english blog

Happy new year, everybody. I'm practicing a lot of slow tempos lately, so here are some Reed interpretations that will be familiar to all jazz students, written out to suggest double time during a ballad. You'll be using sticks to play the exercises, but once you've gotten these together, you should be able to render something similar with brushes. First, without getting too much beyond the scope of a little blog post, we should clarify a few things about this feel. Give a listen to this recording of Dexter Gordon playing Body & Soul: The tune is in 4/4, with a quarter note pulse of about 57 beats per minute, using what I call a compound subdivision of both triplets and straight 8th notes— any musician may play off of either subdivision at any time. You can also hear that at different moments, they may generate a swing feel based on the even 8ths, as if they were quarter notes at ~114 beats per minute. You can hear that most clearly during the piano solo after about 4:...

One of the earlier things we did was a pretty exhaustive, four-page write up of an 11-note pattern which has for some time been coming up spontaneously in my playing. I've been working on it with a student lately, and have written up some ideas for fitting it into a basic funk phrase: The main idea here is that, obviously, the plain lick doesn't fit neatly into 4/4, and I've given some possible ways of setting it up and getting out of it. You should try your own ideas for doing this, try starting the lick in some different places in the measure than I have given, and experiment with moving it around the drums. It will help to run the lick repetitively by itself, in 11/16; and to  go back to the original piece , and learn to play all of page 1 of the pdf on the snare drum. Get the pdf