Bears

Not quite the sense of menace I was
hoping for, but that'll have to do...

One of the effects of this new Internet wonderland of information is that now everyone feels they are in competition with everyone else, everywhere in the world. It's as if every famous drummer who has ever lived, and an endless parade of seeming child prodigies, are now poking their fat noses into your studio and saying “Yeah, but can you do this? Or this? How are you going to make it if you can't do this? Or this? All of us are doing this— why aren't you doing it? What about this?”

The reality is, it's just you, the gigs available to you, and the other people already playing those gigs.

There's an old, dumb-ass, redneck joke about two men in the wilderness, who encounter a bear. One of them begins preparing to do some running— in the usual inane telling he puts on running shoes. Whatever. The other says “Bill, are you crazy? You can't outrun that bear!” To which the first guy replies, “That's OK, I only have to outrun you.”

Haw haw, that guy's going to get mauled by a bear! It's easy to mock the savagery of these frontier people, but now imagine the bear is Vinnie Colaiuta... no, imagine the bear is the abstract concept of career opportunity... no, imagine the bear is a call for a gig. The non-running redneck is “eaten” by the call for the job— he gets the gig in other words— while the other, who has been wasting his time learning to sprint (which, it turns out, is not a primary wilderness survival skill) ends up alone, naked and afraid...

That's not it, either.

It's more as if every bear/drummer in the world has been air-dropped into your back yard, and whatever you thought was your life/career has been instantly transformed into a frantic, futile, and very short, scramble for your life, before being engulfed and ripped quite literally limb from limb. But what they didn't tell you is that the bears are all holograms piped in from zoos around the world, and none of them can actually hurt you.

Grasping that, you go about your business building a shelter, finding a water source, and gathering pine nuts, and are able to survive quite comfortably. Our character with the running shoes thinks this is the way the world actually is, and now puts on a bear costume in hopes of blending in and moving up the bear hierarchy; but since the bears aren't real, and himself having no actual survival skills relevant to his true environment, he soon starves to death.

...

Yeah. This bear thing was just supposed to be the preface to something else, but it kind of got away from me. We'll delve into this subject with a little more discipline soon...

Todd's tom tom thing — part 1

This is something that has come up organically in my own playing, which I've been trying to get a handle on more systematically— we saw a little bit of this before with my “quasi-African” tom lick. Mainly, we're combining moving around the drums with sound/articulation changes with the left hand. This is mainly a soloing thing, but the kind of fluency we'll be developing should generally apply when playing Latin styles that are mainly on the drums, like a rhumba, or calypso; or when you want a texture change on a Latin tune, like during a bass solo.

This sort of thing looks like hell on the page, so we'll break it down as much as possible:

Play the snare drum with the snares off. The left hand will be playing the snare drum normally, rim clicks, rim shots, and ghost notes. The right hand moves between the snare drum (played normally) and floor tom. Once you can do the basic moves, you can begin to play with your sound— adding some accents, changing the quality of your rim shots, and experimenting with the way your left hand muffles the drum during the rim clicks. If you want to use your feet, you can play quarter notes (or dotted quarters in 12/8) on the hihat, or with both feet, to start.

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Melancholia

Sometimes it can be really hard to just do the the obvious unfinished work in front of you. A fairly unproductive week put me to mind of this famous engraving by the artist Albrecht Dürer, and what was written about it by Sir Kenneth Clark:

“In the Middle Ages melancholia meant a simple combination of sloth, boredom and despondency that must have been common in illiterate society. But Dürer's application is far from simple. This figure is humanity at its most evolved, with wings to carry her upwards. She sits in the attitude of Rodin's Penseur, and still holds in her hands the compasses, symbols of measurement by which science will conquer the world. Around her are all the emblems of constructive action: a saw, a plane, pincers, scales, a hammer, a melting pot, and two elements in solid geometry, a polyhedron and sphere. Yet all these aids to construction are discarded and she sits there brooding on the futility of human effort.” 


In my case, this condition has approximately the gravitas of Alan Partridge getting bored and dismantling the Corby trouser press in his hotel room, and walking to the gas station to stock up on windshield washer fluid:



So, yeah. More soon.

Page o' coordination: Afro 6/8 — a hard one

This is something I wasn't going to post until I had made decent headway with it; which I have, at the cost of some misery. If you've been keeping up with current events, the Afro 6 Pages o'... should be familiar, if challenging, terrain by now, but this one is on another level. Without being completely silly. The HH/BD parts are not based on authentic parts— they actually come out of Dahlgren & Fine— but they do have a kind of African quality about them...

Most of these pages have a fairly short adjustment period— my purpose with them was to have them all be of nearly-equivalent difficulty. This one you'll likely find to be very slow going. Consider it to be a straight technical piece, with a side benefit of introducing something into your 6 feel which no one else is going to be able to cop.

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Here it comes

Another clip from the jazz education melodrama Whiplash has been released:



Pretty soon you're going to be able to pay money to see the whole thing.

Groove o' the day: Neftali Santiago — Too Late

Because I don't think your funk is 70s is enough, here's some more Mandrill, with one of the greatest-named drummers ever, Neftali Santiago. And just a great drummer, period. This is Too Late, from the album New Worlds, by Mandrill. It's 1978, Disco is happening, and in keeping with the times, funk drummers are simplifying and cleaning things up a bit. Santiago is pretty freewheeling on the band's earlier records, but here he matches the vamp all the way through. And he still sounds absolutely great.

The great funk hihat accenting debate— which I started, with myself, and no one else is participating in— continues with track; there is no regular accenting the hihat on the beat here. He plays it generally pretty strong and even, but I notice he'll ghost the downbeat every so often; and he'll accent occasionally, usually off the beat, along with the bass drum, or not.

Page o' coordination: Afro 9/8

The “Afro” feel in 9/8, or 3/4, is not exactly a standard feel, but it does come up. Like, in Portland, a tune by the drummer/composer Lawrence Williams gets called quite often, among several different people I play with. It's based on the Afro-Cuban 6/8 (which I hope is causing you a lot of pain via the other POCs), but I don't believe there's a “correct” version of it in 9; so this is a little bit of a bastardization. If you find a bell pattern that works better for you, by all means use it— you won't get in trouble.

A fresh link for the tom moves, for you. 

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Gordon Willis 1931-2014

Still from Manhattan, by Gordon Willis

When thinking of an era in the arts where there's a strong zeitgeist, I always feel that there a large field of people working within a style, doing this era-defining work. And I'm always surprised when it turns out to be just a handful of people, sometimes only one guy, one group, or one company. Like Saul Bass in the design world. And the cinematographer Gordon Willis, who has just died.

Between Willis, Laszlo Kovacs, Owen Roizman, Conrad Hall, and Robert Surtees— some of my favorite artists ever, in any medium— you cover most of the greatest things done in American film in the 70s. Among Willis's credits are The Godfather, The Parallax View, All The President's Men, and some of Woody Allen's most visually beautiful movies: Annie Hall, Manhattan, Stardust Memories, Zelig, and Broadway Danny Rose.

It's not clear to a lot of people what a cinematographer does; he is the camera man, the photographer— which is not to say he is always the camera operator, a separate job description, lower down the food chain. The usual job title today is director of photography, which gives you more the sense that he is the head of an entire branch of the production.

Because of the popularity of the auteur theory of filmmaking— well, of film criticism, actually— we're prone to giving directors credit for everything that happens in their films, except maybe the acting performances. But there's a lot more involved than just pointing the camera where the director tells you. Unless he was a cinematographer before, the director relies heavily on the artistry of the director of photograpy; shots like the one above could not be executed, or often even conceived, without him. A cinematographer is like a commercial photographer or graphic designer, or studio musician; his art is defined in relation to fulfilling a job in collaboration with a client, which is why the men I listed above are not famous among the general public as artists in their own right. But if you like the way certain movies look as visual art, it's time to start looking past the director, to that DP/cinematographer credit.

Stone method for uptempo jazz — 01

Most of the regular drumming literature is poorly adapted to the special conditions of very fast tempos in jazz; the practice materials are either too dense, or are triplet-based, which obviously isn't going to work. Playing those tempos is a major topic of discussion online— a little bit out of proportion for how often you have to do it in the field, actually— but most of the conversation is centered around technique for playing the ride pattern repetitively— not much about comping and actually playing music. I gave a paradiddle-diddle method a couple of years ago, and there are some good things in John Riley's books, but for the most part what is offered are strategies, or guidelines, rather than actual practice materials.

So here we have here is the beginning of a method, applying the first few pages of Stick Control to a few written exercises. We'll be seeing more of these as I develop them.

Each exercise has four comping notes, to which you will apply the stickings in Stone, playing the bass drum where there's an R, and the snare drum where there's an L. Usually it will suffice to just use Stone exercises 1-13, but you could also do ex. 63-72 to test your fluency. The cymbal pattern is mainly quarter notes; we'll be introducing the familiar three-note grouping strategically, to fit the comping rhythm. You can add extra measures of time (either quarter notes, or the regular jazz time pattern, or improvised variations on the cymbal) between exercise phrases, if you want.

Practicing these in a tempo range of around half note = 143-175 should cover you for almost any situation you're ever going to encounter; I would master that range of tempos before worrying about going into the truly stratospheric tempos. Try not to go below ~HN=120-130 to start, and don't swing the 8th notes, even when playing the exercises in medium-up tempo ranges, where you would normally swing the 8ths in jazz. You can check out my old list of tempos of famous recordings to see how you're doing compared to your favorite drummers/recordings.

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