Groove o' the day: Take Your Dead Ass Home

This is pretty much definitional as to what funk drumming is. Here are another couple of Funkadelic grooves, from Take Your Dead Ass Home, on the album Tales of Kidd Funkadelic. The drummer is the unmistakable Jerome “Bigfoot” Brailey— get his sound in your ear.

As the tune progresses, he hits a fat, very P-Funk, crash on beat 1 every two measures.

This happens on the “limerick” sections, with some variations to support the ensemble rhythm:

NSFW audio after the break:

DBMITW: Togashi

The great Japanese drummer Masahiko Togashi, with Masahiko Satoh and Gary Peacock:

Page o' coordination: Songo — 02

This is the companion to the recent Songo page, which I thought you might want to work on concurrently— it's the same set of exercises, with the clave rhythm in the left foot:

Reread the previous piece for such practice suggestions as there are. Each of these coordination pages should be taken as the basis for a workout; the real work with them starts after you can play the entire page without stopping. At that point you should be playing each exercise at least 4-8 times at whatever tempo you're trying to master, moving your left hand, and varying your dynamics.

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Ed Shaughnessy 1929-2013

I couldn't possibly improve on what Jon McCaslin has said about the passing of this great drummer, so just go read his notice.

“What's with that constant cymbal tapping in jazz drumming?”

HEY ROACH, what's with
the constant cymbal tapping?

“...and why do they use the exact same beat on every song?  And who invented this awful, one-man-band percussion concept, with the abrasive and irritating sound of the snare drum leading the charge, and the cymbals clinging and clanging away behind it at full tilt???” 

Inquiring online scholars want to know, but aren't really interested in your answer. I stumbled across this fascinating discussion while looking for something informative, and since I don't like to suffer alone, I thought I'd share it with you. Someone who calls himself Rockist Scientist leads the anti-clinging and clanging charge:

Rockist Scientist: This is one of the things I find annoying in the sound of a lot of jazz. Why did this become so common? Does anyone else find it annoying?

kate: aaarrggghhh, yes, that endless ride cymbal tapping, it drives me NUTS. one of the biggest reasons that i hate jazz. oh, what, apart from it being crap and all.

Rockist Scientist: Well, now, I wouldn't go so far as to call it all crap. I want to like it, and not just for whatever status symbol value it still has. I want to like it because I can hear that there is something going on, but I just can't get into most of it. [...] But I'm glad to know someone else is driven crazy by that sound. It baffles me that it's become such a dominant convention in jazz...

Aaarrggghhh, indeed. There is absolutely no reason for you to continue reading this, but in case you're hurting for empty entertainment calories at the moment, there's more after the break:

VOQOTD: note to himself

Play at least ten minutes a day on the drum set.

— Paul Motian

Page o' coordination: Songo — 01

Here we'll develop some bass drum variations for playing Songo, a popular Afro-Cuban/salsa drumset style, in case you've never heard of it. The first exercise is the ostinato, played with the hands only— the parts there are very standard.

The exercises are written in the 2-3 clave position; also practice them with the measures reversed, to make 3-2 clave. The “bombo” note— the & of beat 2 on the '3' measure of the clave, the second measure of our pattern— is musically important; if you play nothing else on the bass drum, play that note:

Play the right hand on the closed hihat, ride cymbal, cymbal bell, or cowbell; play the left on the snare drum normally, or as rim clicks. You could also do the left hand tom moves, if you want. Play the hihat on 1 and 3, 2 and 4, all four beats, or just tacet the left foot.

Get the pdf

Example/play along audio after the break:

Groove o' the day: Shelly Manne — Way Out West

Here are a couple of very famous things by Shelly Manne, from the album Way Out West by Sonny Rollins. Sonny could be a little perverse in his tune selections, often choosing things that would be considered hokey or uninteresting by many jazz musicians; and here, on the occasion of making a record in LA, he did a couple of cowboy songs. Manne, who was by all accounts a funny, creative cat, chose to use a woodblock to give those numbers a little bit of a horsey flavor.

Swing the 8th notes on Johnny Mercer's I'm An Old Cowhand:

On Wagon Wheels he plays a little backwards hemiola thing:

Audio after the break:

Mel Lewis on cymbals

More on cymbals from Mel Lewis's 1985 Modern Drummer interview. This is pretty much the bible of the subject, as it relates to jazz:


Number and type

The average drummer usually uses two to four cymbals. To have any more than that is totally unnecessary, because where are you going to put them anyway, and how are you going to reach them? They shouldn't be there just for looks. I notice that most people have crash, crash, splash, ride, and hi-hat. Very few young drummers play on their hihats, except in the rock situation where they generally play them closed and they play their 8th-note beat on them. They should learn that the hihat is another ride cymbal to be played properly—"ta, da-ka, ta, da-ka, ta," changing rhythms and all that, open/closed, all open, half open, half closed. There are a lot of effects. To me, the hi-hat is another ride cymbal.

Every cymbal I use is a ride cymbal. Every one of my cymbals is also a crash cymbal. I only use three. Three is enough.

But every cymbal should be a ride cymbal and every cymbal should be a crash cymbal. I've been noticing that almost everyone has only one ride cymbal and a million crash cymbals. You don't need the crash cymbals. You need the ride cymbals, because that's where your whole thing is coming from. Crash cymbals are only for accents, so you can hit any cymbal for a crash.  

Dark

I find that all the cymbals should be dark. If you want a high-pitched splash cymbal or crash cymbal, fine. That's to your own taste. But darker cymbals are more complementary to horns than any other kind of cymbal. High-pitched cymbals have a tendency to obliterate high sounds. 

 The more high-pitched cymbals you have, the more trouble you're going to give the band. Also, for riding in a big band, I think that the pingier a cymbal is and the less overtone and spread it has, the more empty everything will be. It's important that you have a good, full, fat-sounding cymbal. Finding cymbals like that today seems to be a problem. They are all too heavy. Definition is one thing, but those pings do not cut through. There has to be a little more sound to a cymbal than they're creating right now. They've forgotten how to make ride cymbals with color. They don't know what dark sound is. That's why I still like the old K.'s. They're hard to find, but it seems like they are the only cymbal that was made for music. 

Orchestrating cymbals for big band

[W]hen you hit a high crash cymbal with the brass section while they're up in that high register, you will knock out half their sound. But if you hit a cymbal that will blend with that section—in other words, if there are four trumpets and the fourth is playing the lowest part, you should be the fifth trumpet, which is lower yet. Now of course, we can't go that low all the time, but that's the way I'm thinking musically. Trombones, of course, can go lower than my cymbals can, so I want to be somewhere in the middle register where I don't obliterate the lead and I don't destroy the bottom.

With the saxophones, you want a roaring sound to envelop, because reeds don't have the power that the brass has. That's why I believe that during a sax soli— where you have five saxophone players standing up playing together—nothing sounds better behind them than a Chinese ride cymbal, because there's a blend. Bass violin players love Chinese cymbals because the low sound and the Oriental type of roar make the bass sound spring forward. That's why, when we play big ensembles, I'll go to that cymbal, and you can hear the bass just singing through everything. When you've got a whole ensemble, you want a strong, enveloping, low sound with a lot of clarity as far as the beat is concerned. It's like a picture with a beautiful metal frame around it. It gives tremendous fullness to the sound of the band.

Continued after the break: