Comping with Melodies

There is plenty of great resource material out there for learn how to comp in straight ahead jazz styles, with more coming out all the time.  But turning that material from an exercise on a page into real music can sometimes be a difficult leap.  One of my favorite ways of dealing with it is to transcribe the comping of great jazz musicians.  The obvious choice would be drummers like Art Blakey, Philly Joe Jones (here's another), and Charlie Smith.  But you can also transcribe the comping of other rhythm section players, like this example of Bill Charlap.

 

But another way is to use actual melodies to your advantage.  Bebop and instrumental tunes work best for this, as vocal tunes and Great American Songbook repertoire tends to be too open to interpretation for this particular application.  Transcribe (or use a lead sheet) the heads of popular jazz standards.  Just the rhythm of the melody is fine - there's no need to worry about the pitches at this point - then play those figures on the drums.

 

Start by reading the resulting rhythms on the snare.  Then add the bass drum.  If you want to take it farther you could add the hi-hat, tom orchestrations, etc.  But if you listen to the examples linked above, the majority of straight ahead comping relies primarily on the snare and bass.  I like to isolate excerpts that I feel are most applicable and come up with various different orchestrations.

 

Here's an example using Charles Mingus' tune, "Moanin'".  At the top of the sheet is the full melody rhythm.  Below that I've taken individual phrases and written out four potential orchestrations for each.  These are, of course, just a few potential options, and you should come up with some of your own.  Mine lean a bit heavier on the snare than the bass drum, and don't use too many bass drum doubles, but again, you can do anything you like with it.

 

 

 

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.

Solo Transcription - Max Roach, "Sandu"

I've been revisiting Max Roach lately with some of my students, four of whom are working on this particular solo.  None of them have written it down yet.  Rather, we've been learning it by ear in the lesson, going phrase by phrase and playing it on the kit.  Admittedly, it's been awhile since I've transcribed this way myself, but I think it's the superior approach, and one that we should all try to do more often; as opposed to jotting down a bar at a time as we listen to it at 50% speed on a laptop and then trying to learn it like a percussion ensemble piece.

With this approach the students got a better overall feel of the big picture of phrasing and language, and what makes it tick.  Even if they're not playing every note exactly as Max did, the essence of the solo gets into their own vocabulary more quickly and naturally.

I also found that from listening to it so much with them and working through orchestrations and stickings, that when it came time to write it down I could put about 75% of it to paper without even listening to the track.

So, while I may be handing you the notes for this particular solo, I would still consider trying to transcribe by ear behind the kit on this, or another solo.  An old friend of mine who taught me a lot about this music always said:

1. Listen
2. Sing
3. Play
4. Write

Do steps 1-3 multiple times each before going on to step 4.

 

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.

 

 

Solo Transcription - Kenny Washington, "Where Have You Been?"

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.

 

 

Solo Transcription - Philly Joe Jones, "Two Bass Hit"

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 notable and recognizable phrase that is uniquely Philly Joe is the three beat, RLL RLR RLL triplet phrase, as well as the single stroke R LRL that often precedes it.  It appears in measures 3, 11, and the entire last line.  I did a whole post on this with some exercises for developing it a few years ago.

 

I'm not entirely sure about the stickings in measures 7-10, but that's my best guess based on other things I've heard and videos I've seen.

Slide Technique

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 gained were at the expensive of good swing and finesse.  Besides, I’d always been a bit of a traditionalist and wary of such extended techniques.  I remember being in a master class with Kenny Washington where he said something to the effect of, “I don’t mess with all this push/pull or any of that bullshit.”  But on the other hand, I thought, if it gets me to where I want to go sonically, then who cares?

So, a few months back I started putting in some serious effort to what most people call the “slide technique”.  There seems to be a handful of different approaches to it, but they all work in essentially the same fashion.  Rather than bouncing the stick, or push and pulling, it’s swept from side to side, so that each motion that would traditionally yield one sound gets us two.

I asked Kiko Freitas about it in a lesson shortly before I started working on it in earnest, and he pointed out that it comes from brush technique.  Marcio Bahia's style of playing with brushes is a perfect example.  

But, as I started to get more comfortable with this technique I realized that for me, even more so than brushes, it feels very similar to playing a shaker.  And to my ear that vibe very much comes out in the sound as well, to the point where I’ve been using it even at slower tempos that I would be able to play normally because it creates that relaxed feel so indicative of Brazilian music.

One thing to note that can be either a drawback or a bonus, depending on who you are, is that it can be difficult to get a big sound out of this technique.  For me it’s great because it naturally has that very light sound that I’m after.  But, If you’re a hip hop or metal drummer looking for speed AND power then this may not be for you.

Let’s take a look at this technique in action.  It’s popped up on the blog once or twice before.  The video below appeared in this post from 2018, which features an unknown drummer who might be Cesar Machado.  His technique is more of a twisting motion, which seems to me would hurt after awhile, but clearly works for some.  The original video is no longer on YouTube, but you can see it here.

 

This technique also appeared last week in the Arismar do Espirito Santos video.  Like in the video above, Arismar uses a bit more of a twisting motion.  However, he places his index finger over the stick on the same side as the thumb.  This helps him get more power.  For me, though, I found this made it much more difficult to get into and out of the slide, so I’ve avoided it.

There are three other drummers out there today who use some variation of this technique and, not too surprisingly, they’re all Brazilian.

Ramon Montagner who plays one handed rhythms that seem to defy the laws of physics also uses the slide technique in addition to all of the crazy contortionist push/pull motions he’s capable of.  Here’s a slow-mo of his motion:

Douglas Alonso plays a sort of variation on the slide technique.  In the video below, you’ll notice that his style is based on the motions of pandeiro playing and is more complex than the simple back and forth motion.  He starts discussing it around 3:20, and is worth a watch even if you don't speak Portuguese.  But if you want to jump straight to the meat and potatoes, it's at 7:45.

The most recent person I’ve discovered using this technique to great effect is Diego Zangado.  His version seems to be the most straightforward and what I looked to the most when trying to put this together.

So, I tend to think of it a bit like full strokes in German grip, but your thumb is on top like French grip.  That way what would be each down stroke and up stroke you achieve a note with a glancing blow.  You'll have to let your hand relax at the wrist a bit so that the stick isn't moving in a perfectly straight line.  It takes a little tweaking to really feel it and find the sweet spot.

And I tend to lead with the back of my hand, at least when playing samba, so that the downbeats and "&s" move away from me, and the "e" and "a" move towards me.  This is 1. to more closely mimic the motion of a shaker, and 2. because the strokes coming towards you will almost always have a little more weight to them.  This puts a slight emphasis on the "e" and "a", which is exactly what we want when playing samba.

All that said, I do practice it in both directions, so it's more applicable to other styles.

 

Feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions about this technique.

Dig This - Arismar do Espírito Santo on drums

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, and drums, and many of his albums are multi-tracked with him playing every instrument.

About a year ago he released a series of videos on his YouTube channel in which he talks about and plays many of his instruments.  My Portuguese isn't great, and he tends to speak fairly quickly and colloquially, but still, the musical content is fantastic.  Even if you don't speak a word of Portuguese, the playing alone makes it worth the watch.  His style is incredibly creative, while being steeped in tradition.

Below are the videos on drumset and percussion, but as a rhythm section player the others are certainly worth a watch as well.