To me, any drummer who hits the drums too hard doesn’t swing. — Peter Erskine Read the entire Drum! Magazine interview from 2000.
Category: jazz
Groove o’ the day: Shelly Manne — Way Out West
Here are a couple of very famous things by Shelly Manne, from the album Way Out West by Sonny Rollins. Sonny could be a little perverse in his tune selections, often choosing things that would […]
Mel Lewis on cymbals
More on cymbals from Mel Lewis’s 1985 Modern Drummer interview. This is pretty much the bible of the subject, as it relates to jazz: Number and type The average drummer usually uses two to four […]
VOQOTD: Al Foster’s listening habits
From the Small’s interview archive: “He’s in it all the time. He’s listening all the time. He’s got kind of a small range of stuff he listens to over and over again: Monk, Bird, earlier […]
Page o’ coordination: 5/8 + 5/8 — 01
Another page o’ coordination in 5/4. From the amount of time we spend dealing with playing in 5, you might get the impression that I think it’s pretty damned important. I really don’t, but it […]
Much more to do with 5/4
If you’ve been using the pages o’ coordination we’ve been doing around here, you’re going to like what Sam Nadel has been posting recently— a whole bunch of stuff on playing in 5/4. He doesn’t […]
Groove o’ the day: Peter Erskine — Clint
Because I like challenging you to hear past things that most people perceive as cheese, here’s a little relic of the later fusion era, by the great John Abercrombie trio with Marc Johnson and Peter […]
Transcription: Philly Joe Jones — Locomotion
I’ve been working through Philly Joe Jones’s intro on Lomotion, from the Coltrane album Blue Train; a student was given the fairly nutso assignment of learning this verbatim off of YouTube. We worked through it […]
Phrases for Chaffee linear patterns: triplets in 3/4
Here is one set of practice phrases for the Gary Chaffee linear patterns, in one or two measures of 3/4, with a triplet rhythm. For the sake of brevity, I’ve given only the two measure […]
Page o’ coordination: in 4/4 — 01
Extending this coordination series a little further, way out there into 4/4. What he have here is a little Elvin Jones-like phrase, ending with an accent on the & of 4, with a space at […]