Charlie Haden 1937-2014

UPDATE: Haden remembered by some musicians who played with him.

Very disappointed to find out that Charlie Haden, the bassist, died yesterday— he's been one of my musical heroes for a long time, since I heard him on Ornette Coleman's records, and saw him play with Joe Henderson at the John Coltrane Celebration in LA in 1988. He had the most driving groove I ever heard, as well as an unusual rhythmic sense, and very open way of phrasing. And, of course, a distinctive country/folky melodic sense which the marketing people latched onto in his later years.

But for at least the first 30 years of his career he was generally categorized as a free guy. I figured out partly from listening to him that avant-garde music needs a strong, grounded bassist at its center— he was one of the great examples of that.

I'm also sorry he's gone because he's one of the last examples of a musician who everyone agrees is great, who is also coming from a somewhat technically limited place— an irrefutable example of how you can be great without being technically mind-blowing.

Dave Liebman, on his Facebook page, gives a nice remembrance:

“PASSING - CHARLIE: From Blanton to Pettiford to (Ray) Brown, Charlie Haden was the next step along with Scott LeFaro in re-defining the role of the bass. "Time, no changes" was his world, but he could deal with harmony very easily. It was his linear, highly melodic and counterpoint phrasing that was uniquely Charlie that found its home with Ornette. We recorded "My Goals Beyond" with John McLaughlin in the early '70s and Charlie is also on my recording "Sweet Hands" a bit later. Charlie's solos were invariably plainly stated, apparently "simple," obviously melodic, but most of all played with a passionate feeling and deep tone. We talked a few times in the past years about post polio syndrome (which several well-known people have encountered), trying to find someone, somewhere, who could treat it, apparently to no avail. He went down as a warrior, just the way he played.”

Also read memorials at Variety, and Salon, and NPR.

A very soulful piece of playing from Don Cherry's Brown Rice:



More music, and listening suggestions after the break:

Very occasional quote(s) of the day: over and over again

This is the one I had...

“When we were young, we had our seven jazz albums next to our bed and played them over and over again.”
— John Scofield

“When I was young, I'd listen to one record over and over again, like The Best of Sonny Rollins. It's not like now, when I have every Sonny Rollins record ever made. But back the I could only afford one record I found in a cut-out bin. The first Wes Montgomery record I had was his first on Riverside that I got for 89 cents. I listened to it so many times that I took it in in a different way. I was getting an emotional connection that you can't get if you listen to something once and go on to the next one. Now when I hear anything from that record, it still hits me in my gut. I think young people's brains, with the whole computer thing, can take in more than I ever could. There's a real advantage to that, but there's also an advantage to listening to one thing over and over.”
— Bill Frisell

Quotes from Six String Theories by Geoffrey Himes, Jazz Times, August 2015

Groove o' the day: Al Foster — Billy Preston

Must play more music where I can just leave the hihats open all day. This is Al Foster's groove on the tune Billy Preston, on the Miles Davis album Get Up With It; kind of a sleeper album. I think a lot of people bought it for the cover photo, and never listened to it a second time. But it's great. Do check out Rated X, our other GOTD from this record.

Foster plays no fills, and the variations, mostly with the bass drum, should be easy to hear.

Page o' coordination: Elvin waltz, with 16th notes

An big part of the Elvin Jones “thing” (if we must think of it that way), which doesn't get talked about much, is 16th notes. People instantly think Elvin >>> triplets!, but he played a lot of 16th notes, too. So,  introduce them into our familiar POC-thing, we'll use the vamp from our original Elvin's Afro-waltz page, plus a variation, with an extra bass drum note at the end.

In jazz, 16th notes are played legato, and not swung; play them evenly, but don't articulate them crisply, as you would in funk. You can generally play the left hand very softly here. You can swing the 8th notes triplet-style, the way we usually do them, or put them on a 16th note grid— again, keep it relaxed if you're going to do that. But don't feel that because you're embellishing or comping with 16th notes here and there, you need to shift your entire grid to a 16th note subdivision— you don't. Depending on the tempo, you can experiment with accenting the left hand in different places— with these exercises on the &, or on the 'a'. It sounds better if you don't accent in the same place all the time.

This isn't a great set of exercises for this, but at very slow tempos, you could actually experiment with swinging the 16th notes, making a double time feel by putting them roughly on a 16th note triplet grid. To be clear, usually when you do this you would be considered to be “playing double time”, rather than “swinging 16th notes”, even though they are actually the same thing. Just be aware that jazz musicians don't arrive at double time by saying “Hey, I'm going to swing some 16th notes here.”

Get the pdf

Scott K. Fish blogs

Something new for you to read while I'm out of town for a few days catching the opening of Family Album, the new rock musical featuring my girlfriend: former Modern Drummer contributer and managing editor Scott K. Fish is now blogging about drumming, with a lot of anecdotes from the golden age of that magazine, when there were a lot more of the old drumming legends around, and being covered by MD. Definitely pay him a visit and check back in frequently.  

Page o' coordination: Elvin's waltz — inverted feet

Once you start doing an Elvin-like thing, the pull of that dotted-quarter rhythm can be very hard to resist; it's effective, it builds tension, and it feels good to play it, but you need to be able to get away from it. So here's a page o' coordination for doing that same basic feel without the heavy bass drum on every downbeat.

Doing the tom moves is not just about learning to go crazy playing a whole lot of tom toms; it's more about tricking you into playing the patterns for longer, by making you think you're learning to go crazy playing a whole lot of tom toms.

Get the pdf

VOQOTD: Marc Ribot on the state of things

From the August 2014 Jazz Times interview with Guitarist Marc Ribot:

It's not an exaggeration to say that the recording industry has collapsed. There's been something like a 60% collapse. And that last 40% could be gone within a year when YouTube premieres its listening service. 

An endless amount of BS gets spilled over this. [Tech companies that facilitate free or pirated music] have big publicity budgets. And no matter how many musicians come forward to speak a critical truth, they can always pay someone to say, “Oh, no, things are wonderful.” But the truth is that for the overwhelming majority of artists now, they can't make back their production costs. For trust fund kids who have tones of money, that doesn't matter. But for normal people who actually need to pay their bills, it's been hard. 

And these tech corporate people have an answer for everything. They say, “Oh, don't worry, you can just go out on the road. You don't need to make money from records.” I love people who have no experience with this telling us what we can do. I'm no stranger to the road; I've spent a significant portion of my life on it. But as the recording industry is crashing, it has not gotten easier on the road, because all kinds of dinosaurs who were in retirement because they figured record royalties would always take care of them, now that that revenue stream is gone, they're back on the road. There is a glut of artists and studio musicians who once stayed put and played on other people's records back on the road. So there's a wide range of bands touring, and it's depressing wages on the road. 

Site work

ANOTHER UPDATE: The search engine is mostly working correctly now. If you're looking for something specific and not finding it, open a new window and do a Google search with site:cruiseshipdrummer.com  at the beginning of the search.

UPDATE: Sweet lord, I hate the Internet. Almost everything should be back to normal now— you may have even noticed that the address of the site is now www.cruiseshipdrummer.com. Before, if you typed that into the address bar, it would take you to the old blogger address, shipdrummer.blogspot.com. Now it's the other way around; typing shipdrummer...etc takes you to the new domain. There is one small problem, however, which is that the search engine is behaving very strangely. So for now, to peruse the archives, you should try to do it with the labels, or do a regular Google search, putting site:cruiseshipdrummer.com at the beginning of your search. Hopefully I can get this figured out soon.

Doing a little hosting changeover over the next few days, so it's possible some of the downloads may not work for a moment. If you run into that, leave a comment on the post of the file you're attempting to download, and I can make sure to get it working for you.

Transcription: Ed Blackwell — Guinea

OK, this one is definitely a labor of love— that took way too long to finish and proof. But I've been living with this piece for a good twenty years, and performing it for much of that time, so... whatever. This is Guinea, by the group Old And New Dreams, if you don't know them, a band of former Ornette Coleman sidemen: Don Cherry, Dewey Redman, and Charlie Haden, with Ed Blackwell on drums. The tune is Guinea, an African-flavored tune in 6/4, by Don Cherry.

The 8th notes are swung for much of the piece, except for a passage where straight 8ths are indicated, where he's making a double time feel. He's using three high tom toms, indicated by black noteheads on the top space, the top line, and the space above the staff. You can also safely ignore most of the hihat part. Rather than trying to play it exactly, I would just use it to get an idea of how he's approaching the feel for the tune overall. Sometimes he suggests a waltz, with the hihat on 2-3/5-6; other times he plays a "4" feel, with the hihat on 2/4/6. Often, though, the hihat is just moving sympathetically with what he's playing with his hands. Rarely is the hihat worked out as part of the coordination— his major ideas are flowing out of the hands, and bass drum.

The lick with the 5s, in measure 63, is simpler than it looks; the second lick starts on the & of 2, and ends on the & of 3. I might use a RLLRRL sticking.

In playing this, I would try not to get bogged down in the few little peculiar things, which, if I've transcibed them correctly, are obviously the product of Blackwell's very special, very practiced thing; like the 16th notes at the beginning of measure 14. Things like that are just the tip of a very large iceberg of stuff that he had been practicing and playing for decades before this. Rather than taking it as a lick to be copied, look at is as a clue about the sorts of things that are in his technical background— what he's been practicing.

Get the pdf

ECM has blocked most of their music from YouTube, and I've been spending way too much time on the computer doing technical BS to have the patience to make my own bootleg video of it, so you'll just have to buy the album, if you don't already have it. It's really essential listening, as important as any other record in my collection.