There was a period in time when hip hop really rocked. This is the groove from Night Of The Living Baseheads, from Public Enemy’s album It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back. […]
Year: 2014
DBMITW: Bernard Purdie
Posting will continue to be a little light this week, as I’m occupied with other projects, so here’s an obscure track featuring Bernard Purdie, recommended by Rick Marotta: [h/t to Geoff Gil]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]