A few weeks ago we introduced a new term, that is totally made-up by me: skiplet. It refers to the cluster of three notes of the standard jazz ride cymbal pattern starting on beat 2, and on […]
Category: comping
Page o’ coordination: Elvin’s waltz — inverted feet
Once you start doing an Elvin-like thing, the pull of that dotted-quarter rhythm can be very hard to resist; it’s effective, it builds tension, and it feels good to play it, but you need to […]
Page o’ coordination: hihat splash in 3/4 — 02
Hey, I kind of like these things— we’ll see several more pages o’… with hihat splashes, in the near future. This format has become one of the major things we do here, as I’ve had […]
Page o’ coordination: across the barline in 5/4
This is a classic situation when you start improvising in 5/4: you get a little cocky about your ability to just vibe the meter and come out OK, and in a few moments you observe […]
Paradiddle-diddle variations, for jazz
Hey, we haven’t done anything for the snare drum in awhile— in my own practicing I’ve been preoccupied with Dahlgren & Fine’s Accent On Accents books, and Buster Bailey’s Wrist Twisters, and my students are […]
5/4 jazz ostinato with snare drum — 01
Another in the Dahlgren & Fine-esque, post Elvin’s Afro-Waltz series of stuff, here with a slightly more normal jazz ostinato. I keep writing these because I like practicing them, and learning them gets a lot […]
Elvin-like 5/4
Here’s another in this fairly massive Elvin series, which I wrote to develop this unusual cymbal pattern in 5/4, with the 8th notes on beats 3 and 5. The first measure is the cymbal-and-feet ostinato, […]
From the zone: Elvin 9/8
Let’s see if I can make a series out of this— it will depend on people sending me cool stuff out of their personal notebooks. Meaning, you should send me cool stuff out of your […]
First lesson in 5/4 — swing feel
A rare two-pager today. Here I’ve put a little flesh on the bones on the process I outlined in my earlier Cracking 5/4 series, with an easy first lesson coordinating snare drum and bass drum […]
Expanding on The Kenny Note
What we have here are some very basic comping ideas based on the so-called (by me only, I’m sure) “Kenny” note— a snare drum punctuation on the & of 1 or the & of 3. […]