I’ll be honest, most of my uptempo things I improvise while practicing, and then work on them maybe a few times over a week or two. But taken together, they give you more than a […]
Category: jazz
Transcription: Jimmy Cobb solo
This week I may finally be getting a handle on this Jimmy Cobb fellow, after 40 years of listening to him. It turns out his records with Wynton Kelly are the ones to listen to. […]
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 […]
Transcription: Jimmy Cobb fours
Jimmy Cobb trading fours with Wynton Kelly on Gone With The Wind, from Kelly’s self-titled (plus an exclamation point) trio album from 1961. There’s a lot of very standard vocabulary here, the type of which […]
Three Camps for drum set: 16th notes – SSBB
More of Three Camps adapted for drum set, with a 16th note SSBB pattern, in a jazz feel. Let’s call this an advanced page, because there’s a little extra 16th note filler on the snare […]
Know your tempos: Ballads
Once every dozen years of blogging, I like to write about ballads— slow tunes you play on jazz gigs. They do exist. Possibly I don’t write about them much because I learned to play them […]
Daily best music in the world: Mingus
Please forgive the light posting— in honor of Charles Mingus’s birthday, dig this record:
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, […]
Cliché control
A little writing experiment, like my old Funk Control pages, and my Philly Joe solo page. Here we have a lot of jazz soloing clichés, to practice in combination with each other. Similar to a […]