It's been awhile since I've done any Max Roach, but I've got some students working on his stuff at the moment, so I've been revisiting a lot of it and transcribing it the week I assign it to them so I can check their work on the spot.
So here's "Gerkin for Perkin" from Study in Brown, the same album that brought you "Jacqui", the first ever transcription on this blog.
Keeping on with the current comping theme I figured I'd transcribe some of Max's comping to go with the Sandu solo I did a couple months ago. It was quite hard to hear some of it, but it's largely accurate. As best I can tell, Max is feathering through the whole tune. So, for the sake of clarity I left the feathering out, and only notated the bass drum notes that are part of the comping figures.
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:
Listen
Sing
Play
Write
Do steps 1-3 multiple times each before going on to step 4.
I try not to post too much stuff here on the blog that is already widely available in a million other places, but I recently put this sheet together for a student and figured there was no harm in sharing it with all of you as well. If nothing else maybe it will serve as a reminder to occasionally revisit the "basics".
I generally try to play through anything I give my students to make sure that A) the sheet is right, and B) I'm not asking them to do anything I haven't shed myself. And funnily enough, while not difficult, this sheet showed me that there are certain ride and hi-hat combinations that just never made their way into my day-to-day playing. It's not that I couldn't play them, but they just didn't feel as natural, especially when getting the left hand involved. So it's been fun putting on Max Roach's Jazz in 3/4 Time and take these for a spin.
"There's always the danger of sounding inhuman. You're not obliged to take a breath before you do something. Wind players are obliged to be human, they have periods, questions marks, exclamation marks, phrases. But there's always the danger, with people who play piano, percussion, or string instruments, of not creating phrases that speak out to people."
Here's a little variation I came up with of a classic Max Roach fill. I'm sure many of you are familiar with this one:
It pops up in many great Roach solos, including "Jacqui". Check out measures 18-19, at 0:28 on the video). Another great way of playing this, especially when the tempo won't allow you to tear through those 16th notes is to simply play it with triplets. There are a few different ways we can approach this. First, let's keep the movement from drum to drum as close to the original spot as possible, like so:
Now, let's keep the original sticking intact. We'll have to squish the ending a bit:
There are, of course, many different ways to arrange this fill, and I encourage you to come up with your own. Here's one of mine. Adding accents gives this fill some extra shape and makes it even more melodic than it already is. I changed the ending a bit as well for a bigger impact.
I never did much transcribing early on in my education and even in college. I would do the occasional few bars or maybe even a solo when something was really bugging me, but for some reason or another I never really got into it. Then a few years back, while working on a cruise ship, it was quite difficult to find a practice space, so I started transcribing. This is one of the first solos I transcribed in that period. There are some classic Max-isms in here, such as bars 18 and 19, and when you take a minute to analyze it, you realize that it's quite a clever solo with some very cool theme and variation. The album that this tune comes from, Clifford Brown and Max Roach's Study in Brown is must have.
