I'm getting ready to move next month and have been clearing out some boxes.  In the process I found an old notebook that I had completely forgotten about with a handful of transcriptions that I did by hand many moons ago.  Over the coming weeks I'm going to digitize them all and post them here.   The first one clearly comes from early on in my period of digging into Kenny Washington as it's from the first album I ever heard with Kenny on it; Bill Charlap's Written in the Stars.     ..read more

I realize there's already quite a few of transcriptions of this one floating around the internet, but for one, I just wanted to do it myself, and two, I think some of them have mistakes or are missing details.  I'm not claiming to be the world's leading expert on Philly Joe, but I've probably listened to his playing more than any other drummer of that era, and I like to think I have a pretty good idea of what's going on in this solo. The six-stroke rolls at the beginning are a common Philly Joe sound, but we can't really attribute a rudiment like that to one drummer alone.  The most ..read more

For years I’ve wanted to by able to play 16th notes in my right hand with the speed and sensitivity of my favorite Brazilian drummers like Edu Ribeiro and Celso de Almeida.  But despite huge amounts of effort, I always seemed to top out around 115 bpm, at least with any kind of touch.  I could go a little faster, but then it started getting clunky. I tried playing around with the push/pull technique, but it just never clicked with me.  It felt very unnatural and I found it difficult to make it sit.  I could go a little bit faster with it, but the couple extra clicks I gain ..read more

Arismar do Espírito Santo is one of those enigmatic figures in music.  He is a prolific composer, and is very much beloved in Brazil and abroad.  Many of his compositions are already modern day standards, and I think most would agreed that it's fair to label him a living legend. Beyond his incredible writing, Arismar plays most instruments to a very high level.  Many other multi-instrumentalists seem to have a primary instrument, and then happen to be good at others as well.  I'm not sure that is the case for Arismar.  He seems to gig regularly on guitar, bass, piano ..read more

Samba cruzado is one of, if not the, earliest forms of playing samba on the drumset, predating the use of cymbals as pioneered by Edison Machado.  You can hear this style in the playing of drummers like Walfrido Silva and Luciano Perrone.   Cruzado, which means "crossed" in Portuguese, refers to the way one must cross their arms to play this style.  But, rather than crossing our dominant hand over our weaker hand as most of us do with our hi-hat, we cross our weaker hand over our dominant hand.  This is because the dominant hand plays telecoteco on the snare drum, whil ..read more

Now that it's been released I'm allowed to tell you that I had the great pleasure last year to spend an evening in the studio with Jacob Collier to play a very small part in recording his newest record, Djesse Vol. 4.  No drumming, I'm afraid, but I do appear on two tracks singing backing vocals and doing hand claps.  The vocal track features rhythms from all over the world segued seamlessly from one to the next, as seen in the very cool video at the link below. Unfortunately, embedding was disabled, but you can still check it out on YouTube:  https://youtu.be/f7oGC2mdlkQ?si=7q ..read more

This is one of the first Chick Corea tunes I ever heard.  As a clueless 18-year-old jazz studies major I was told I should check out Chick Corea.  So, I went out and got Verve Jazz Masters 3 - Chick Corea, a greatest hits collection featuring "You're Everything", "Spain", and a number of other Chick classics.  I remember really loving "Lenore", but it wasn't until many years later that I realized how hip the drum grooves were. In the A section Steve Gadd plays open-handed, with his left hand on the hi-hat, much like he does on "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" and other signature ..read more

Right around Christmas I got a message from the prolific drum book author, Joel Rothman, introducing himself and asking if I'd like to check out some of his books.  I was already familiar with some of Joel's work, and had used his book Basic Drumming back when I first started teaching as a good catch-all book that would cover a lot of topics and last beginner students for a couple of years.  What I didn't know, however, was that not only has Joel been living in London for the last 40 years, but he lives a mere 15 minutes from me.   So, a few weeks ago, Joel invited me to his hom ..read more

Enéas Costa is a real mystery as best as I can tell.  His discography is impressive, having recorded with the likes of Gal Costa, Chico Buarque, Edu Lobo, and Caetano Veloso. But I've never been able to find out much else about him; where he is/was from, whether he's still alive, nothing.  The only thing I've ever found is one picture which supposedly shows him playing with the great saxophonist J.T. Mereilles, and bassist Luizão Maia, who played with Elis Regina for many years.     But we can certainly hear a lot of him, because his name appears on many an album credit.&nb ..read more

I was recently turned on to this recording featuring a young Art Blakey playing with Charlie Parker.  This is an era of Blakey I've not been too familiar with until now.  I know he played in fellow Pittsburgher, Billy Eckstine's band and with Fletcher Henderson in the big band era, and did some work with Dizzy Gillespie.  Bit still, when I think of Blakey I (like most people, probably) tend think of the Jazz Messengers, of driving shuffles, and of hard bop leaders like Hank Mobley, Jimmy Smith, and Lee Morgan.  So I find it really interesting to hear him playing in this muc ..read more