Billy Higgins playing on a funky vamp with some kicks in it, on Blackjack, from Donald Byrd’s album of the same name. It sticks with the rhythm figure all the way through, and Higgins plays […]
Category: Blue Note
Transcription: Tony Williams – Cantaloupe Island
A student was asking about Cantaloupe Island, played by Tony Williams on Herbie Hancock’s Empyrean Isles album, so I went ahead and transcribed the whole thing. Why not. The style may get called as a […]
Grooves o’ the day: Rumproller
Eaaasing back into blogging after an eventful couple of weeks, with some grooves by Billy Higgins, from Lee Morgan’s album The Rumproller. First, the groove from the title track: Often he’ll accent the & of […]
Groove o’ the day: Grant Green — Cantaloupe Woman
Here are two different Blue Note/soul/boogaloo-type grooves on the tune Cantaloupe Woman, from albums by Grant Green. First, from the great session drummer Ben Dixon (who also wrote the tune), as played on the 1965 […]
Groove o’ the day: a Blue Note waltz
Let’s do an easy one. Here’s Billy Gene English sketching out a simple, Blue Note-y, quasi-Latin waltz on the tune Wavy Gravy, from Kenny Burrell’s Midnight Blue: Swing the 8th notes. You can think of […]
Circumstances of a Monk record
From Jazz Wax, here’s a nice piece about Thelonious Monk’s Genius of Modern Music Vol. 2, recorded for Blue Note in 1952. The album included the first recordings of the horrifying Skippy, the underplayed Hornin’ […]