Transcription: Billy Higgins / Tears Inside

Tears Inside, from Pat Metheny's album Rejoicing, is such a favorite track of mine, I'm surprised we haven't done anything with it before. I did transcribe the drum intro for the forthcoming[!!!] Book of Intros. So to tie into that, here's Billy Higgins comping behind the first three choruses of Metheny's guitar solo. His playing on this record is one of the greatest things in recorded drumming, and this tune is like a textbook of medium tempo bop drumming— I hate to reduce it to that, because it's primarily a great work of art, but it's also educational.

Swing the 8th notes. Higgins plays his ride cymbal at a fairly even volume— generally without the accenting characteristic of many drummers' playing; and he tends to not be over-triplety in his swing feel. He flattens it out a bit. There's no hihat audible, but you can add it on 2 and 4 if you want. He does often play time on the bass drum— feathers it, in current parlance— and probably is doing that here. You can practice the page in one, two, or four measure chunks, or learn the whole thing like an etude.

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Page o' coordination: Afro 6 - 6/4 feel

Another Afro 6 POC. It's a very rich and rewarding style, which is why I do so bloody much stuff with it. I was surprised to see I had never written up this variation before— it seems obvious. The BD/HH part, which suggests 6/4 or 3/2 across the primary meter of 6/8, is not authentic to the Cuban music that is the source for this groove— not that I am aware of. We're doing this just to open up other possibilities, and increase awareness of the major cross rhythms.

Like I said only yesterday, do the left hand tom moves when you practice this.

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GOTD & POC: Elvin Jones — That 5/4 Bag

First-ever combined Groove o' the Day and Page o' Coordination. We're completely off the chain. From Elvin Jones's second album as leader, Dear John C., here is the major groove for That 5/4 Bag, with transcribed variations, and some exercises I've written for developing it.

Elvin doesn't sound quite as comfortable here as on his recording of 5/4 Thing five years after this; he plays pretty repetitively, with a few basic comping ideas. The ride pattern is unusual— quarter notes plus a skip note at the end. One variation he does frequently is to put a tied note on the & of 1. It's all there on the page...

I'll keep re-explaining the tom moves I use with the Pages o' Coordination— I know everybody doesn't read every single thing I've ever written. When working on these pages, I move the left hand to different drums every note, or every note or double— I don't like having to do a super-fast move between drums, so I keep very close-together notes on the same drum. I use a few stock moves; S = snare, H = high tom, L = low tom:

SH, SL, HL, SHSL, HSHL, LSLH, SHL, SLH

I find this to be a real value-multiplier— follow the link above for more explanation.

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David Bowie (1947-2016)

(h/t Luqman Brown)

UPDATE: A very cool article about Bowie's final album.

Simple one-handed Reed interpretation

UPDATE: Download link is working now...

This is a simple exercise which arose while working on my Zigaboo Modeliste-like half time feel funk method. It will be easy to master— it's fun to work on hard stuff, but in the field you really benefit from having a whole lot of simple things together. This will come in handy if you drop a stick, if nothing else.

Play exercises 1-15, plus the 20-bar exercise, leading with either hand. You can move the snare part around the drums, and the cymbal part between cymbals, if you'd like. You can also do flams on the drum notes, per the last example.

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Daily best music in the world: Howlin' Wolf

We'll be getting back into regular blogging soon enough— I've just finished the 2015 Book of the Blog (available for purchase soon!), and am chilling out with some Howlin' Wolf right now...

Daily best music in the world: Milton

Listening to Milton Nascimento's Clube Da Esquina 2 while working on the 2015 Book of the Blog, which should be finished today. We slowed up with the downloadable materials towards the end of the year, and I was concerned about that, but it's actually going to be pretty sweet. Over 100 pages.

Paul Bley 1932-2016

We've lost quite a few great people this week: the singer Natalie Cole, cinematographers Vilmos Zsigmond and Haskell Wexler, Harlem Globetrotter Meadowlark Lemon, and now pianist Paul Bley— word is, he passed away while listening to an album of his with Charlie Haden and Paul Motian. RIP





The drummer on this recording is Barry Altschul. The ending as he plays it, incidentally, is exactly the way I end tunes whenever there's any kind of ritard and fermata— I won't play in unison with the lead instrument until the last note. Often I'll set up the ensemble last note with an accent on the drums, when there's space. I didn't think there was anything unusual about it, but a couple of people have commented. Just a little postscript on one of my favorite endings ever...

What to do in college

Wow, a whole month without any posts. Let's eaaase back into blogging after having returned from Europe with a wicked case of the flu: here's Advice To A College Music Student, by Michael D'Angelo. Here are the bullet points, which are pretty self-explanatory by themselves, but do go read the whole piece:

1) Your professional career starts as soon as you step foot on campus     

2) Be prepared 

3) Be reliable 

4) Practice your ass off

Remember, at some point in their lives, everybody good practiced 4-12 hours a day, every day, for a period of years. College is the best time to do a good chunk of that.

5) Record yourself often 

6) Listen 

!!!

7) Don’t get discouraged 

As Brad Pitt said in Moneyball, It's a process, it's a process, it's a process. Other students may be further along in their development, and progress faster than you, but that doesn't mean they're going to be better than you forever. Or even if they are, it doesn't mean they're going to be a better artist than you, or have a better career. You're young. Lots of things are going to happen with your development, and the other guy's, in the first 5-10 years you're out of school, much less the 50-75 years you hopefully have left to live. All you have to do is keep going, and not get complacent.

8) Save everything 

9) Perform as much as possible 

It's a three-legged stool: play, listen, practice. Sorry for the tired metaphor.

10) Get out of your comfort zone 

11) Don’t be afraid to ask for help 

12) Last but certainly not least, have fun

Do I have to tell you not to live in a Whiplash-style tent of fear and alienation? You are allowed and encouraged to do a certain amount of college stuff. Have a girlfriend. Check yourself if you can't stop drinking once you start, and avoid heavier, non-psychedelic, drugs— if I may completely frank. Stay away from people with predatory attitudes towards women. Do not become, or continue to be, a bro. Go to movies on campus, read some new books, work on evolving your sense of art and humor.


I would add, remember that college is college. It's not real life. Don't mistake college reality for real reality, and don't get too comfortable merely excelling at being a student. You have to embrace it enough to learn the stuff they're trying to teach you, and not be miserable for 4-6 years, but eventually you have to get tired of it and want to do something else. Personally, I embraced it to the absolute minimum possible, and probably didn't learn as much as I should've as a result. Other people I know embraced it too much, and are still working in the same building 20+ years later.

This also means that how you do in college is not necessarily reflective of how you're going to do in life. When you're out putting together a career, none of the people you hit it off with are going to give a shit if you ate it on Ballad For The Dance on fall juries your junior year.