To the best of my knowledge there's not a whole lot of literature out there for unaccompanied solo drum set. Admittedly I've never looked that hard as I've not often had the need for it, but prior to lockdown I had a student whose school music teacher was often asking to hear unaccompanied solos. So we did Max Roach's "The Drum Also Waltzes", some variations on Nate Smith's "Pocket Change", and she wrote some material of her own. And then I quickly started to run out of suggestions, or at least suggestions that I thought were cool enough to be worth spending our lesson time on.
Enter Kenny Washington. I know the term "musical drummer" gets thrown around far too much these days, but I'm going to use it anyway here to refer to Kenny. Even when he is demoing a drum set as he is in the video below, Kenny is always making music, as opposed to simply ramming notes. There's always a clear shape, structure, and purpose to his playing, which I really appreciate and enjoy. The end result is that those drum demos end up sounding very much like an unaccompanied drum solo that might actually be worth performing, so I've taken the liberty of transcribing it.
Now, for over six years, That Drum Blog has been full of free content for everyone to enjoy and learn from, and that's not going to change. But, in addition to all of the free content that I will continue to provide, I will also be posting some larger, more detailed projects for you to purchase, this Kenny Washington solo being one of them.
In the coming days there will be payment links set up for automated instant downloads, but until I get all that infrastructure in place we'll have to do it the old-fashioned way. If you'd like a PDF of the solo below please send $3 via PayPal to adamosmianski@hotmail.com and I'll get you a copy within 24 hours.
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