The sword that caused the wound must also heal the wound

Wagner/Parsifal

One spring evening in the early eighties, after several scotches and two sets of extraordinary jazz, (Milt Jackson, Cedar Walton, and David Williams) I walked in on a green room conversation between the late Seattle jazz writer Maggie Hawthorn and the redoubtable drummer of the evening, Billy Higgins. It was the age of Reagan, the beginnings of the thirty year war against labor and the poor and the ascendancy of the freedom eschewing jazz revisionists. Maggie was lamenting the climate, “What happened to the music? Nobody plays free anymore.” Smiling Billy, as usual, didn’t miss a beat. “Maggie, that’s the thing about freedom, you got to practice it from the inside out.”

When Frankfurt school philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote his infamously reductive and dismissive essay on jazz in 1967 he summarized his disdain by declaring that, “Jazz, in finality, is but an entertainment.” And so do many conceive of it to this day. Still, music is an information technology – a delivery system that can incite emotions and ideas in a way both broader and more emotionally inclusive than words alone. Good Marxist though he was, Adorno missed the message of emancipation in the practice of jazz.

In the aftermath of the second world war and the concomitant integration of both the Northern workplace and military – where readers of Uncle Willie’s memoirs on these pages can witness to the profound good fortune of Willie finding himself in an integrated army band that included the great Wynton Kelley – and the aftermath of the Great Migration, the music carried its own information stream with it that expressed the increased volition of African Americans as well as the great speed and complexity of post war America. Because this was not your Father’s music anymore, no longer merely the purview of dancers, gangsters and white folk looking for the exotics provided by black bodies in syncopated time.

But at the heart of the music was a message that transcended commodification by tastemakers – the message of emancipation. If freedom was being practiced – and signified upon – at Minton’s, the Royal Roost and the Deuce’s by the late forties, by the late fifties it was being talked about in jazz expression as well. By that time, the word freedom had become a common modifier in the work of Sonny Rollins (Freedom Suite) Max Roach (We Insist; Freedom Now) and implied in the song titles of Mingus from “Haitian Fight Song” to “There Once Was A Holding Company Called America” The explicit inclusion of Abbey Lincoln’s lyric on “Mendacity” that called out Jim Crow voting practices in the South on her collaboration with her then husband Max Roach, “Percussion Bittersweet” marked a declarative throw down over the pending voting rights act in a manner abruptly new to jazz, as did Coltrane’s poignant elegy, Alabama; marking an explicit lament for the victims of the 16th St. church bombing. By the time Mingus debuted in phenomenal fashion his suite “Meditations On Integration” at the 1964 Monterey Jazz Festival, the word and deed were out. The music was no longer merely signifying, it was calling out. Still, the practice of talking about freedom was only the cap on a process of call and response that had long been working in the American polity.

God has wrought many things out of oppression. He has endowed his creatures with the capacity to create – and from this capacity has flowed three sweet songs of sorrow and joy that have allowed man to cope with his environment and many different circumstances. ‘ Jazz speaks for life. The blues tells us the story of life’s difficulties, and if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with new hope or sense of triumph. This is triumphant music Modern jazz has continued in this tradition; singing the songs of a more complicated existence. When life itself offers no order or being the musician creates an order and meaning from the sounds of the earth which is flowing through his instrument.

And if that call came from the earth, it invoked a response in multi-racial America. Both Coltrane and Malcolm X, whose response to racism at home was toward a thorough going equality that went beyond race based identity structure, acquired a universalist perspective that stressed the unitary freedom of body and mind. If you had to be taught about the blues, if you needed to be free from the inside out, then here were the teachers. As Dr King stated explicitly…..the blues aren’t just palliative they’re transcendent as well; providing a way through and a way forward. An orator in the black Baptist tradition rooted in call and response, King knew his congregation, knew how to invoke a response in a way no politician since has been able to pull (Sorry, Mr. President) off . But more importantly, he knew how to spread the word and find the greater response in a nation needing to heal the wounds of racism.

And along the way, the freedom movement was being abetted by the attention and respect being given one of America’s first black crossover artists, who began his path as a jazz singer, in the person of Harry Belafonte. By making explicit through his broad ranging interpretation of black African and Caribbean folk musics Belafonte linked the common aspirations of the African diaspora with other peoples throughout the world. By serving as liaison between the mainstream political establishment and the movement, he put some fire behind the tepidly liberal on race Kennedy brothers: introducing RFK to the conditions for black children in the South. All of this is well documented in the currently running HBO Documentary, “Sing Your Song” on Belafonte’s remarkable life as artist/activist and where we again witness the trans versing of the line between aspiration and transcendence played out in the lives of – by his time – generations of jazz folk.

In this manner an active call and response was being carried on between elements of jazz and blues culture and the political establishment so was the call being heard by the gander of the white youth culture aborning in psychedelia and opposition to the war. Even a short survey of the sixties pop genre reveals the aspirational modalities of Coltrane and the agons of the blues as the source material for much of that music was most expressively political and explicitly militant in tone, culminating in the triumphant triumvirate of black expressionists, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and Gil-Scott Heron, who brought the vernacular expressions of pop, jazz and soul into seamless social art.

Not all who heard the call were so conciliatory in their appropriation of jazz voice, notably the poet and playwright, Amira Baraka, who expressed a decidedly Marxist perspective very different than Adorno’s, – that jazz was the vanguard music of the coming socialist revolution – that cultural militants would set the stage for political ones. And while offering an adroit reading of the essential nature of call and response in his work “Blues People” , Mr. Baraka may have misheard the call in this case as the aesthetic call and political agendas diverged while a strain of this thought would embed itself subliminally in the organization of black arts groups in the late sixties and seventies such as the Black Artists Group in St Louis and the AACM in Chicago.

Yet, by the early seventies, jazz as an ever expanding expression of freedom turned back into itself through absorption of popular forms and approaches much as the rococo variations of ‘hard bop’ brought generic conventions to the untempered expressions of the founders a generation earlier. With this deference to the markets of popular music, jazz lost its explicit link to the political and cultural niche – no longer possessed of a triumphant modernist narrative as exemplified in Coltrane – the late forms of style marked by self-referential excess, parodic motifs and pastiche In other words, jazz was now fodder for a more generic post-modern, and post political, phase of production closer, indeed, to Adorno’s notion of the music as commoditized entertainment.

While what had become known as ‘free jazz’ – with its implicitly oppositional and transgressive qualities now encoded in the language – found a distinctly limited if devoted following through the work of the AACM, the NYC loft scene and through the evolution of stalwart and surviving pillars of craft as well as iconoclasm such as Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor and Sonny Rollins. Nonetheless, as fascinating and acutely musical as these explorations were, their marginal economic and political footprint made its transgressive message a hard sell. The music may have been free, but the musician still needs to get paid. Without a cultural context both the message and means became obscured.

Yes, the stage is set for the conservative Marsalis restoration and political civil war within the music as to proper political boundaries and property rights to the legacy of jazz. It is of no little note to this discussion that during the institution building phase of the restoration movement, Wall St played no small part in the enshrinement of Jazz at Lincoln Center, in helping to raise the $131 million necessary for the construction of three state of the art jazz rooms at 60th and Broadway – placing their aesthetic mark at the center of that property.

During this time the explicit expression of political content fell on a few such as bassist Charlie Haden in collaboration with Carla Bley in their Liberation Music Orchestra projects that appropriated musics of liberation from around the world in the context of jazz arrangements and soloists. Amongst these recordings, the haunting “Ballad of the Fallen” from the early eighties and the recent “We Shall Overcome” stand out as eloquent statements of solidarity and intent, particularly in opposition to Reagan era imperialism in Central America.

So, where is the political intent – or pulse – in the music today? It’s commonly thought that the universal lingua franca of hip-hop has taken up the cultural void left by a de-politicized jazz. Certainly, when jazz has turned overtly political in recent years it has often borrowed from hip hop forms and rhyme schemes, most notably in tenor sax titian David Murray’s scintillating “Fo Deuk Revue” of 1997 or clarinetist Don Byron’s “Existential Dread” project of the mid-nineties. Both relying on poetry of the likes of Amira Baraka and Shadig as well as interpolated hip hop rhymes. While these have been effective collaborations, they have not sparked a trend within jazz.

While the spirit of the freedom movement resides in recent releases such as guitarist Larry Coryell’s, “Birmingham” – a musical portrait of the events of 1964 – and bandleader Marcus Shelby’s, “The Soul of the Movement” these represent a look back to the point of prime engagement between music and movement. More contemporaneously, we find literate homage paid to issues of human rights and the condition of labor in recent works by trumpeter Dave Douglas and keyboardist/composer Wayne Horvitz’s epic suite “Joe Hill.”

What of now? Will jazz lyricists and composers respond to the current political climate, OWS Jazz, as Mingus inferred in his fore stated description of holding company America? While a couple of composers have tipped their musical hats toward the President, there’s no bandwagon there. Or, as Mr. Higgins had it at the top, is the freedom felt and won now embodied in those playing freedom from the inside/out? Is the practice of freedom within the form what democracy really looks like?

Joseph murphy Bibliographic Notes: While it’s unfair to pick too much on Adorno’s myopia the essay “Jazz” that appears in his collection “Prisms” is an interesting study in seeing the forest for the trees. Amongst the books with the best insight into the intersection between the spiritual/political nexus transversed by Coltrane, Ayler, Shepp and others during the sixties is John Coltrane and Black America’s Quest for Freedom, a collection of essays and interviews edited by academic Leonard L. Brown. Brown conducts the interviews here and comes across too strident in directing his subjects toward an Afro-militant nationalism in interpreting the music while his interviewees, including George Russell and Yuseff Lateef keep steering him back to a more inclusive – and elusive point of view. – A vital book for any semi-serious jazz scholar is Scott DeVeaux’s 1997 work “Birth of Bebop” where his introduction is particularly strong on the sociology of the jazz/political world of the forties and fifties.

Wagner/Parsifal

One spring evening in the early eighties, after several scotches and two sets of extraordinary jazz, (Milt Jackson, Cedar Walton, and David Williams) I walked in on a green room conversation between the late Seattle jazz writer Maggie Hawthorn and the redoubtable drummer of the evening, Billy Higgins. It was the age of Reagan, the beginnings of the thirty year war against labor and the poor and the ascendancy of the freedom eschewing jazz revisionists. Maggie was lamenting the climate, “What happened to the music? Nobody plays free anymore.” Smiling Billy, as usual, didn’t miss a beat. “Maggie, that’s the thing about freedom, you got to practice it from the inside out.”

When Frankfurt school philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote his infamously reductive and dismissive essay on jazz in 1967 he summarized his disdain by declaring that, “Jazz, in finality, is but an entertainment.” And so do many conceive of it to this day. Still, music is an information technology – a delivery system that can incite emotions and ideas in a way both broader and more emotionally inclusive than words alone. Good Marxist though he was, Adorno missed the message of emancipation in the practice of jazz.

In the aftermath of the second world war and the concomitant integration of both the Northern workplace and military – where readers of Uncle Willie’s memoirs on these pages can witness to the profound good fortune of Willie finding himself in an integrated army band that included the great Wynton Kelley – and the aftermath of the Great Migration, the music carried its own information stream with it that expressed the increased volition of African Americans as well as the great speed and complexity of post war America. Because this was not your Father’s music anymore, no longer merely the purview of dancers, gangsters and white folk looking for the exotics provided by black bodies in syncopated time.

But at the heart of the music was a message that transcended commodification by tastemakers – the message of emancipation. If freedom was being practiced – and signified upon – at Minton’s, the Royal Roost and the Deuce’s by the late forties, by the late fifties it was being talked about in jazz expression as well. By that time, the word freedom had become a common modifier in the work of Sonny Rollins (Freedom Suite) Max Roach (We Insist; Freedom Now) and implied in the song titles of Mingus from “Haitian Fight Song” to “There Once Was A Holding Company Called America” The explicit inclusion of Abbey Lincoln’s lyric on “Mendacity” that called out Jim Crow voting practices in the South on her collaboration with her then husband Max Roach, “Percussion Bittersweet” marked a declarative throw down over the pending voting rights act in a manner abruptly new to jazz, as did Coltrane’s poignant elegy, Alabama; marking an explicit lament for the victims of the 16th st church bombing. By the time Mingus debuted in phenomenal fashion his suite “Meditations On Integration” at the 1964 Monterey Jazz Festival, the word and deed were out. The music was no longer merely signifying, it was calling out. Still, the practice of talking about freedom was only the cap on a process of call and response that had long been working in the American polity.

ANTIPHONY IN ACTION

In 1964, arguably the height of what MLK jr, called, “The Freedom Movement,” that found expression politically in the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Dr. King was asked to provide opening remarks for the Berlin Jazz Festival. His words, eloquent and concise as always, spoke directly to the emancipatory information carried through jazz. I quote at length:

“God has wrought many things out of oppression. He has endowed his creatures with
the capacity to create – and from this capacity has flowed three sweet songs of sorrow
and joy that have allowed man to cope with his environment and many different
circumstances.

Jazz speaks for life. The blues tells us the story of life’s difficulties, and if you think for a
moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into
music, only to come out with new hope or sense of triumph. This is triumphant music

Modern jazz has continued in this tradition; singing the songs of a more complicated
existence. When life itself offers no order or being the musician creates an order and
meaning from the sounds of the earth which is flowing through his instrument.”

And if that call came from the earth, it invoked a response in multi-racial America. Both Coltrane and Malcolm X, whose response to racism at home was toward a thorough going equality that went beyond race based identity structure, acquired a universalist perspective that stressed the unitary freedom of body and mind. If you had to be taught about the blues, if you needed to be free from the inside out, then here were the teachers. As Dr King stated explicitly…..the blues aren’t just palliative they’re transcendent as well; providing a way through and a way forward. An orator in the black Baptist tradition rooted in call and response, King knew his congregation, knew how to invoke a response in a way no politician since has been able to pull (Sorry, Mr. President) off . But more importantly, he knew how to spread the word and find the greater response in a nation needing to heal the wounds of racism.

And along the way, the freedom movement was being abetted by the attention and respect being given one of America’s first black crossover artists, who began his path as a jazz singer, in the person of Harry Belafonte. By making explicit through his broad ranging interpretation of black African and Caribbean folk musics Belafonte linked the common aspirations of the African diaspora with other peoples throughout the world. By serving as liaison between the mainstream political establishment and the movement, he put some fire behind the tepidly liberal on race Kennedy brothers: introducing RFK to the conditions for black children in the South. All of this is well documented in the currently running HBO Documentary, “Sing Your Song” on Belafonte’s remarkable life as artist/activist and where we again witness the trans versing of the line between aspiration and transcendence played out in the lives of – by his time – generations of jazz folk.

In this manner an active call and response was being carried on between elements of jazz and blues culture and the political establishment so was the call being heard by the gander of the white youth culture aborning in psychedelia and opposition to the war. Even a short survey of the sixties pop genre reveals the aspirational modalities of Coltrane and the agons of the blues as the source material for much of that music was most expressively political and explicitly militant in tone, culminating in the triumphant triumvirate of black expressionists, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and Gil-Scott Heron, who brought the vernacular expressions of pop, jazz and soul into seamless social art.

Not all who heard the call were so conciliatory in their appropriation of jazz voice, notably the poet and playwright, Amira Baraka, who expressed a decidedly Marxist perspective very different than Adorno’s, – that jazz was the vanguard music of the coming socialist revolution – that cultural militants would set the stage for political ones. And while offering an adroit reading of the essential nature of call and response in his work “Blues People” , Mr. Baraka may have misheard the call in this case as the aesthetic call and political agendas diverged while a strain of this thought would embed itself subliminally in the organization of black arts groups in the late sixties and seventies such as the Black Artists Group in St Louis and the AACM in Chicago.

Yet, by the early seventies, jazz as an ever expanding expression of freedom turned back into itself through absorption of popular forms and approaches much as the rococo variations of ‘hard bop’ brought generic conventions to the untempered expressions of the founders a generation earlier. With this deference to the markets of popular music, jazz lost its explicit link to the political and cultural niche – no longer possessed of a triumphant modernist narrative as exemplified in Coltrane – the late forms of style marked by self-referential excess, parotic motifs and pastiche In other words, jazz was now fodder for a more generic post-modern, and post political, phase of production closer, indeed, to Adorno’s notion of the music as commoditized entertainment.

While what had become known as ‘free jazz’ – with its implicitly oppositional and transgressive qualities now encoded in the language – found a distinctly limited if devoted following through the work of the AACM, the NYC loft scene and through the evolution of stalwart and surviving pillars of craft as well as iconoclasm such as Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor and Sonny Rollins. Nonetheless, as fascinating and acutely musical as these explorations were, their marginal economic and political footprint made its transgressive message a hard sell. The music may have been free, but the musician still needs to get paid. Without a cultural context both the message and means became obscured.

Yes, the stage is set for the conservative Marsalis restoration and political civil war within the music as to proper political boundaries and property rights to the legacy of jazz. It is of no little note to this discussion that during the institution building phase of the restoration movement, Wall St played no small part in the enshrinement of Jazz at Lincoln Center, in helping to raise the $131 million necessary for the construction of three state of the art jazz rooms at 60th and Broadway – placing their aesthetic mark at the center of that property.

During this time the explicit expression of political content fell on a few such as bassist Charlie Haden in collaboration with Carla Bley in their Liberation Music Orchestra projects that appropriated musics of liberation from around the world in the context of jazz arrangements and soloists. Amongst these recordings, the haunting “Ballad of the Fallen” from the early eighties and the recent “We Shall Overcome” stand out as eloquent statements of solidarity and intent, particularly in opposition to Reagan era imperialism in Central America.

So, where is the political intent – or pulse – in the music today? It’s commonly thought that the universal lingua franca of hip-hop has taken up the cultural void left by a de-politicized jazz. Certainly, when jazz has turned overtly political in recent years it has often borrowed from hip hop forms and rhyme schemes, most notably in tenor sax titian David Murray’s scintillating “Fo Deuk Revue” of 1997 or clarinetist Don Byron’s “Existential Dread” project of the mid-nineties. Both relying on poetry of the likes of Amira Baraka and Shadig as well as interpolated hip hop rhymes. While these have been effective collaborations, they have not sparked a trend within jazz.

While the spirit of the freedom movement resides in recent releases such as guitarist Larry Coryell’s, “Birmingham” – a musical portrait of the events of 1964 – and bandleader Marcus Shelby’s, “The Soul of the Movement” these represent a look back to the point of prime engagement between music and movement. More contemporaneously, we find literate homage paid to issues of human rights and the condition of labor in recent works by trumpeter Dave Douglas and keyboardist/composer Wayne Horvitz’s epic suite “Joe Hill.”

What of now? Will jazz lyricists and composers respond to the current political climate, OWS Jazz, as Mingus inferred in his fore stated description of holding company America? While a couple of composers have tipped their musical hats toward the President, there’s no bandwagon there. Or, as Mr. Higgins had it at the top, is the freedom felt and won now embodied in those playing freedom from the inside/out? Is the practice of freedom within the form what democracy really looks like?

Joseph Murphy
Bibliographic Notes:

While it’s unfair to pick too much on Adorno’s myopia the essay “Jazz” that appears in his collection “Prisms” is an interesting study in seeing the forest for the trees.

Amongst the books with the best insight into the intersection between the spiritual/political nexus transversed by Coltrane, Ayler, Shepp and others during the sixties is John Coltrane and Black America’s Quest for Freedom, a collection of essays and interviews edited by academic Leonard L. Brown. Brown conducts the interviews here and comes across too strident in directing his subjects toward an Afro-militant nationalism in interpreting the music while his interviewees, including George Russell and Yuseff Lateef keep steering him back to a more inclusive – and elusive point of view.
-
A vital book for any semi-serious jazz scholar is Scott DeVeaux’s 1997 work “Birth of Bebop” where his introduction is particularly strong on the sociology of the jazz/political world of the forties and fifties.

Intermediate students should have completed their work in the Beginner’s Corner. Some additional knowledge of scales and chords might be helpful.  This can be found in the Player’s Resource or Jamey Aebersold Play Along Volume 1,16,24 and 84. The Intermediate Corner provides an important step that insures greater success with the Core Curriculum introduced in the Player’s Corner.

Lesson 1 starts HERE

Special Acknowledgement!

We would like to acknowledge that the intermediate lessons are based on the Jazz Anyone…? classroom series, Books 1 and 2. The complete series with rhythms manuals, teacher editions and CDs are still available and may be ordered online from Alfred Publishing.com or at your local music store.

]]> http://www.jazzeveryone.com/general/intermediate-corner/feed/ 0 http://www.jazzeveryone.com/general/rhythm-pack-lesson-4-bass/ http://www.jazzeveryone.com/general/rhythm-pack-lesson-4-bass/#comments Mon, 21 Nov 2011 21:10:04 +0000 Willie Thomas http://www.jazzeveryone.com/?p=8312 4.1 Bass Lines and Harmonies

The bass line can be systematically expanded to include more and more notes. Building your concepts step by step helps develop and condition the automatic responses needed to eventually improvise sensible and creative bass lines. Adding the fifth below is easy: it’s always in the same fret a string below. Observe the pattern formed on the finger board.

4.2 Playing the Blues

Play bass line patterns 1 and 2 now with the play track using the fifth (5th) below in a variety of ways.

play

4.3 Walking eighth notes in the Bass line

Adding swing jazz eighth notes to the bass line gives the beat a boost. The energy created with these added swing jazz eighth notes lifts the beat and helps it move along. Changing harmonies are also enhanced by properly selected and placed eighth notes. Play patterns 1 & 2 from section 4.2 and patterns 3 &4 below as the rhythm section reinforces accents of Beginner’s Corner Lesson 4.4.

play

4.4 Playing with the Band

Practice your bass part below with the play track. You will play the arrangement (head) one time through, then play 2 choruses of open blues for the soloists, then repeat the head and take the coda. During the open solo choruses use the suggestions for improvising for solo instruments from the Beginner’s Corner.

play

Additional notes are added now to enhance and color previousvoicings. We will also move the tonic I7 chord to the IV9 chord in its second inversion or a non-root position.

4.2 Playing the Blues

Play the new piano voicings through two choruses of blues with the following rhythm pattern. Repeat this pattern until you can play it correctly with the rhythm section. Notice how many of the voices do not change as they move.

play

4.3 Reinforcing Accents

The rhythm patterns below will require considerable practice to play them with the correct feeling and precision. Syncopated rhythms that anticipate various up and down beats are critical in developing more comprehensive comping skills.

play

4.4 Playing with the Band

Practice your piano part below with the play track, as you did in the previous lessons. After the first time through (one chorus) you will go directly to the coda. When you play this with your band, you can play as many solos as you like after the first chorus. After your soloists have played, play the first chorus again and take the coda.

play

Another two-note tri-tone voicing will be expanded in Lesson 4. The ninth (9th) of the chord is added to the Bb dominant harmony and the sixth (6th) of the chord is added to the Eb and F dominant seventh chords. These voicings also move by half steps (one fret) around the tonic chord.

4.2 Playing the Blues

Strum the new tri-tone voicings with the play track. Let the left hand damping motion help you feel and keep the time (beat) steady as you strum.

play

4.3 Reinforcing Accents

play

Jazz vocabulary patterns introduced in Lesson 4 text require rhythms for reinforcement that are not introduced until later. Practice these with the play track. Then, strum and reinforce accents with the rhythm patterns below in the Beginner’s Corner Lesson 4.4. Try a variety of pick-strokes on these syncopated rhythms.

4.4 Playing with the Band

Practice your guitar part below with the play track. You will play the arrangement (head) one time through, then play 2 choruses of open blues for the soloists, then repeat the head and take the coda. During the open solo choruses use the suggestions for improvising for solo instruments from the Beginner’s Corner.

play

The following syncopated rhythm is introduced to the rhythm section now as it is needed to properly reinforce Lesson 4 jazz vocabulary patterns. This syncopated rhythm anticipates the third beat of the measure and presents a challenge in correct placement. We will use the triplet technique as we did in developing the swing ride beat.

Begin practicing this anticipation by playing the triplets on the snare drum with the left hand as you play the hi-hat on beats two and four (1). Next, add the ride cymbal as shown in example (2). Play the hi-hat through all exercises.

Now, add the bass drum playing the dotted quarter/eighth note figure with the ride cymbal as you continue to play triplets on the snare drum with the left hand (3). Finally, play the dotted quarter/eighth notes pattern with the bass drum and snare drum with the ride cymbal picking up the beat with the pair of swing eighth notes on beat four (4).

Here is another difficult anticipation to play correctly. The difficulty is in placing or anticipating the down beat precisely on the third eighth note triplet of the fourth beat.

Practice this rhythm by starting the triplets with the snare drum (L.H.) on the fourth beat as you place the ride cymbal entrance on the up-beat eighth note anticipation of the last triplet eighth note of the fourth beat. Add the bass drum with the ride cymbal. Finally, play the rhythm without the triplets played on the snare drum.

4.2 Syncopating Swing Jazz Blues

play

Play the play track and use the new rhythms. In the following example, the rhythms are alternated between the snare and the bass drum. The first rhythm is played, then the second follows. This should be done while playing a steady ride beat. The ride cymbal may or may not reinforce rhythms with the snare and bass in actual performance.

4.3 Reinforcing Accents

play

The following rhythm patterns will be used as numbered to reinforce the jazz melodies introduced in Beginner’s Corner Lesson 4.4. Playing these rhythms correctly will require a great deal of practice. The secret in learning to play and control more complex rhythms lies in  your understanding of the importance to practice each example slowly until it becomes a natural response. Important accents for snare and bass drum are written on the bottom in patterns 3 and 4.

4.4 Playing with the Band

Practice your drum part below with the play track. You will play the arrangement (head) one time through, then play 2 choruses of open blues for the soloists, then repeat the head and take the coda. During the open solo choruses try creating different rhythm patterns and sounds on various parts of the drum kit. Make sure you’re swinging!

play