Daily best music in the world: Mozambique

Melao Para El Sapo, a New York-style Mozambique by Eddie Palmieri. I'm finding that my page of Mozambique from 2013 is holding up pretty well as a method for getting some basic fluency with this groove, which also serves well as a generic Cuban-style Latin groove when playing jazz. I suck at identifying Cuban song styles, but NY Mozambique seems recognizable by the bell pattern, the tumbao (the & of 2 and 4, especially on the 3 side of clave) played strongly by the timbales, and the vocal “Mozambique” riff.

Three minutes

Following our “3½ minutes” playlist, here are some recordings of songs/tunes that are three minutes long. We are definitely into more of a pop format now, though there are a few jazz examples— mainly vocal numbers, and mostly-melody arrangements with little improvising. A lot of old 78s are around that length. It's enough time for a pop song to feel fully-developed, though it leaves you wanting more; jazz recordings definitely feel very tight.

Transcription: Airto — Earache My Eye

Cheech & Chong's Earache My Eye is just an eternal piece of American teenage rock & roll culture, along with Smoke On The Water, Iron Man, Sunshine Of Your Love... like that. On hearing it for the first time in a long time, I think this is what I've been really been trying to play like all these years— with rock & roll, anyway— like this, and like Jim Gordon on Zappa's Apostrophe.

It turns out the drummer on the recording is Airto, which surprised me, but I can dig it. To understand how great he is, just check out a few of the many covers of the song; the tom fills really make the whole track, but nobody else does them especially well. And none of the guys beating the f__ out of their drums plays as effectively as Airto does here— they rock less.

I went ahead and put in everything I could hear, including the hihat played sporadically with the foot. If you actually want to work this up, you can safely ignore the left foot, for the most part. What's significant about it is that he will sometimes play it on the &s, Brazilian/jazz style, and other times he'll play it in unison with the bass drum, emphasizing the rhythm section line.

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Stick Control patterns in 3/4, with flams and accents

A little companion to the page of Stone patterns adapted into 3/4, from the other day— here I've added some flams and accents to the sticking patterns from that page:

Quite a few of the exercises have an unaccented note followed by an accented note on the same hand, a common, difficult sequence of notes. Put in a very deliberate upstroke after the little note— pick up the stick fast to get it into position to play the accented note. A lot of people will try to make the two notes into one “whip” stroke— which is often executed more like a “jerk” stroke, which is as wrong as it sounds— I'm not in favor of that, at first. Start by separating the strokes: little note+fast upstroke, then accented downstroke. You can streamline that sequence into one motion after you have the individual parts well under your hands.

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Transcription: Al Foster — Pannonica

Oh, what the hey, hot on the heels of our Frankie Dunlop transcription of Pannonica, here's Al Foster playing the same tune, the way I like to play it, in the original slow 4. It's from the McCoy Tyner album 4x4, and the transcription is from the piano solo, starting at 1:54 in the track. McCoy plays it a little slower here than Monk recorded it.

Foster is playing in a functional, modern mode here. He tends to accent the & of 2 and & of 4 pretty strongly, a la Elvin Jones, and maintains a triplet-based swing feel all the way through. McCoy and then Bobby Hutcherson do play some fast stuff over it, but almost all of it with a triplet foundation— little the soloing is actual double-time. During the more complex passages he will play straight triplets on the ride cymbal, which builds the intensity, and is a good way to keep from breaking the groove with that stuff.

Also noted that he likes to accent with the crash cymbal by itself— with no snare drum or bass drum to support it. And much of the comping— the things that are not obviously interactive, or marking a phrase— is for texture, and to keep the groove together.

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Listening: Miles Davis — In A Silent Way

This guy's copy is in a little too
good condition for my taste.

Following another Twitter conversation begun by Ethan Iverson, I listened to Miles Davis's album In A Silent Way, always one of my favorites, three times in a row while having my coffee. My comment there was that it really is a perfect album, as much so as anything else in jazz— Kind of Blue, A Love Supreme, anything else you'd care to name. The improvising is sort of backgrounded, and the writing is extremely minimal, so, famous as it is, it's not necessarily put in that kind of company. Some historically-minded people just regard it as transitional, others want more blowing and are bored by it.

If you spend a little time with the record, the reasons it is great are self-evident in the sound coming off the vinyl, and I'm not going to try to state them in English. It is a totally unique album; for all the “jazz/rock” and fusion that followed it, nobody (except for Miles, occasionally) does quite the thing that is on this record. Maybe Gil Evans comes the closest, here and there.

The background lore isn't really necessary, but you might want to read guitarist John McLoughlin's comments about playing his famous rendition of the track In A Silent Way; also, via Iverson, there's an article from Downbeat discussing the album, and some bad feelings between Tony Williams and Miles surrounding the recording session. One writer on Iverson's feed suggested that Miles whole purpose with his music in this period was to impress Betty Davis (née Mabry). While I don't believe that, it would be great if it were true, because it would prove that it doesn't friggin' matter why people do things.

Embedding for the YouTube video of the album has been disabled, so you'll have to follow this link to listen— or go to your record collection. Everyone is supposed to own this one.

Transcription: Frankie Dunlop — Pannonica

Here's Frankie Dunlop, playing a walking ballad— maybe it's a little fast to call it that?— by Thelonious Monk, Pannonica, on the album Criss Cross. I've transcribed just the accompaniment for the Charlie Rouse's saxophone solo. There's a typo in the pdf regarding the start time— the transcription starts at 1:40.

Dunlop maintains the slow, triplety swing feel, with sticks, all the way through the piece. On other Monk recordings of this tune, the drummers Max Roach and Ben Riley suggest a double-time feel much of the time, and play it with brushes. Personally, I prefer not to double-time this tune. Another version with Al Foster on drums, has the feel I like. Dunlop plays the drums strongly during the comping, and tends to play more quarter notes than do a lot of drummers.

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Sharing information: two views

“Those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know.”

— Timeless wisdom from the East, attributed to Lao-Tzu.

“All the pros I know freely share their prime locations, techniques and business practices.”

— Photographer Ken Rockwell, who has a website. 

I said two views, but they are not mutually exclusive, actually. I don't want to put words in Lao-Tzu's mouth, but he was not talking about how to erect a pup tent, or about the correct procedure for operating a table saw safely. He was talking about enlightenment; ultimate understanding in the cosmic sense, but his line is sometimes abused by people who want to undercut someone else's authority to speak on a subject, without engaging them on the specifics. Rockwell is really talking about sharing merely all the things that can be shared. Which is not the same as everything, period. His point is that sharable information is not enough to make a person a successful artist and professional.

More after the break:

Triplet bell patterns

Here's a nice video by a British percussionist, cataloging a whole lot of mostly-folkloric, triplet-based/compound meter, bell patterns from around the world:





It's always good to use caution trusting people's interpretation and scholarship with these things. I certainly don't agree that the jazz ride pattern falls under this list's category— it's arguable, anyway— and the way he plays it, with an accent on the 1 and 3, is just wrong. One viewer who seems knowledgeable left this comment:

several of those forms are not right at all. These are foundational rhythms for these forms of Folklore. If you dont get the foundation correct to start, you are heading off in the wrong direction big time. 

He's right: if you're planning on using this video as your jumping off point for studying twenty different folkloric styles from different parts of the planet... that might not be a great idea. That would be a crazy endeavor regardless of the video. But, with reasonable caveats, it's nice to have a loosely-correct survey of similar rhythms that have a history of human usage.