Kenny Washington Inverted Roll

Here's a quick little phrase that I've been playing for years, but for some reason never thought to share with you wonderful people.  It's an idea I got from Kenny Washington that is built on an inverted roll.

An inverted roll is simply a roll in which the first note of each double stroke is on the "&", rather than the downbeat.  So, instead of: RRLL RRLL....  you'd play RLLR RLLR

Kenny, however, leaves off that single note on the downbeat and simply starts straight in with the double strokes on the & of 1, which gives the whole thing a nice kick.  It's worth trying it in different parts of the bar, as well as different parts of the phrase, though it works particularly well on the & of 1, and the & of 2.

I'm toying with the idea of tying the blog into YouTube a little bit more, so there is a video down below demonstrating this idea.

Tony Williams-Style Flam Drags

Calling these "Tony Williams-Style Flam Drags" is potentially a bit unfair.  After all, Tony isn't the first or only person to play flam drags on the kit.  Actually, the ideas below seems to be quite in vogue at the moment. But Tony probably is one of the earlier players to split them around the kit in this fashion.  I have some students digging deep into Tony at the moment, and I've also been working on some transcriptions for a scholarly article being written at the University of Oregon, and have seen these flam drags pop up quite a few times.

Your basic flam drag, if you aren't already familiar, is a three-note phrase.  A flam, followed by a double stroke, and then a tap with alternating sticking, which we can group as triplets, or 8th/16th notes.

Another common way to play flam drags is to keep the rhythm the same, but change the sticking to that of a Swiss Army Triple.  RRL or LLR.  Even though the rhythm is exactly the same, the sticking gives it a different character.  This one, in particular, sits very nicely on the kit and is a lot of fun to play.

And if we change the sticking one more time, as well as the accent pattern, we get another interesting phrase that I've heard Tony do quite a bit.  This one is also quite common in the drum corp scene, and I believe they gave it one of those goofy names, but I don't recall what it is off the top of my head.

As always, these are just the stock versions of this rudiment and it's sticking variations.  Get creative and spend some time voicing it around the kit and in different parts of the bar.

Ratamacues Around the Drums

Time to put those rudiments back to work.  Many of the jazz greats used/use the ratamacue as a fill around the kit, so let's do a bit of it ourselves.

Philly Joe Jones comes to mind in particular when I think of this:

And I've heard Jeff Hamilton turn this around and come up the drums, playing the grace notes on the bass drum, like so:

Philly Joe and Jeff Hamilton generally play both of these in a closed interpretation, meaning they are playing a true ruff which comes just before the primary note, not in any specific time.  But as we've discussed before on the blog, these rudiments can also be played with an open interpretation wherein the grace notes become measured, and are played on the note prior to the primary note.  So this....

....becomes this:

Putting this open interpretation on the kit gives us something similar, but with a different vibe to it.

If we take this one step further we may be pushing the boundaries of what a ratamacue truly is, as it's now closer to being a double paradiddle, but we can get a whole series of new ideas nonetheless by playing the grace notes (which sort of cease to be grace notes) on the two 8th notes prior to the primary note as opposed to the two 16th notes before it.  I recently saw Edu Ribeiro playing an idea like this, and brighter tempos it sounds very cool.

And finally, with everything now being evenly spaced it frees us up to move the idea more freely throughout the bar.

Here is everything above neatly organized into one sheet.  Drop me an e-mail if you'd like a PDF.

Quick Lick - Jeff Hamilton

In an effort to start posting more regularly again I thought I'd do a couple of short posts to get myself back in the habit of signing in to Blogger.

Awhile back I was considering buying a riveted china cymbal for that big band sort of vibe.  I eventually decided against it (at least for now), but I did come across some videos of Jeff Hamilton demoing one of them.  At the end of one of the videos Jeff plays a very nice little one-bar fill.  It's nothing difficult, but it sits under the hands really nicely and is fun to play.  So I thought I'd jot it down for you in case anyone was interested in a new fill to throw into their bag.

Start around 0:32 for the fill

Permutations of a Bill Stewart fill

If you're a Bill Stewart fan then you almost certainly recognize this lick...

It pops up quite a lot in Bill's playing.  The placement of the bass drum seems to change from time to time.  Maybe it's a tempo thing or maybe just a personal choice.  Either way it's worth trying all three versions.

I was playing around with this phrase recently and started moving it around the bar, and inverting it, ending up with ideas like this....

Just by shifting everything by an 8th note we can get three very different feeling phrases.  Place the bass drum in all three places for each permutation and all of a sudden we've got 9 different phrases to play around with.

By playing 16th notes instead of triplets we can take this one step farther....

We now have a three beat phrase, which works well in 3/4, or perhaps even more so, as a hemiola idea that moves over the bar line.

Send me an e-mail if you'd like a PDF page of all the combinations.

Quick Lick(s) - Kiko Freitas

Another one of Brazil's finest these days is Kiko Freitas.  For the last 15 years he has been the drummer for Brazilian legend João Bosco.  Along with two other members of Bosco's rhythm section, guitarist, Nelson Faria, and bassist Ney Conceição, they form their own group called, oddly enough, Nosso Trio, which is Portuguese for "Our Trio".

We all have our bag of tricks that we like to reach into, and recently one of Kiko's really started jumping out at me.  As soon as I heard it once I began hearing it everywhere.  It's a very cool lick which he seems to go to a lot.  Apparently Freitas spent some time in LA studying with Dave Weckl, and if that is indeed true, you can certainly hear it in these licks.  It has an undeniable fusion vibe to it, but with Kiko's inherent Brazilian feel.

There seems to be a formula to this lick that he follows pretty closely.  The first part is ghost notes in the left hand - usually on the hi-hat and sometimes on the snare - combined with right hand accents around the kit for the first beat and a half to two beats.  Generally these accents fall on the e's and a's which is what really accentuates the Brazilian feel of it.  This is followed by some sort of linear foot-hand-hand combination.

Here are a couple of different orchestrations:

As you're experimenting with these it's important to note that the contrast between the accented and unaccented notes is pretty high.  The unaccented notes are almost to ghost note status.

In longer phrases, Freitas often likes to added a dotted eighth note figure, usually on a short, trashy cymbal sound like a stack or a china, though occasionally he plays this with the bass and floor tom as in the last of these three examples.  Note that the first bar of each of these follows the exact same formula as above, followed by the dotted eighth figure in the second bar.

Quick Lick - Edu Ribeiro

As I was doing my nightly gawking on YouTube this little lick happened to catch my ear, and I thought it would be a nice addition to any player's jazz vocabulary.  For the first two bars I've split the hands into two lines: right hand on top moving in circles with a pulse on each beat, and left hand on the bottom.

Edu Ribeiro is one of the baddest Brazilian cats out there; actually he's one of the baddest cats out there, period. I've got some more in-depth posts about him and his work coming soon. But for now, do yourself a favor and YouTube him, but prepare to feel very slow.