Another drum solo from a Jackie McLean record. Jack Dejohnette early in his career, soloing on a fast tune from McLean’s album Jackknife. The tune is Climax, tempo is about half note = 160. We […]
Lead hand
From Mike Clark’s Twitter feed, a graphic illustration of what I mean when I talk about a lead hand, or mention the drums being a predominantly right-handed instrument: This is how I played before I […]
Transcription: Roy Haynes – It’s Time – drum solo
Here’s Roy Haynes’s drum solo from the title track of a Jackie McLean record we visited a few months ago, It’s Time. The solo begins at 5:31. Pull up my Cliché Control page and start […]
Marking up Reed
You know, I think we should all own multiple copies of Syncopation— first because they tend to get destroyed through use, second so we can pencil in our own changes without turning the book into […]
Reed interpretation: alternating triplets, no left on cymbals
Interesting, unusual little tweak streamlining a standard Reed triplet method, that should be good for fills, and for creating an easy, open triplet texture with a strong foundation in the bass drum. Probably helpful for […]
Transcription: Elvin Jones – Chasin’ the Trane – 09
Continuing this project, here are the 49th-54th choruses of Elvin Jones’s playing on Chasin’ the Trane, from John Coltrane Live at the Village Vanguard. Transcription begins at 9:20 in the recording. I see there’s a […]
RIP Carlton Jackson
Portland drummer Carlton Jackson died last weekend, he’s been such a pillar of the jazz community, a knowledgeable authority, and one of the handful of top drummers in the region for so long I was […]
EZ set ups and partial filler
I’m working through this with a student. It’s an easy reading item for the drum set, with a narrow set of parameters, using my tresillo inversions page (lines 1-8 only), my tresillo inversion combinations page, and […]
Transcription: Elvin Jones – Chasin’ the Trane – 08
When in doubt, keep doing what you’re doing. Let’s actually continue and complete my beginning of the year project, transcribing all of Elvin Jones’s playing on John Coltrane’s Chasin’ the Train, from the Live At […]
What are we doing
Been having a minor existential crisis in the last week or so— I played my first session in over a year last week, was feeling really unpracticed and generally out of touch with music… and […]