“I learn something every time I play.” – Philly Joe Jones, 1982 Modern Drummer interview with Rick Mattingly
Stick control in 12/8 – “Afro logic”
Here’s what that page of 6/8 sticking patterns was setting up— and that funny joke photoshopped page from Stone: sticking combinations in 12/8, oriented like the Afro “short bell” rhythm, with one pattern on beats […]
Reed interpretations: 16th notes in a triplet feel
A simple system here, that nevertheless has a number of possibilities, that I was playing using with my own book, Syncopation in 3/4, along with the Bill Frisell / Where In The World loop in […]
What kind of sticks do you use?
Addressing the classic drum clinic question once again. In 2019, under the sway of our friend in Berlin, Michael Griener, after about 10 years of using the Vic Firth SD-11 Slammer (a maple 5B) or […]
Stick control patterns in 6/8
This is part of a larger writing project I’m doing— some things you have to write out to decide if they’re going to be of any use. You can see that the logical sequence here […]
Solo transcription: Elvin Jones – Crisis
Here’s Elvin Jones’s drum solo on that tune Crisis, from Freddie Hubbard’s Ready For Freddie, which we looked at a couple of weeks ago. It contains some classically Elvin stuff, and is good for some […]
CYMBALISTIC: Get ’em while they’re hot
CYMBALISTIC: Service announcement— cymbal business has really been cooking this winter, so if you have your eye on any of the wonderful Cymbal & Gong cymbals on my Cymbalistic site, it’s best to act fairly […]
Max wants you to turn off YouTube
“We used to listen to records and take off the record what the person was doing. You didn’t see the person. You’d just hear it. We’d figure out what was happening with our ears. Then […]
Stick Control with short bell logic
Another one of my little photoshop gags— I edited a jpeg of the first page of exercises in Stick Control to follow the logic of the Afro “short bell” pattern*, which has beats 1 and 4 […]
Very occasional quote of the day: you have to be there to play every night
“You have to work with the people for a while. I was talking to Jo Jones one day. He commented something like, ‘It’s very important how a person develops his own musical personality.’ He says, […]