For intermediate jazz students, here is a page for learning the basic pattern for Mel Lewis’s rubadub concept (as helpfully explained by Chris Smith), about as thoroughly as possible, while also developing solid execution with […]
Category: jazz
Listening to Kenny Clarke
Let’s do a little guided listening. I caught this on Portland’s excellent jazz station, KMHD— If you don’t have a good station locally, and you probably don’t, you should be streaming KMHD live 24/7. The tune […]
1985 Mel Lewis clinic
Surprised I haven’t already shared this Mel Lewis clinic, given in the Netherlands in 1985. He talks about his familiar opinionated subjects: playing the bass drum, drum sounds, fighting with recording engineers. Somewhere in there […]
Transcription: Philly Joe brush feature
I heard this on the radio yesterday— Soft Winds, from Chet Baker’s album In New York. Philly Joe Jones also had a cool drum solo on it, played with brushes. Drumming right now is in a […]
Groove o’ the day: Louis Hayes calypso
A calypso-type groove played by Louis Hayes in 1957, on the Curtis Fuller album Volume 3, on Blue Note. The tune is Quantrale, a light thing written by Fuller. Hayes plays variations on the groove […]
Very occasional quote of the day: late arrivers
“There’s a certain kind of people that are more or less late arrivers, you can – even though he was certainly on the scene and known and respected – you can hear him building his […]
Jazz waltz with Chaffee
Let’s detail something I mentioned in the Chaffee jazz post: using the patterns in that system as 8th notes in a jazz waltz. They’re three-note (or rest) patterns, so playing them two times = a […]
Making sense of the Chaffee jazz materials
Patterns, vol. 3 by Gary Chaffee Let’s talk about a big scary hard thing: the jazz section of volume 3 of Gary Chaffee’s Patterns series— the Time Functioning book. It’s in a similar category with […]
Transcription: Kenny Clarke fours – 02
Put this in your binder with Kenny Clarke’s fours from Love Me Or Leave Me that I posted a few years ago. Here he’s trading fours on Two Not One from the album Lee Konitz with Warne Marsh. […]
Practice loops: two McCoy loops
A couple of practice loops sampled from McCoy Tyner. The first is from Reaching Fourth; it’s the vamp from Old Devil Moon, and at 142 bpm it’s a nice medium tempo, good for working on […]