This is the type of thing I like to share on the blog— a little piece of oral history posted someplace obscure, that could easily be lost, or extremely difficult to find again. This was […]
Category: jazz
New e-book: 5 Tony Williams Transcriptions
Another new e-book— not new to my long time readers, because most of the contents have been shared here before. Like the title says, it’s 5 Tony Williams transcriptions, re-proofed and reformatted for tablets and […]
Page o’ coordination: Elvin’s Afro-waltz – starting off the 1
Hearkening back to one of the very first pages o’…, in which we worked on developing an Elvin Jones-style waltz, the way he played it on John Coltrane’s Your Lady. It’s an interesting groove, with […]
Page o’ coordination: triplet pattern with cymbal variations – 01
A slight variation on our usual page o’ coordination thing; here we’re doing a set triplet pattern on the snare drum and bass drum, along with various cymbal parts— some are standard rhythms, and some […]
Practice loop: Max in 5
In honor of what would be Max Roach’s 92nd birthday, here’s a practice loop sampled from As Long As You’re Living, from his album Quiet As It’s Kept. The tune is a blues in 5/4, […]
Very occasional quote of the day: classical in jazz
“[T]hese days I think there can actually be too much ‘classical’ sounding stuff in jazz. In a master class I heard Paul Bley warn about this. Bley thought it was better for young jazz musicians […]
Daily best music in the world: Paul Motian Trio / Lisbon ’86
We’re very lucky. When I was first getting into this group around 1989, the only way to see them was to fly to New York, or catch them at a festival in Europe or maybe […]
Daily best music in the world: OH S___
In writing about playing the drums, you tend to focus on what is definable. You write the things you can say for sure, and you don’t write about things you can’t. That can give people […]
EZ Tony Williams-like method: another setting
Here’s something that was leading me into a very modern, hiccupy, vaguely Chris Dave-like jazz concept. I was practicing along with the Coltrane recording of Big Nick, a medium-slow swing tune, and found myself doing […]
Transcription: Joe Dukes – Hallelujah Time
I was rooting through some early George Benson the other day, and turned up this smoking number, which I had never heard before: Hallelujah Time, played by Brother Jack McDuff, with his long time drummer […]