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 […]
Author: Todd Bishop
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 […]
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. […]
Partido Alto variations
The partido alto rhythm, in this case; it’s also a Brazilian song style, a type of funk groove, and a tune (see below). It’s one of the major rhythms in Brazilian music— several of the batucada […]
Very occasional quote of the day: new music
“And I said, ‘How about you? Who’s your favorite drummer?’ He said, ‘Tony Williams.’ And I didn’t know who Tony Williams was, so the next day I went to a record store, and on the […]
DBMITW: Tom Zé
Busy week here, moving my girlfriend Casey Scott to Ashland, Oregon for the summer, where she will be acting and playing bass in Family Album, the new play by Stew Stewart, part of the Oregon Shakespearean […]
Page o’ coordination: hihat splash in 5/4
Here’s the disconcerting third dropped shoe in this recent spate of hihat splash pages o’…, now in 5/4, and I… Wow, I think that may be the ugliest, most incomprehensible sentence I’ve ever written. I’m […]
Gladstone (et al) method for Stick Control
I stumbled across this piece of drumming lore, posted in 2006 on the Drummerworld discussion forum: Billy Gladstone’s way of practicing Stick Control. According to a guy posting anonymously on the Internet. It does sound […]
Groove o’ the day: more DC Go Go
Last year we looked at the quintessential Go-Go groove, in my mind, played by Ricky Wellman, with Chuck Brown. Trouble Funk is another major act in that style, and their drummer Emmett Nixon did things […]