From Ben Riley's 1986 interview in Modern Drummer with Jeff Potter:
“In my first experience with [Thelonious Monk], in Amsterdam, we played 'Embraceable You' as a very slow ballad. Then he went into 'Don't Blame Me.' He stood up, looked over to me, and said, 'Drum solo!'
Fortunately for me, I had been working at the Upper East Side supper clubs playing a lot of brushes, and I like brushes. So when I played it, I didn't have to double the tempo, because I was used to playing slow brush tempos. I played it right at the tempo he gave me.
When we were going back to the dressing room, he just walked by me and said, 'How many people you know could have done that?' and he kept on going.”
It seems like Monk liked to spring that on drummers the first time he played with them— in the same situation, Riley apparently fared better than Frankie Dunlop, who shared this horrifying, hilarious story with Scott Fish:
I started transcribing this, but was too distracted by Ukraine developments to finish more than a page of it. It's Up Jumped Spring, by Freddie Hubbard, from his album Backlash— I'm listening to a lot of Freddie Hubbard lately. Otis Ray Appleton is on drums. This is one of the first tunes in 3/4 I ever learned, and like most tunes I know, I learned it on the job, playing a little gig.
The form is AABA, with 16 bar A sections and 8 bar bridge, so here's most of one chorus [hahahaha, I suck- t] of the drumming on it, from the beginning of Hubbard's flugelhorn solo, starting at 2:09:
The drumming is straightforward, grooving, driven by mostly a quarter note rhythm on the cymbal— not a lot of skip notes happening. He's playing the tune; not a lot of stock jazz waltz stylistic things happening. He plays the hihat on beat 2 sometimes. Comping on the snare drum is mostly simple offbeats (often the & of 3), with larger statements at phrase endings— often a roll on the snare or floor tom, singles or closed roll. He uses the bass drum and cymbal strongly to outline the form. He does a few basic combinations the bass drum and snare drum, which you can easily pick out.
Overall it's a great example of how to play the form, and play great time, simply and functionally without just playing stock jazz waltz drum groove.
Nice cymbal sound, too— a rather dark, dry 20" cymbal, with good ride and accent sounds.
“I thought it was the worst thing I'd ever heard. I said to myself, they're not even trying! It was just a sloppy cacophony. Then I listened to it a couple more times, because I couldn't believe Frank Zappa could do this to me – and because a double album cost a lot of money. About the third time, I realized they were doing it on purpose; they meant it to sound exactly this way. About the sixth or seventh time, it clicked in, and I thought it was the greatest album I'd ever heard.”
- Matt Groening on Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart
A little point of doctrine here— like, this is how I believe musicians are supposed to be. There are certain liberties average schmucks in the street are allowed, that people who are serious about music are not.
We're not free to indulge our immediate taste. You don't get to only listen to what you like, or play what you like— you don't get to skip or ignore things you don't immediately like.
When I was a student, there was no endless free music. You had to buy records, or a friend of yours had to play them for you. Or you could get them from the library. Music was fairly scarce, so when you spent the money to get something, you would listen to it a few times and make an effort at learning to like it. You would give some credit to the idea that if it got put on a record, and people say it's good, you give it a chance.
Professional-aspiring musicians— either you're a professional, you want to be a professional, or you want to be like a professional, because that's what being a good musician is— have to play a lot of music that is not to their personal taste. Most of us can't only do gigs we like— and in order to not be miserable, you have to embrace those types of music a little bit. Enough to enjoy the gig, and play well on it.
And no blanket dismissal of music based on “genre”— what genre is/is not is a subject for another post— no dismissal based on marketing labels or categories. You have to listen and make your assessments based on individual pieces of music.
And you limit your critical assessments. You listen like a professional and you figure out what a recording can teach you related to your job. On hearing an unfamiliar piece of music, “do I dig this” is the last thing you should be thinking about, not the first.
We are creative artists, not just employees, so you do have to have music that speaks to you personally and immediately— you may also find that a much wider variety of music does that, once you start listening this way.
Thursday, February 24, 2022
Shoutout to Eduard in Odessa, and all of our other readers in Ukraine— stay safe.
I'll be playing through this on the drums, with RH on the cymbal, possibly with the bass drum in unison, and with the left hand on the snare, playing around with some of the usual moves around the drums. Probably with dotted quarters played with the left foot.
A simple system here, that nevertheless has a number of possibilities, that I was playing using with my own book, Syncopation in 3/4, along with the Bill Frisell / Where In The World loop in 9/8. It's fast filler for slower triplet-feel tempos. I was also sloppy in writing this, creating an opening to make your own decisions on how to do it.
Here are the basic things you do with any single beat of rhythm in Syncopation. As always, we're interpreting the top line rhythm from the book, ignoring the bottom line part.
So if you see this rhythm in the book, you'd play:
There's nothing sounding on beat 4 there, so you fill out the entire beat with the triplet 16ths*. Also note the sticking on beat 3— the basic interpretation has all of the cymbal notes played with the right hand, but you can alternate when there are two cymbal note in a row with triplet spacing. You can then make the quick move to fill the middle of the triplet with either hand, or leave it open, as in the next example.
You don't need to play wall-to-wall notes— you can introduce some space to mostly do only five stroke singles as filler, like so:
Let's review the options for this rhythm:
The basic thing, alternating all the 16ths:
With some space added:
If you have any problem with the timing of the 16th notes, play the fill as left handed flams, triplet rhythm— a good thing to practice in its own right:
After that's very solid, you can adjust the timing of the left hand to make the 16th notes.
* - Sidebar: about 16th notes in a triplet-feel environment The 16th notes here are played at the same rate as ordinary sixtuplets, but we're playing them off of a three-note, 8th note triplet subdivision, like 16th notes in compound meters— 6/8 or 12/8:
Regular sixtuplets and 16th note triplets in 4/4 have an implicit 8th note subdivision:
The rhythm is exactly the same, but with this system we're basing them off of 8th note triplets rather than 8th notes.
Addressing the classic drum clinic question once again. In 2019, under the sway of our friend in Berlin, Michael Griener, after about 10 years of using the Vic Firth SD-11 Slammer (a maple 5B) or the VF SD-4 Combo (the universal standard jazz stick), I began looking into some very light hickory sticks.
I had been put off of hickory by the brutal sound of the heavier Vic Firth models I used in the 80s. The lighter models get a stronger attack while not moving too much mass— I can get the dynamic sound I want without playing too loud. And the maple sticks, I felt, were producing too much body and not enough attack.
I tried a number of other things, and was surprised that other sticks with similar specifications don't work very well for me. Vater's 500 Bebop model is almost the same size as the Swing Classic below, and I just couldn't hang with them.
Here's what I'm using now— these all handle very well. I like to have a little stick and a regular stick in my stick bag:
Regal Tip 7A Nylon Tip - 15" x .520" Several years ago I saw that the pianist George Colligan (also a drummer) had some in his stick bag, so I bought a set, and finally started using them. They're an order of magnitude smaller than anything I ever used before. The nylon tips sound disgusting, but they do project.
Naturally, I can't get them any more, because the Regal company is having some kind of inter-family squabble, which has resulted in them not producing any drum sticks. Apparently someone with a controlling interest in the company would rather let it burn than have another family member be involved in it.
They also make/de 16" Jazz and Combo models (.475" diameter!) I'd be interested in trying if and when that becomes possible.
Bopworks Birdland Model - 15 5/16" x .5" Bopworks is a one-person company reproducing mainly signature models from the past— several models are very good, a couple of them seem more specialized. The Birdlands are by far the smallest sticks I've ever used, similar dimensions to the Regals, but even lighter. Long taper, slender at the playing end. It's easy to blend with unamped acoustic bass and piano with these, and after an adjustment period, they feel and sound like normal sticks.
Bopworks 40s Swing Classic Model - 16" x .515" Longer than the Birdlands, slightly beefier, with an acorn bead, long taper. Good balance, good normal stick. When a stick is too weighted towards the bead end— like those Vaters— it feels like I'm playing with boxing gloves on.
This is part of a larger writing project I'm doing— some things you have to write out to decide if they're going to be of any use. You can see that the logical sequence here is unusual. File this in your library with the myriad of other items in 6/8 on the site.
I rarely play any kind of stick control-type pattern just on the practice pad— except with students. I'll usually play them on the drum set, with one hand on a cymbal, with the bass drum in unison, or some variation of that. Or with one hand accented and the other hand ghosted.
