english blog

I guess I'm blogging in couplets this week.  Speaking of one of my favorite records , Decode Yourself, by Ronald Shannon Jackson's Decoding Society— long totally out of print, from a not-very-collectible era in jazz— I'm glad to see the tune Behind Plastic Faces up on YouTube now. The groove for the main part of the tune uses a sort of synth china cymbal sound— probably using a Simmons SDS-5— and tom sound at the end: He plays no fills or variations (oops, I just caught one ) on this part of the tune, except that he seems to sometimes play the roll as a 7-stroke instead of a 5-stroke. It also sounds like he's closing the hihat along with most of the bass drum notes, which you can do, or not.

“I play music and I play rhythms. I play them and I work on it because I hear something, then I just go sit down and start working on it. It’s like when my wife first asked, I’d be writing music all the time, she’d say ‘What are you going to be doin’ with all that music?’ ‘l don’t know…’ I just know that I be hearin’ it and if I keep writin’ it, it’s going to come. It’s like a dream, if you don’t write it then, you won’t write it. You just keep doing that man, you know?” — Ronald Shannon Jackson That pretty much sums up the entirety of the life of an artist. That's from Michael Bettine's remembrance of, and interview with, the late, great Ronald Shannon Jackson , from Bettine's blog  Percussion Deconstruction. It's also a nice overview of Jackson's recorded work, if you're just getting acquainted with him, and are wondering what to buy— though he doesn't mention my favorite RSJ record (after Barbeque Dog ), Decode Yourself: “Play like you play at home when ...