UPDATE: All the videos are up! CYMBALISTIC: Just letting everyone know, the latest shipment from Turkey has been delayed YET AGAIN— so we won’t be seeing a big new batch of cymbals until later in […]
Cliché control – 5 stroke singles
Another Cliché Control page for learning to solo in jazz, combining stock licks. This time centered around 5-stroke singles: RLRLR or RLRLB. We’re squarely in Philly Joe / Art Blakey territory here— and a lot […]
Sidebar: open and closed
As long as I’ve been playing, with the people I’ve been around*, open and closed were understood to refer to, respectively, double-stroke, rudimental-style rolls, and multiple-bounce, orchestral style rolls. Double strokes = open, multiple-bounce = closed. That […]
Groove o’ the day: Afro 10/8
An interesting groove by Billy Kilson, on A Seeking Spirit, from Dave Holland’s Prime Directive album, one of the big records of the late 90s. If you’re not familiar, he had a very high powered […]
Transcription: Roy Haynes 8s
Hot on the heels of that “too perfect” post, here’s a great example of what I’m talking about in terms of playing with an edge: Roy Haynes trading 8s with Chick Corea on Rhythm-a-ning, from […]
Too perfect
Perfect and boring For a long time I thought robotic perfection was basically impossible to achieve for people not practicing massive hours… so you may as well just try your best to achieve it. Lately, […]
Thelonious’s ballad test
From Ben Riley’s 1986 interview in Modern Drummer with Jeff Potter: “In my first experience with [Thelonious Monk], in Amsterdam, we played ‘Embraceable You’ as a very slow ballad. Then he went into ‘Don’t Blame […]
Listening: Up Jumped Spring
I started transcribing this, but was too distracted by Ukraine developments to finish more than a page of it. It’s Up Jumped Spring, by Freddie Hubbard, from his album Backlash— I’m listening to a lot […]
Sidebar: Learn to like things
“I thought it was the worst thing I’d ever heard. I said to myself, they’re not even trying! It was just a sloppy cacophony. Then I listened to it a couple more times, because I […]
Shoutout to Eduard in Odessa, and all of our other readers in Ukraine— stay safe.