Jerry Bergonzi on drums and drummers

Just a few short pieces while I finish transcribing Vinnie Colaiuta's playing on the epic guitar solo in 19/16 on Keep It Greasey, from Joe's Garage...

Here's another nice piece from Ted Warren at Trap'd- Warren's interview with saxophonist Jerry Bergonzi, who I did not know is also an accomplished drummer.

Go read the whole thing, but this is my favorite part:

Warren: You have studied your main instrument (Saxophone) very extensively and have written many books dealing with it, yet when you play you never sound calculated or cold. Did you consciously work on separating practice and performance?

Bergonzi: When I play I do not think of any of the things that I teach or have studied. I try to think the least amount possible and be in the moment. If I don't feel anything I don't hear anything. I have to feel something and when that happens a whole world of sound opens up. When the conscious mind comes in the creative mind leaves. 90% of the stuff that I ever practiced never got in my playing but it help develop some other things. It is a work in progress. There is no end and we are lucky for that. What else would we do. Make Money?

Humanizing the hard stuff

Over at Four on the Floor Jon McCaslin has posted several great duo videos featuring Max Roach, including clips with Dizzy Gillespie, Randy Weston, and this with Cecil Taylor:




Max really warms up Cecil's thing, doesn't he? This reminded me of Momentum Space, with Cecil alongside Elvin Jones and Dewey Redman, which gave a similar feeling; and the Tony Williams/Cecil duet on Joy of Flying. And Gary Peacock on Albert Ayler's Spiritual Unity. I guess it shouldn't be a huge mystery- you put someone with the greatest drummers in the world and they're going to sound good. But his music is so impenetrable it's hard to imagine Max being able to do anything with it at all...

Favorite albums: Thelonious Monk Trio

Thelonious Monk - Trio
Prestige 7027

Thelonious Monk - piano
Percy Heath, Gary Mapp - bass
Art Blakey, Max Roach - drums

This record doesn't seem to get talked about much, and I don't know why. It has a bunch of great tunes in their classic form, including Reflections, Trinkle Tinkle, Bye-Ya, and Little Rootie Tootie; it has a loose, breezy feel, with each track coming in at a very concise three minutes long; the drumming by both Blakey and Roach is creatively handled, with something special happening on each track. Extremely friendly and listenable record.

What all the damn numbers on your camera mean

I encourage all of my friends to take up film photography, so to help them out of the trouble I have gotten them into, I'll be posting a little series of pieces about my methods. I like to do things about as easy, quick and dirty as is possible, so hopefully this will all be easier to understand and use than when it's explained by photo geeks with delusions of being the second coming of Ansel Adams on steroids and crack.

Before I can tell you what all the damn numbers mean, you need to understand what is actually happening when you press the little button to take a picture.

Exposure: what it is. 
It's how much light you let hit the film when you take a picture. There are three factors that go into your exposure: shutter speed, film speed, and aperture.

Shutter speed = how long the camera shutter stays open to let in light.
Film speed = how sensitive your film is to light.
Aperture = the size of the opening the light comes through.

A fourth factor is the brightness of the light coming through the lens. For now we'll assume that's part of the terrain and you can't do anything about it. Film speed is also sort of a given, because unless you're some kind of freak, you are not going to change film to get a single shot. So the main settings you have to work with creatively are shutter speed and aperture.

Three Camps

This is a traditional rudimental piece going back to at least Civil War days- it consists of accented rolls in a triplet pulsation. Originally it functioned as a sort of camp alarm clock, as part of the Reveille. More recently- since the 30's or so- it has been used by drummers as a framework for practicing rolls and a variety of other rudiments. I learned it when I was in drum corps in the 80's, and it was the first thing I pulled out when I decided to get my fast singles together once and for all, ten years ago or so. I learned this the old fashioned way (verbally and a little bit wrong) from corps legend Bill "Ghost" Linen.

Ghost was in the great Boston Crusaders drum lines of the 60's, and was a corps instructor in Salem, Oregon in the 70's; my instructors pulled him out of "retirement" I think to give us a taste of the old school, a connection to the tradition. He had a long beard and raggedy clothes, swore a lot, chain smoked Drum cigarettes, and used to tell us hair-raising stories about corps in the 60's, brawls in the parking lot after shows, which corps you went to to get which kind of drugs. He used to build his own marimbas and Harry Partch-style instruments, and had a funky, ramshackle studio full of all manner of percussion instruments where the drum line would occasionally rehearse. He seemed ancient at the time, but he was maybe 40-45.

Favorite albums: Where In The World by Bill Frisell

Where In The World by Bill Frisell
1991 - Nonesuch B000002H9S

Bill Frisell - guitar
Hank Roberts - cello
Kermit Driscoll - bass
Joey Baron - drums


I and a lot of other drummers of my generation immediately took all of the muffling out of my bass drum after hearing the opening track, Unsung Heroes. Baron's incredible playing is a little more subdued and supportive of the mood than on some of his wilder blowing albums. Covers a lot of ground stylistically, but plays like episodes in a movie. One of the things that kept me sane in L.A. in the riot year.

Also from this record: Child At Heart practice loop and transcription

Solo transcription: Jack Dejohnette - God Bless The Child

Another example of that ECM gospel feel with my original transcription of Jack Dejohnette's famous solo on God Bless The Child, from Keith Jarrett's Standards Volume 1:

 Keith Jarrett - Standards, Vol. 1
ECM B000VAKNLK

Keith Jarrett - piano
Gary Peacock - bass
Jack Dejohnette - drums

Get the pdf 

1996 Paul Motian interview, last part: There's No Rules, Man

This is the last part of my excerpts of Chuck Braman's 1996 interview with Paul Motian. I highly recommend you visit Braman's site and read the entire unedited piece (part 1 - part 2); there is also an excellent long piece with Motian discussing some of his recordings.
 Thanks again to Chuck for making this excellent piece of writing available- I wish all drummer interviews were this good.

KEITH JARRETT II:
Chuck: When you were with Keith Jarrett, you rarely played any swing music with walking bass and ride rhythms. Why was that?

Paul: We weren't into it! (laughs) We wanted to get away from that traditional stuff.

Chuck: But when I saw you reunited, playing with Keith again a few months ago, during the break I overheard him saying something to the effect of "Man, Paul's playing his ass off, he's swinging his ass off." And he said, "We never used to play that way when we played together, we never tried to just swing, we were always trying to do something different," as if he didn't know you could do it. And he seemed so happy about the new approach of that particular night.

Paul: So it's exactly what I was saying to you, man, at that time when we were playing, in the late sixties and early seventies, that's what people were into, just to do their damnedest to do whatever they could do to change the shit, to play something different, to try to create something new. And people would do things different just to be different, no matter whether it was good or bad. So that's what was happening too, we were playing with Keith and all this different shit was happening with jazz, plus what I was saying before about Dylan and the Beatles. All that was happening, so that's what we were playing, we weren't playing swing.

1996 Paul Motian interview, part 4: Rumba Beat on a Tom Tom

Fourth part of my excerpts of  Chuck Braman's 1996 Paul Motian interview:

FREE:
Chuck: When you first heard people actually playing free, how did it strike you, coming from a background rooted so strongly in hardbop?

Paul: I know what you're getting at, but actually it didn't strike me as being real radical or real different. A lot of people at that time were into this thing about wanting to play different, wanting to explore more and get into different areas. Almost just for the fact to be different, you know?

Chuck: Do you miss that spirit today?

Paul: No. I feel pretty much settled now in what I'm doing. I don't feel like experimenting anymore, I really don't. I feel like I can play however I want to play now, and it's O.K.