This is one of the most overlooked elements of playing samba, though I'm sure the same thing happens in any style of music. When learning a new style or rhythmic tradition, most drummers work out how to play grooves, which is what most book and resources focus on. But when it comes time to play a fill, they typically resort to the things they already know, leaving seven bars of decent sounding samba, followed by a bar of jazz or rock fills. These fills often interrupt the directional rhythm of the groove, in this case telecoteco, and therefore the overall flow. The fills are as idiomatically important as the groove itself because, really, they still ARE the groove. So, as with anything else, we must listen, listen, listen, transcribe, transcribe, transcribe.
Here is a page of some fills by two well-known and respected samba drummers who have been mentioned on this blog before, the late, great Camilo Mariano, and Cuca Teixeira. These all come from the same Maria Rita album that this repique de anel transcription came from, so this might have to become a little series of material from different albums.
These fills are all from phrase endings that have no ensemble hits that are specific that the tune, so these fills should be pretty versatile. Note how the groove in most cases, retains the structure of the telecoteco pattern or, at the very least, contains a lot of "e's" and "a's". The double bar line of each example marks the phrase ending as the fills often carry over into the first bar or two of the next phrase.
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