Here’s a drum solo played at a bright tempo with brushes by Philly Joe Jones. The tune is Sub City, by Bud Powell. The form is 32 bars long, and he’s basically playing two choruses, […]
Author: Todd Bishop
Very occasional quotes of the day: from Elvin
Jon McCaslin at Four On The Floor has posted a collection of quotes from Elvin Jones, collected by Adam Nussbaum. Here are two of my favorites; there are many more at FOTF: “Thad told me […]
Flam combinations in 6/8
Way too many wordy posts recently, with more coming, so let’s do a simple page of flam exercises in 6/8— in a triplet feel. Like p. 34 in Stick Control, but more robust. Whenever I […]
Building rubadub – 01
For intermediate jazz students, here is a page for learning the basic pattern for Mel Lewis’s rubadub concept (as helpfully explained by Chris Smith), about as thoroughly as possible, while also developing solid execution with […]
Dealing with it: bad time
We’ll see if this becomes a regular feature: dealing with it. If anyone has thoughts, ideas, frustrations in real life playing situations, mention them in the comments, and maybe I can write something about it. […]
Snare drummers vs. drum set players
This came up in the Neil Peart piece: the idea of snare drummers as opposed to drum set players. People who play the drums as a single four limb instrument vs. people who are essentially […]
Neil Peart
Well, dang. Everyone knows by now Neil Peart has unexpectedly passed away. He was certainly the most celebrated drummer of the past ~ 45 years, maybe ever. A few are more famous, but I don’t […]
Listening to Kenny Clarke
Let’s do a little guided listening. I caught this on Portland’s excellent jazz station, KMHD— If you don’t have a good station locally, and you probably don’t, you should be streaming KMHD live 24/7. The tune […]
RLB intro page
This is based on a page I wrote in 2012— I was using that with a younger student, and marked it up so heavily that it was unreadable. So here’s a clean version of what we […]
New gear rules
NO I’m getting a little punchy from working on this new book, so I just started writing rules about gear. Consider the following to be LEGALLY BINDING. Failure to comply may result in a SUBSTANTIAL […]