Gadd shuffles

I stumbled across a video the other day of Steve Gadd playing a shuffle in which he used his left foot to play the skip notes.  This frees up the the left hand to just play backbeats, and the right hand to just play quarter notes - be it on the ride or hi-hat.  As no one limb has to play those two shuffled eighth notes really close together it creates a very relaxed feel.

Now, Gadd obviously isn't this first person to do this.  Mel Lewis immediately comes to mind.

But, as you'll have heard, Mel is playing a jazz ride cymbal pattern along with that left foot.  Gadd, on the other hand, is only playing quarter notes.  Again, to my ear this just makes the pocket deeper, and gives the groove an ease that's particularly applicable to rock and blues shuffles.

In the same video Gadd also went on in the video to do a few variations.  One was simply putting the odd push on the bass drum, like so:

He also put ghost notes on the triplet partial immediately after the back beat:

This opens it up to the possibility of turning the groove into some sort of half-time shuffle.

And while I was looking for a better video of Gadd playing these examples I came across another video labelled "Gadd Shuffle".  But it ended up being something different.  In this video Gadd was using his ride hand on the snare drum to create the shuffle.

Here you are playing those two shuffled eighths with the same hand, but with the right hand as you would on a ride cymbal anyway.  Again, it just seems to relax everything a bit.  Or maybe it's just Gadd being Gadd.

Anyway, the curmudgeon in me kind of wants to say "just work more on your left hand", which we all should do, but actually these are nice to have the your back pocket.  Stick them in your bag alongside the shuffles according to Keith Carlock.

Groove Transcription - Damion Reed, "F.T.B."

Here's another one from the notebook I mentioned in the last post.  This is Damion Reid's playing on "F.T.B." from Robert Glasper's debut album In My Element.

 

The main shape of the groove looks like this:

 

He plays what is written above almost every time.

 

There are points throughout, however, where Reid gets a little chattier with some extra ghost notes.  What's written below is not necessarily exactly what he plays, but rather just shows where he places some of the ghost notes some of the time, so it's worth experimenting with different combinations.

 

 

Groove Transcription - Celso de Almeida, samba cruzado

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, while the weaker hand mimics the surdos on the toms.

I've had a more in-depth post on samba cruzado in the draft folder for ages, and I really am hoping to get to it soon, but in the meantime, I've been doing a lot of playing along to this loop I created of Celso de Almeida playing a more modern style of samba cruzado from his self-titled 2014 album.

Here Celso plays a steady stream of 16th notes on the snare drum in his right hand, and uses accents to present a typical bossa nova pattern:

 

In his left hand, Celso plays the toms to mimic surdos, including a third surdo-like turn of phrase:

And with his feet, he plays what is probably the most common bass drum/hi-hat combination:

 

 

Here it is all together, with a loop of Celso playing it to help capture the feel:

 

Groove Transcription - Steve Gadd, "Lenore"

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 grooves of his.

A few times later in the tune he drops his left hand down to the snare on the & of 3, which makes a nice variation.

Now, even the most cursory of searches will show you that I'm not the first person to transcribe or write about this groove, not by a long shot.  But most people seem to focus solely on that first part and fail to talk about how super hip the groove is in the next section.  It's pseudo-linear, with hard-driving accents on the pulse.

Towards the end there's considerably more improvising, but as it builds in density we hear something more like this.

Groove Transcription - Otis "Candy" Finch, "Let 'em Roll"

Check out this very cool shuffle played by Otis Finch.  It comes from the title track of a Big John Patton record called Let 'em Roll, which, in addition to Otis and Big John features half of the Street of Dreams band with Grant Green and Bobby Hutcherson.

If you remember from the Keith Carlock shuffle videos, he explains that the most important notes to make a shuffle feel right  are the & of 1, 2, and the & of 2.  Here Otis plays those three notes on the hi-hat, snare, and bass drum respectively and moves the constant swinging 8th notes that are often on the snare up to the ride cymbal.

It's a very cool groove, and makes a great shuffle play-along track even if you don't feel like playing Otis' exact orchestration.

Groove Transcription - Ivan 'Mamão' Conti, "Pulando Corda"

One of the big name Brazilian drummers I have yet to cover on this blog is Ivan "Mamão" Conti, from Azymuth.  Mamão and Azymuth are probably best known for the tune "Partido Alto" which is now a jazz fusion standard and one of the first tunes to use the partido alto rhythm in the modernized drumset orchestration that can be heard on the track.

Conti phrases and orchestrates Brazilian rhythms in ways different to many of the other Brazilian drummers both old and new that  we've looked at on the blog.  I find that his playing is focused less on chops, and is not as busy as some other players.  Part of this could be due to the fact that Azymuth don’t often play at extremely fast tempos, opting instead for more mid-tempo grooves.  Also, despite the slower tempos I tend to hear less of the steady 16th note time keeping in favor of a more syncopated approach, which is exactly what we’re looking at today.

This transcription comes from the tune “Pulando Corda” on Azymuth's latest release which came out last year on the Jazz is Dead label.

As I mentioned earlier, Mamão foregoes the constant right hand 16th notes, and instead plays his own variation of telecoteco.  The left hand then supports the right hand rhythm with occasional accents at various points in the bar.  We’ve seen a somewhat similar approach by Edison Machado.

The phrases below were transcribed directly from the recording, and as you’ll see the second bar of the phrase rarely changes.  But like most samba influenced music, these rhythms are directional meaning you can mix and match any of the first bars with any of the second bars as long as you stay on the right side of the rhythm.

Equally, you could change the direction by playing any of the second bars followed by any of the first bars.

Both of the above approaches are worth experimenting with, and you could even revisit this post and try a different telecoteco pattern in your right hand while playing around with different rhythmic placements of the left hand.

Samba Invertido, aka "A batida do 'Tamanduá'" ("The 'Tamanduá' beat")

This is a very cool groove that I've been enjoying for many years and have been meaning to write about for almost as long.  I'm pretty sure it was developed by Hamilton de Holanda.

I first heard it in 2007 when I went to Brazil and picked up the first album by de Holanda's now famous quintet.  The album is called Brasilianos, and the groove came up in the song "Pra Sempre".  It only appears for a few bars at a time at the end of the first A section.  You'll find it  in the melody at 0:16 and 0:58, and many more times throughout the solos and out head.  Marcio Bahia is on drums.

Two years later, in 2009, de Holanda's quintet released a new album, called Brasilianos 2, and the same rhythm was on a very beautiful, and very funky tune called "Tamanduá".  Within the first few bars I recognized it as "that cool groove from 'Pra Sempre'".  Except this time an entire piece had been composed around it.  Again, Marcio Bahia is on drums, and he includes a few different variations on the groove.

Bahia orchestrates it a few different ways in this live version as well.

So what's going on here?  The answer is actually right in front of us, though cleverly hidden.  It didn't jump out to me until I saw Hamilton de Holanda's own chart for "Tamanduá".  Beneath the title the style marking said "Samba Invertido", which translates "inverted samba", and it smacked me in the face.

If you keep up with my regular postings on samba and Brazilian music, you might already know that a common telecoteco rhythm looks like this:

This rhythm is directional, meaning that depending on the composition it could be played as you see it above, or the two bars can be swapped so the cycle starts on beat one of the second bar.

But, if we start on beat two of the second bar (or "invert" it), we end up with this:

Which just so happens to be exactly what is being played in the examples above.  "Tamanduá" adds an additional layer of disorientation by starting on a pick up note, like so:

Edu Ribeiro has played this groove a few times as well, putting his own subtle spin on it.  The first was in 2011 when, Jota P., a sax/flute player from Hermeto Pascoal's band released a self-titled solo album.  The track "Que Fase!" features the groove.

And finally, in 2019, Hamilton de Holanda released a record with a new quartet featuring guitarist Daniel Santiago from his quintet, Thiago Espírito Santo on bass (son of Arismar do Espírito Santo, and occasional sub in the HH quintet), and Edu Ribeiro on drums.  The album, Harmonize, is one of de Holanda's finest in my opinion, and features a new rendition of "Tamanduá".

This groove is quite a specific thing, so I wouldn't recommend dropping it willy-nilly into your next bossa gig.  But it presents it's own challenges that are a lot of fun to work though and might give you some new creative ideas.

Solo Transcription - Gaylord Birch, "Yes We Can Can" live

Following on from the first Gaylord Birch post the other day, here is a live version of the same tune where he gets more of a feature.  This is my kind of drum solo.  Just a kick-ass groove that everyone can still dance to with some bells and whistles thrown in for pizzazz.  I love the way that old kit shakes as he plays the living crap out of it, and that backhanded crash at 3:22 gets me every time.

Solo starts around 3:02, but you should just listen to the whole thing

Transcription - Gaylord Birch, "Yes We Can Can"

This one has been in the drafts folder for a loooong time.

I remember the girl across the street from me growing up and her parents were big fans of the Pointer Sisters.  Then a few years ago I was reminded of them when this tune came on the radio very late one night as I was driving home from a gig.  I checked out the record the next day, read up on the drummer, Gaylord Birch, who I wasn't really familiar with, and made a note to transcribe that cool breakdown.

Fast forward a few years and my buddy from college, Steve Bidwell, posted about Gaylord on his blog, which reminded my that I had never finished this post.  Long story short, here we are.  Gaylord is killer, there's a cool transcription below, and you should also check out Steve's blog.

Transcription starts around 3:38

Groove Transcription - Kenna, "New Sacred Cow"

One of the few pluses of this period of zero gigs is that fact that with no other music to prepare I have reverted to just playing any old random thing for fun, and reaching deep in the bag for different material.  So, the other day when an old pop record that I used to listen to in college came to mind, I gave the whole record a spin, transcribed the grooves from a few of the tunes, and started playing along with them.  The record is Kenna's New Sacred Cow.  It's not the deepest record in the world, but it's nostalgic for me, and actually has some pretty cool grooves on it.  Also, I like working on grooves that weren't necessarily written from a drumset perspective as it forces you to think and play in a different way.  So here are three of grooves, should you feel so inclined.

hellbent was one of the singles from the record and, besides having an interesting groove that is reminiscent of a half-time shuffle, it has a cool video to go with it (though it doesn't seem to be on YouTube, unfortunately)

vexed and glorious has some nice counterpoint between the tambourine (notated as a cymbal here) and the rest of the kit.  If you play or sing them separately they really feel like two parts that would be played be different people.  But when you stick it all together it feels nice and is a lot of fun to play.

And finally, war in me.  The drums don't come in until at least halfway through the tune, but again, it's a groove written most likely at a desk rather than behind a kit, which gives it an unnatural feel that is nonetheless very enjoyable to play.

Mel Lewis Latin Groove

Here is a latin groove I've heard Mel Lewis play a few times.  This is very much a jazz-latin groove as it doesn't really stick to deep rooted practices of any particular rhythmic tradition.  And that's OK.  I love to nerd out on said rules and find one what makes various types of music tick, but that doesn't mean grooves like the one below are any less valid.  If anything, it's more true to the jazz tradition.  Jazz has always been a music of fusions; melding elements from various cultures to create something new.

Here Mel is playing your standard ride cymbal and hi-hat pattern with straight 8th notes.  The rim and tom voicings remind of an agogo pattern that you'd hear in old Brazilian recordings of singers like Carmen Miranda.  Whatever it is, or isn't, it's a cool and versatile groove worth checking out.

Groove Transcription - Roni Size, "New Forms"

Drum 'n' Bass, as far as I can remember, never got really big in the States.  In high school, I remember some kids listening to techno and going to raves.  Some of these kids were my friends, and I also recall being ridiculed when I told them the only electronic music I could really get into was drum 'n' bass. More than 20 years later, I now teach a class in the history of EDM for West Virginia University, so a couple years ago I spent an entire summer reading about and listening to just about every style of EDM there is.  And while I can appreciate a lot of it more now, I'd still have to say that drum 'n' bass is some of the hippest and most listenable of those styles.  It certainly has the coolest drumming.

One of the most recognizable names in drum 'n' bass is Roni Size.  His album New Forms is a seminal work of the d'n'b canon.  In 1997 it won the Mercury Prize here in the UK, beating out Radiohead's OK Computer.  Below is the title track to the album.  In some ways it's very easy.  It's similar to that rock groove that every non-drummer can somehow kind of play.  But on the other hand, it's very fast, very intricate, and requires a lot of control.

I've written out the main groove that repeats throughout the song, but the devil is in the detail.  If you listen closely to the whole thing, you notice that each time around there are a few notes added here and there, giving it just a little bit more lift and energy each time.  In a weird way it reminds me of how some of the best jazz drummers build the density of their playing so gradually you almost don't notice it happening.  Anyway, here it is.  Drop me a line if you'd like a PDF.

Jeff "Tain" Watts Songo Grooves and Fills

For some reason this one has been in the drafts folder for ages, so I'm excited to finally get it out.  I came across this video a few years ago of Tain playing with an unnamed band at the San Jose Jazz Fest in 2014.  I was initially taken by the way he used the cowbell, and by the way he put the last note of the tumbao on the tom or floor tom instead of the bass drum, so I decided to dig into it.

 

It's funny when we first see/hear certain things, especially at brighter tempos, it seems like there is so much going on, but when you look a little deeper at this video you'll notice that Tain isn't actually playing that many different things rhythmically.  It's often the same, or very similar, stickings orchestrated differently around the drums (sort of like in the Eric Harland transcription we looked at way back when).

And, speaking of what he's playing, it's basically a 3-2 Songo.  This may not immediately jump out at you as a Songo, because Songo is so often played in 2-3.  So much so that 2-3 Songo is often simply taught as the single way to play Songo.  A quick Google search turns up a plethora of images that look like this:

Now, I'm not suggesting that there is anything wrong with this.  This is a perfectly acceptable way to play a Songo.  It's just that I get the feeling that a lot of drummers don't appreciate the fact that Songo isn't a pattern or sticking, but a style, to which there is much more than this one way of playing that is often shown to be the "correct" way.

Check out where the clave fits in the pattern above:

This can just as easily be played in 3-2:

And of course this is, by far, not the only sticking and/or orchestration that we can employ, as we can see in the Tain video.

There are plenty of hits in this tunes, so rather than transcribe the whole video and end up with a lot of superfluous material, I decided to grab the sections of groove that could easily be applied elsewhere, as well as some fills to go along with them.  You'll have to use your ears and some common sense, but you could likely take a lot of these grooves and mix and match them with the fills at various points to come up with some nice ideas of your own.

Freedom Through Discipline

Last night I had the pleasure of catching up with an old friend of mine from WVU, Mike Dawson.  You may know Mike from his Instagram page and/or YouTube channel that is chock full of excellent content, or from the podcast he hosts with Mike Johnston called the “Mike and Mike Podcast”.

Mike was in London for the first time, giving a masterclass on creative practice skills.  In it he touched on an idea that some of our teachers at WVU showed us, and something I have mentioned here on the blog before: forcibly limiting yourself in various ways in order to foster creativity.  I always explain to my students that these exercises help develop the control to play exactly what we want to play, when we want to play it, rather than letting parts of ourselves go on autopilot, or work by muscle memory.  Mike described this in three simple words: Freedom Through Discipline.  By disciplining ourselves to only play certain things, or not play certain things, we are developing the control to be completely free with our creativity and improvisation.  Mike employs this idea in his own way, so I’ll leave you to check out his work yourselves, and rather than attempting to give you a recap of last night I’d like to share with you one of my own ways of putting this concept into practice.

Mike does a lot of playing with ambient loops that often don’t imply any specific time or feel.  Rather, it’s up him to see where his creativity takes him with each sound.  So today I gave this idea a try.  I pulled up a random template in Ableton and composed a beat over it.  At the time I just played, and I didn’t write anything down, but for the sake of this post I jotted it out when I was finished.

Since the loop had a decidedly acid house sort of feel I decided to imagine my playing as a drum machine.  The 4-bar groove repeats exactly the same, ad nauseam.  I could “mute” one or more channels, or fade channels in and out; the channels being the voices of the kit.  Therefore, the only rules I imposed on myself were this:

1. When playing the groove, I MUST play the groove, and only the groove, note for note; no extra notes or different voices, and no leaving out notes unintentionally.

2. To improvise I can only change the volume of each voice, or take one or more voices out completely

This sounds a lot easier than it turned out to be.  For one, I thought of the bass drum line as a short AABA form, so it was important to stick only to those two rhythms.  To not add extra notes just because I felt like it, or because I lost my focus was surprisingly difficult for the first couple minutes.  Taking out the snare had its share of difficulties as well.  While it seemed easy enough at first I noticed that my left hand and right foot weren’t alway perfectly aligned.  This was another thing that Mike touched on in the masterclass; use this disciplined practice time to highlight problems in your playing and iron them out.

Lastly I tried full mutes of the entire groove, attempting to stop on a dime in a specific spot in the phrase, and coming back in in a particular spot.  To come back in, say, on the & of beat 2, with full confidence, in perfect time, and without adding or leaving out any notes is much harder than it sounds.

I encourage you to find your own loops, and write your own parts, but if you’d like to start by trying mine, the notation and loop are below.

Transcription - Carter McLean Bovid Drum Heads Demo

Here's a little transcription I did just for the sake of transcribing something on my day off yesterday.

If you nerd out on enough drumming videos on YouTube you may have come across Carter McLean.  Besides playing with Charlie Hunter and the Lion King on Broadway, Carter puts out some great YouTube content.  His videos are very popular amongst his viewers, but he doesn't have nearly as many subscribers as his playing warrants.

Carter's videos are simple and to the point.  There's no superfluous nonsense, such as unneccessary theme music, and titles like "Are YOU making THIS drumming mistake that will RUIN YOUR LIFE?!", or "Do these THREE things to get the gig with Beyoncé."  Most of them are just videos of him playing along to recordings or demoing new gear (of which he seems to find a lot of cool niche stuff).

I stumbled across this video yesterday of Carter trying out some Bovid heads, which appear to be hand constructed animal skins heads, made in the same fashion as hand drum or frame drum heads.  The video is supposed to be about the heads, but Carter plays some really nice stuff.  So, on a lazy Saturday afternoon I figured I'd jot a bit of it down.  I often like to transcribe things like this that have no immediate context to a piece of music.  I feel like it opens up the possibilities for personal application a bit more.

Anyway, here's a few bars of Carter playing, starting around 4:08 in the video below.

Kiko Freitas-style samba

It's been about 12 years since a Brazilian friend of mine first introduced me to the drumming of Kiko Freitas.  Recently I finally got to see him play live with Brazilian legend João Bosco.  Kiko was one of the first Brazilian drummers I was exposed to when started really digging in to this music.  He’s one of those drummers who sounds exactly like their records when playing live which was hugely satisfying.

I’ve written about Kiko’s playing before on this blog, and mentioned him in a couple of my Modern Drummer articles from a few years back.  In the MD article I mentioned a signature groove of his whereby he plays this rhythm on every beat in his left hand.

This underlying rhythm is one of the driving forces behind samba.  In his right hand he then plays 8th notes, so we're left with this:

By sticking it in this way we get a steady stream of really swinging 16th notes, but our right hand is free to do a little bit more.  The most basic approach would be to move between the ride and snare, like so:

It’s also quite nice to go to the floor tom to emulate a surdo.

These grooves are particularly useful when playing a fast samba where most of us mortals can’t play that crazy-fast right hand thing that guys like Kiko and Edu Ribeiro can do.

I really enjoyed seeing Kiko put this groove to use with João Bosco in London a couple weeks back.  And at the concert he took this idea to another level.  He still had the 1ea rhythm in his left hand, but he then proceeded to play a telecoteco pattern on his ride cymbal, which was absolutely killer.

I was able to find a video of Kiko playing this groove on YouTube.  This particular pattern start around 1:49.

As with any groove there's a lot more to it than is notated.  You'll have to listen and play along to properly imitate the inflection and swing.

Try any or all of the ideas above with some of these rhythms in your feet.

And also remember that there’s always the “Jazz Samba Builder” that you can pull some ideas from as well.