Here’s a page to print out and staplegun to the wall by your drums: a summary of some major practice rhythms, and their inversions. Sometimes you don’t need a readable page, you just need a […]
Category: comping
A basic waltz vocabulary – 01
I was working with a student on a jazz waltz, played at a brighter tempo than he was real comfortable with, so we needed to come up with some easy things to add to his […]
Transcription: Roy Haynes – Bad News Blues – 03
Part 3 of Roy Haynes playing Bad News Blues on his record Cracklin’. Booker Ervin’s tenor solo includes a chorus of stop time, two choruses of blowing, then he trades choruses with Roy. This is […]
Transcription: Roy Haynes – Bad News Blues – 02
Part 2 of Roy Haynes playing Bad News Blues on his record Cracklin’. This is Ron Matthews’s piano solo, starting at 1:51— four choruses, 48 bars. Things like this are a little bit of an […]
Transcription: Max comping
That’s the theme of the week now: jazz comping. Here’s Max Roach playing on the horn solos on A Little Sweet, from his record The Many Sides of Max. Each solo is 24 bars long, […]
Beware of formulas
Making that Shadow Wilson transcription, I was reminded of this video fellow blogger Jon McCaslin shared with me (and Ted Warren of Trap’d), in which drummer Bernie Dresel shares his formula for comping with the […]
Transcription: Shadow Wilson comping
A little bit of Shadow Wilson’s playing on Nutty, from Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane, at Carnegie Hall. This is Monk’s second solo chorus, starting at 2:33. The tune is 32 bars long, form is […]
Transcription: Mel Lewis comping
On Chess Mates, from a 1985 Joe Lovano record, Tone Shapes & Colors— a live recording with Mel Lewis on drums, and Kenny Werner on piano. A lot of what I’d call “non-independent” drumming here, […]
Transcription: Elvin Jones – Foolin’ Myself – 03
We’ll keep going with this. Part 3 of Elvin Jones playing on Foolin’ Myself, from Lee Konitz’s record Motion. This is the second chorus of Konitz’s solo, starting at 1:57 in the track. The previous […]
Page o’ coordination: hihat in the space
Here’s a page based on this ongoing Elvin Jones transcription— I observed when he was playing time on the hihat, he would tend to close it before the beat. I also saw him doing that […]