What the hell, I’m on a roll, waiting for this weekend’s blanket of suffocating heat to descend on the entire Pacific Northwest. Let’s look at some more of Al Harewood, on yesterday’s same record by […]
Category: comping
Page o’ skiplets – UPDATED
UPDATE: Boy, I suck— it turns out this thing is riddled with typos in the 4/4 versions. I’ll let you know when I’ve posted the corrected version… You know, instead of saying “skiplets”— a very […]
Reed tweak: four beats per drum, cycling
Here’s an easy way to modernize your melodic phrasing when playing an ordinary thing using Syncopation— everyone knows about playing the melody parts from the book on the snare drum and bass drum, along with […]
Linear 8ths in 9/8 – 01
This is how it is, I get busy teaching, doing my taxes, preoccupied with other stuff, and not able to hit the drums for a week, and everything dries up. No ideas and I feel […]
Transcription: Roy Haynes – It’s Time
Roy Haynes playing behind Herbie Hancock’s solo, on the title track of Jackie McLean’s record It’s Time. There’s a lot of what people call “broken” time here, and meter-within-meter playing. The tune is in 4, […]
Accents on 8/8 jazz rhythms
A background project lately has been to create some ways of practicing feathering the bass drum as part of a modern, varying, organic jazz texture. This page is related to some things I’m hearing in […]
Page o’ coordination: feet in the gap
Another little item inspired by the ongoing Chasin’ the Trane transcription— in which Elvin Jones does this a lot. Here we’ve got both feet in unison, played on the &s of 1 and 3, in […]
Three Camps for drum set – inverted quarter note triplet fill – 07
I’m telling you this is a good system. It gives you the thing, some basic variations on it, starting on 1 or 2, straight and syncopated, and it makes you do it for as long […]
Page o’ coordination: jazz / RLRR
Working on this Elvin project the last couple of days, I noticed that, similar to Max Roach on another recording, he plays the snare drum in the gap in the cymbal rhythm a lot, for […]
Another Reed tweak
Another minor tweak on a normal Reed method, in a jazz feel. It’s good to have some easy options to relieve the tedium, and to bring more of the texture of real playing into it. […]