A Latin groove played by John Von Ohlen on Love For Sale, arranged for the Blue Wisp Big Band by Carroll DeCamp. From their famous album Butterfly. This was one of the first serious big […]
Category: latin
Groove o’ the day: Like Sonny – alternate version
An Afro 6 feel recorded in 1959 by Lex Humphries on an alternate version of Like Sonny, from the John Coltrane Alternate Takes compilation. The master version of the tune was released on the album […]
Filling a Mozambique
This is something I was working through with a student recently: filling during a Mozambique groove. Latin grooves need to be worked out more than other things, so it’s a good idea to break it […]
Guaguanco – two ways
A little more on general fluency with a Guaguanco-type groove on drumset. It’s not a style that authentically uses a drumset, but the groove is a hip alternative for non-traditional situations. It has a nice […]
Page o’ coordination: Rumba clave – hands only
Page of exercises for coordinating the left hand with rumba clave played with the right. It’s not pure independence practice in the abstract— most of the patterns are related to the clave rhythm in a […]
Q&A: Cuban for jazz
I got a surprisingly tough question from a reader the other day: What’s a good book for playing Cuban styles in jazz? Part of the difficulty with answering this is, what do we mean by […]
Groove o’ the day: Lex Humphries afro 6
Hm, Lex Humphries has been coming up a lot lately. I heard this tune played on KMHD, Portland’s jazz radio station: Taboo, played by Duke Pearson on his Blue Note album Profile. I should think about […]
Groove o’ the day: Charli Latin
One more item from that tune Fuss Budget, by Curtis Fuller, from the album Two Bones: there is a few bars of a Latin groove on the head of the tune, during which Charli Persip […]
Page o’ coordination: Cinquillo
Here’s an easy page o’ coordination based on a basic bell rhythm, known in Latin music circles as “cinquillo”— which basically means quintuplet. It’s not a quintuplet, it’s the indicated 5-note rhythm, but that’s what […]
Groove o’ the day: Lex Humphries – Abana
Back to posting drum stuff after a shocking, depressing last week, with the massacre of a lot of innocent humans in New Zealand. Here’s some music for anyone still struggling to find their equilibrium. I was […]