Another Jeff Watts transcription, from Branford Marsalis’s album Trio Jeepy. The audio is not available on our usual YouTube; but, you, know, that’s OK. Music isn’t actually supposed to be free. So get thee to […]
Category: drum solo
Transcription: Jeff Watts — Upper Manhattan Medical Group
Here is Jeff Watts’s 32-bar solo on Upper Manhattan Medical Group, from Branford Marsalis’s album Trio Jeepy. It’s a sign of the times that Watts, a virtuoso himself, comes off as kind of un-technical compared […]
Transcription: more Frankie, more Jackie-ing
Let’s really Dunlop out during this fundraising drive. Here’s part 2 of yesterday’s most— Frankie Dunlop’s actual solo on Jackie-ing, from Thelonious Monk’s Live In Stockholm 1961 album: Note that he feathers the bass drum […]
Transcription: Elvin Jones — Summertime
Let’s start out the new year with a more substantial transcription than we’ve done in a while, in this case a very famous drum solo by Elvin Jones, on Summertime from John Coltrane’s My Favorite […]
Different values
I usually keep just one CD in my car for days or occasionally weeks at a time- recently for me it’s been Don Cherry’s Art Deco, an old favorite that had been languishing in the […]
Getting started soloing over a form
This is more a roughly-progressive series of guidelines than a step-by-step how-to; this is a much larger subject than can be fully addressed in one little blog post. Players spend years or decades developing a […]
Some of them just can’t count.
There’s a great extended piece over at Four on the Floor on the subject of form in soloing, and how to hip the other musicians to the fact you are adhering to it: Of course […]
Baby Dodds
One thing I’ve noticed in recent years is that you can’t have a conversation about the drums in jazz without Baby Dodds coming up- he’s become kind of a signifier of seriousness about the subject. […]