The Brush Book Joe Morello Never Wrote

We can complain about algorithms all we want, but they often find interesting things for us.  Because of the videos in the last post about Mel Brown playing through Brush Artistry YouTube recommended to me a series of videos by Jon Hazilla, who I'm not familiar with, but apparently teaches at Berklee.

Jon studied with Joe Morello, and later developed his own approach to Master Studies using brushes to develop facility with lateral strokes.

I've been revisiting Master Studies lately myself (with sticks, that is), so I think I'll be giving this a try soon.

Mel Brown demonstrating Philly Joe's "Brush Artistry"

In a recent excursion down the YouTube rabbit hole I came across a YouTube playlist of Portland drumming legend Mel Brown demonstrating each of the patterns in Philly Joe's venerable book Brush Artistry.  These are short, sweet, and to the point if you have any doubts about how the material in the book should be executed.

As the book is many years out of print, I can't see how there'd be much harm in sharing the fact that a scanned copy of it can be found here.  We certainly wouldn't want it to be lost to time.

Coincidentally, Mel was recently interviewed by Christian McBride on NPR's Jazz Night in America.  Check it out below to find out more about Mel and hear him play with his organ group.

Carmen Intorre solo transcription

I first heard Carmen Intorre play in 2012 at Ronnie Scott's with Pat Martino.  The whole band were crushing that evening.  I had long been wanting to do an organ trio record myself, and that show put the spark under my ass to finally do it.  I was so inspired by it that I even called Pat Bianchi to do the record, which you can check out in the menu on the right.

Anyway, with the recent passing Pat Martino I've been revisiting a bunch of his records, and in listening to his final record, "Formidable", got to thinking again about that evening at Ronnie's and the great teamwork of Bianchi and Intorre.

I was reminded of this video I saw back in 2014 when looking for a studio to do my record.  It's a promo video for guitarist Alessandro Florio, and features a very nicely constructed solo by Carmen.  I was always struck by how relaxed Carmen was and how naturally he made his way around the kit and flowed from one idea to the other.