I picked up a few more cymbals from Cymbal & Gong HQ last week, for sale on my Cymbalistic site. I’ll be posting those and adding video… shortly. Four Holy Grail series, two 20″ rides, […]
Latest uptempo drill
I’ll be honest, most of my uptempo things I improvise while practicing, and then work on them maybe a few times over a week or two. But taken together, they give you more than a […]
Transcription: Jimmy Cobb solo
This week I may finally be getting a handle on this Jimmy Cobb fellow, after 40 years of listening to him. It turns out his records with Wynton Kelly are the ones to listen to. […]
Syncopation exercise: page 38 inverted
A little writing experiment here: I’ve inverted the rhythm from the full page Exercise 1 from Progressive Steps to Syncopation, on p. 38 in current editions, famously on p. 37 from earlier editions. It’s one […]
Daily best music in the world / groove o’ the day: Sookie Sookie
I heard this on Portland’s jazz station KMHD yesterday— on Ben Turner’s excellent afternoon show. You probably don’t have a decent local jazz station, so you should be streaming KMHD online and becoming a monthly […]
Page o’ skiplets – UPDATED
UPDATE: Boy, I suck— it turns out this thing is riddled with typos in the 4/4 versions. I’ll let you know when I’ve posted the corrected version… You know, instead of saying “skiplets”— a very […]
Page o’ coordination: Jimmy Cobb Afro
Page o’ coordination based on Jimmy Cobb’s playing on the tune Not A Tear, played by Wynton Kelly. The main groove Cobb plays on this tune is actually identical to the groove from Andrew Hill’s […]
Reed tweak: four beats per drum, cycling
Here’s an easy way to modernize your melodic phrasing when playing an ordinary thing using Syncopation— everyone knows about playing the melody parts from the book on the snare drum and bass drum, along with […]
Linear 8ths in 9/8 – 01
This is how it is, I get busy teaching, doing my taxes, preoccupied with other stuff, and not able to hit the drums for a week, and everything dries up. No ideas and I feel […]
Transcription: Jimmy Cobb fours
Jimmy Cobb trading fours with Wynton Kelly on Gone With The Wind, from Kelly’s self-titled (plus an exclamation point) trio album from 1961. There’s a lot of very standard vocabulary here, the type of which […]