Cruise Ship Drummer!

SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: New sites galore!

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Bishop) — Sun, 15 Dec 2024 05:08:00 +0000

If you're a regular reader you're probably here by accident— the cruiseshipdrummer.com domain is no longer working on the blogger hosted site— or won't be shortly. I have moved it over to my own hosting account, with a Wordpress blog, which I am presently setting up. It's time, we've totally outgrown this platform... it all has the stink of 2005 about it.

So, thanks Blogger, it's been a mediocre 20 years. Everything on the old site will remain here until Google finally folds the entire operation and consigns everyone's work to total oblivion forever. Happily, all my old content, and all new content going forward, will all be on the new improved, much more usable Wordpress site.

The new CYMBALISTIC site is also now up and running, and is awesome.

Lots of updates coming, check back soon...

Daily best music in the world: Tony Williams day

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Bishop) — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 17:14:00 +0000

Still hard at work on the new Cymbalistic site, which will be going live any minute now. I'm at the designing-cruise-ship-drummer-themed-merch-while-waiting-for-domain-cot-com-to-let-me-log-in-to-my-account-so-I-can-reset-the-domain-to-take-you-to-shopify phase. That old story.

In the mean time, in honor of Tony Williams's birthday, here's an old favorite record, Believe It, by his fusion group Lifetime. It's one of the first things I bought with him on it, in about the 10th grade. All the older guys knew about the drum solo on this tune, Snake Oil. It's a different kind of drumming from what fusion developed into.

It's a funny tune— it reminds me of the first things I tried to write, that were very chunky— a series of episodes.

CYMBALISTIC: Shopify store coming!

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Bishop) — Sat, 07 Dec 2024 18:12:00 +0000

UPDATE: Soft launch time— the new store is now active— I'm writing an official announcement as we speak. Feel free to swing by, check it out, ask questions. No doubt lots of little things will need to be fixed/made better, so let me know if any part of could be done better... announcement coming soon...

CYMBALISTIC: A pre-launch-of-something heads up here: I'm in the midst of setting up a Shopify store for this little cymbal business of mine. It will streamline and improve the getting-stuff experience for everyone in a bunch of ways:

Easier ordering: You will now be able to order securely directly through the site.

More cymbals: I'll be syncing my listings with the available stock at Cymbal & Gong, which will dramatically increase what I can offer.

For cymbals from Cymbal & Gong's stock, I'll go to the warehouse and select the best, most representative of the model. You won't be buying at random.

Discounted shipping: That's it, shipping will be cheaper, with free returns.

More ways to pay: Including a pay over time option!

Better communication: It will be easier to ask questions directly through the site, with a chat function so you can get answers in real time, as I'm available.

Books: It will be an improved portal for getting my books, which will probably encourage me to publish some projects that have been languishing 90% finished for way too long.

Merch: Branded stuff for CRUISE SHIP DRUMMER!, Cymbalistic, and Cymbal & Gong, and probably some cool other non-branded drummer related graphic items— coffee mugs, t-shirts, hats, and whatnot. You'd be amazed at the level of crap available to slap a brand on and have drop shipped.

... I won't be doing that last thing. CRUISE SHIP DRUMMER! dietary supplements, lunch boxes, etc. I'll be very conscious of maintaining standards and not crapifying the whole thing— my entire brand is that you're getting some kind of expert guidance through the buying process, and getting stuff that passed my filter. We're not just hustling people to buy more crap here, the idea is that I'm helping drummers get what they need to do their thing, in a personalized way.

Stay tuned, I hope to launch the thing next week, and will do some kind of special to kick it off! Get a jump on it by visiting cymbalistic.com and getting on my mailing list— I'll send an announcement when it launches.

Very occasional quote of the day: technique

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Bishop) — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 15:57:00 +0000

What if you think of something to play that doesn't have a standard technique? That's what jazz cats have been doing since jazz was born. All of a sudden, you want to play something that a flam doesn't encompass, or a paradiddle doesn't encompass, or anything else.

What is it? Maybe it's a flubadub. I don't know, but you play this flubadub, and the only way to play this thing is to use the technique you discovered to play it. So you have added to the standard technique by playing this thing. And if you can use it musically—it works!

There is no right and wrong. If it's musical, it works. So just to sit and practice standardized techniques from drum books will not make you freer. The concept makes you freer, not your technique.

- Barry Altschul, Modern Drummer interview by Rick Mattingly, November, 1982

Drummers as an inferior class

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Bishop) — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 18:06:00 +0000

Savoring the persecution

“Drummers are known to be a race on their own.”
- Joe Morello

“General Browning, I am a Pole, considered by some to be smart.”
- First line spoken by Gene Hackman playing the Polish general Sosabowski in A Bridge Too Far

Hey, let's talk about a favorite topic of drummers: why does everybody hate us so much. God, it's good, apparently; the rich liquor that is the feeling of persecution. Let us feast at that trough. Let's mix some metaphors, drummer-style, because we're so unsmart.

Pretty obviously, playing the drums is kind of a low-prestige occupation in the eyes of much of society. Not a serious activity, or much of an art form— a joke instrument played by people of questionable intelligence. It's like telling somebody you're in motocross.

I'm not immune to it; when asked what I do, usually I'll say “musician”, and then drummer if they ask what instrument. I'm not embarrassed about it, but it sounds more serious to say musician first. I used to be worse. When I got my scholarship to go to the U. of Southern California, I would talk to classical students there and feeling abashed that I was getting money for playing the drums, while they were taking out loans. For a time, working this site's titular river boat gig, I was embarrassed to be getting paid more to work fewer hours than most of the crew. Boy, was I dumb.

Among musicians, the comments happen the most among students. People in their late teens/early 20s are more competitive, and have not accomplished anything yet, and tend to be overly status-oriented. They'll go at each other over the general status of their pursuits, and future prospects as they imagine them. Who goes to the best school, who has the best pedigree, who plays the biggest bulls**t instrument, and who plays a real instrument. I saw a lot of that in California, and from players from the Northeast.

Later on the attitude comes from mediocre musicians— who don't value the drums, and/or who are mad that drums are a more attention-getting instrument than their own. They may feel bullied by the drums— their physicality, and dynamic power. A lot of players never learn to play with enough power to compete with the drums played at a normal, musical volume.

Aside: Which is not to say that it is not still our job to accompany them and help them sound good. But they have a job too, to learn to get a sound and make themselves heard and play their instrument better.

It is easy for drummers to feel clueless around other instrumentalists, with their mysterious “chords” and “pitches” and “fingerings” and whatnot— which they've been talking about routinely since they were children, and we mostly learned later, with less regularity, and greater effort. It can make it appear that they're doing something harder than what we do. They are not. All major instruments have a low bar for entry— people start them as little kids, without even any priors. They didn't make anyone pass an aptitude test and do four years of coursework to pick up a guitar. All instruments, and the music written for them, are designed to be playable by humans.

In fact those other musicians are 100% as clueless about drummers as drummers are about them. That's a huge deficiency, considering how important our job is to a group sounding good. But it's normal, and fine, so long as they value us, and we can relate to each other on a purely musical level.

Normal citizens make offhand comments because 1) they're lazy, and 2) they heard someone else say something about a drummer once. The ones that actually give you grief really want to be doing what you're doing— they hate their jobs and feel untalented, and they deal with it by trying to make you feel that way too. They were raised by bad adults who made them feel bad for wanting to do anything creative, and they are not good enough people themselves to overcome that and decide to not be that way to others.

Occasionally you get comments from music fans and from bad, part time drummers, to the effect that you are not famous and are therefore a failure. The same type of people who also attack famous people for not being as famous as they once were, or for not being as famous as somebody else. The drummers may come at you for not being as famous as a drummer they like— thinking that liking the famous drummer gives them credit for that drummers's accomplishments, elevating them above you.

I've seen repeatedly online part time drummers attempting to gatekeep who gets to be called professional, limiting it to people whose only source of income is actually performing on their instrument— an increasingly rare species of music professional. It's a way of dragging professionals down to their level, because virtually all professionals make some of their money doing things besides performing.

Online trolls— sad losers who want to make other people feel bad to the level at which they hate themselves— are a very low grade of opponent. They dedicate their entire lives to that pursuit, and engaging with them is a mistake. Non-responsiveness and dismissal are the best tactics if you choose to do that.

Troll: [makes stupid/insulting comment calculated to compel you to respond]
You: All right, good luck with that.

You don't speak to the “substance” of their comment. To the extent that there's any substance to it, they don't care about it, it's just a hook to get you to respond as they try to string you along for as long as possible. It's a pure game, and if you're going to respond, learn to do it non-responsively, and detatch.

More generally, being defensive about anyone's comments or attitudes is losing. You won't convince a determined loser that what you do isn't a joke. I don't defend the activity. If I feel like fighting with someone about it, I'll defend the job, and the business. Like, the IRS thinks I'm working a real job, I have several decades of Schedule Cs to prove it. In the objective sense of being an economic entity answerable to the government for your accounts, your work is as serious as anyone else's in the world. People even pay you in real currency, and everything.

It helps if you work on having a professional bearing, and a sense of professional correctness, appropriate to the situation. That puts whatever anyone says right off the table as anything deserving an emotional response. Or any serious response. You have the choice to not participate. You have to be detached from whatever reality someone is basing their comments in. It's harder if you've put yourself in an amateur situation, so try not to do that.

And you can't secretly believe they're right. It can take a long time in life to have basic confidence in what you're doing even without somone challenging it. If you were lucky enough to not be raised and educated surrounded by offensive people, it takes some adjustment to handle them effectively and non-defensively.

Be clear on it: all of this stuff comes from bad-to-mediocre people, and bad-to-mediocre musicians. It's completely beyond the pale for normal fulfilled people, or for good musicians. Normal people think the drums are a fun instrument, and that anyone who can earn their living with it is lucky. Good musicians value good drummers. For someone to say something negative about it directly to you should be surprising, a sign of exceptional smallness of character.

Mel Lewis stuff!

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Bishop) — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 16:54:00 +0000

A flurry of drumming activity of actual interest on Bluesky this morning. So far much of the drumming content there has been pretty mundane, but they've added ~ ten million new users in the last month, and things are developing rapidly.

Anyway: here's a new repository of the Mel Lewis history of drumming tapes, edited, cleaned up, and generously shared by Flip Phillips. Previously the digital files were divided up by show, under the heading of the name of the drummer they were discussing. Phillips has broken those up, with individual files for the recordings played, and subjects of conversation. It's super helpful.

It's a work in progress, so you'll probably want to check in there for updates in coming months.

Also Gary Kennedy has shared a link to some Mel Lewis interviews I hadn't seen before, with Les Tomkins, several times between 1971-88. That site has a whole ton of interesting interviews, actually.

And Jon McCaslin has written a new post on Mel Lewis you're going to want to read.

Follow everyone on Bluesky:
‪@flipphillips.com‬
@fouronthefloorblog.bsky.social‬
@jazzsnob99.bsky.social
@cruiseshipdrummer.bsky.social

Conductor of form

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Bishop) — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 19:34:00 +0000

The general topic here is jazz comping— some general concepts thereof, getting into what I think is missing from a lot of students' playing, even as they do the basic thing pretty well. The following are not necessarily mutually exclusive categories of playing— they're more ways to listen, ways to think about the functions of what we're playing.

Our first job with that is just to learn some left hand activity, as running commentary on the snare drum, which we get from practicing out of Chapin or Reed, or by downloading a bunch of junk off my site. Guided by a general need to be doing something, hopefully not in a stupid way, hopefully sounding like they're listening to the soloist.

There is also an element of groove support— backbeats, the rim click on 4, a bongo rhythm, and riffs— repeated rhythm figures, which people learn early.

As players mature, they get better about being selective about how they make their bigger statments, thinking more in terms of punctuations, interjections, filling spaces left by the soloist. They'll differentiate their dynamics between that vs. running background texture.

Through the development of all of this, the mindset is vaguely about “playing better”, playing cool things well, hopefully being a good ensemble player. Apart from the groove stuff, the real purpose of it isn't real clear— beyond just playing the style, or of conversation or self expression. Building intensity. We get closer to it as we get better at playing phrases, at playing off of the tune. But it all happens by vibe.

The unstated thing is that there is a presentational or guiding function happening as well— introducing changes, conducting the form, guiding the group through dynamic changes— it's the big center of our musical job as drummers. Acting as an arranger, and stater of the arrangement. It usually only gets discussed indirectly under some other categories of things, and not in the sense of what are we actually doing here, what is this total performance about.

Maybe you can hear Philly Joe Jones conducting us through the form here:

This is all over the album Milestones— the arrangement is involved, and very show-like, presentational. Everybody's thinking that way. But he's pretty assertive with the snare drum as running commentary as well, that's not all purely functional re: the form.

We could stereotype Elvin Jones as generally a texture drummer— I pulled this up with the idea of it being an example of primarily textural playing— but you can hear him doing the exact thing I'm talking about, conducting us through this blues form:

Listen for it here, in Al Foster playing very busily with Joe Henderson. To me virtually everything he does here has a function within the form. There is a lot of pure texture happening, some elements of it just driving the groove. The big things you hear him doing are all about blues, the movement of that form:

Early on, form is just a thing we're trying not to get lost in. Later it becomes the arena for you to do your thing— at which phase you're more attracted to blank forms, blowing-friendly forms, or to very friendly and distinctive ones— and hostile to the obligations of playing an arrangement. The thing we're talking about here is becoming a presenter, and the form is the thing you are pleased to present.

When you start thinking this way, your job playing unfamiliar material becomes clearer— you'll know the problem you're trying to solve. The mundane details are not just pains in the a** interrupting your flow, they're the whole thing you're doing.

I can see someone taking this idea and going way too far with it. People like turning suggestions into doctrine. It's one angle to consider in your playing, and to guide your listening, that I haven't seen widely stated elsewhere.

Hey, follow me on Bluesky

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Bishop) — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 00:41:00 +0000

SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: I have now abandoned that festering hell site formerly known as Twitter, and invite you to follow me on Bluesky, a vastly more friendly environment for good and sane people. There's a nice culture there of immediately blocking trolls, and generally not engaging with negativity. It's a welcome change.

Find me at: @cruiseshipdrummer.bsky.social

Nice things about it include starter packs on various topics, so you can group follow a lot of people who are knowledgeable about whatever you're interested in. And there are feeds that are actually functional, under which people interested in a certain thing will congregate. And there's no algorithm— part of what has made Twitter truly toxic in recent years, monetized trolling.

I'm sharing things from the blog, cymbal related news, and a nice mix of art, movie, and comedy related stuff, and some well selected liberal/progressive political content. See you there, and here!

Expanding a concept - 01

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Bishop) — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 18:44:00 +0000

This is connected with all the fill related jive we've been dealing with lately. I share it with you to illustrate a thought process, not a particular set of licks. These are some things I did live while practicing recently, without writing anything down, using the following humble page from my own book, Syncopation in 3/4:

You look at that see a lot of dumb rhythms in 3/4 time; I see an unending fairyland of playing possibilities for the drumset. You may put that in different terms.

I happened to be playing along with a loop sampled from Herbie Hancock's Cantaloupe Island, which is in 4/4 time, with a straight 8th note groove. I was playing 16th note rate stuff against it, so I needed to double time those rhythms— line one for example:

Becomes:

Played in a 4/4 environment that would be:

For practice purposes, and concept purposes, we're interpreting that time signature as a description of the length of the rhythm pattern, not as a demand that we play in 3/4 time.

The rhythm suggests a number of possibilities on the drum set just as a fill/solo idea— starting with RH on cymbal, with bass drum, on the 1; remainder of the rhythm played with the LH on the snare drum, with some help from the RH, as the embellishments get more involved.

Of course we're going to move that around the drums, try some different stickings, accents and embellishments. Generally try to make music out of it.

Some possibilities for line 2:

And line 4:

You'll notice:

- We often add bass drum at the end of the pattern, or between the quarter notes of the original rhythm.
- You can interpret the rhythms as a general pattern outline of fast and slow notes— you can substitute faster rhythms for the 8th notes in the original rhythm.
- You can embellish freely, double or buzz some notes, add flams, add ruffs.

One facet of a larger topic of drumistic thinking. Drummeristic. Whatever. Drumming is a process, not just playing some notes somebody wrote down. More of this coming. This post may see a major revision when I can think about it while some guys are not reroofing my house. It sounds like Gene Krupa uncrating some wildebeest with a sledgehammer on d-day around here.

Transcription: Mickey Roker - Essence

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Bishop) — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 17:46:00 +0000

Here's Mickey Roker playing behind Donald Byrd on Essence, from Byrd's record Electric Byrd. It's vibey modal thing, in a slower 4/4 swing feel. It looks busy on the page, but this is mostly about groove, which is exceedingly deep. Tempo is about 88 bpm.

I've gone a little nuts with the ghost note notation, but it's accurate— a lot of the comping activity is very soft. We can assume he's feathering the bass drum most of the time; I've only notated it where it's audible. Often with Roker that bass drum and snare drum are layered— he plays more unisons between the two drums than some of us do.

In the comments someone mentioned an interview with Roker by Ethan Iverson, where he mentions the bass drum:

EI: When you are playing this fast, are you feathering the bass drum?

MR: I almost always pat the bass drum because that’s the bottom of the drums. I’m from the old school. We used to play with no bass player and you had to pat the bass drum. I am so used to that. Sometimes I get too rambunctious with it but I don’t want to sound like Papa Joe Jones. That’s why I like cats like Vernel Fournier. Nobody played that bass drum like that guy, you can hear it all the time. Some drummers tune their bass drum at too high a pitch and you can hear it but it gets on your nerves. But if it is down and damp, it don’t get in the way of the bass player.

EI: Do you think you are feathering here?

MR: (listens to track [Three Little Words from Sonny Rollins On Impulse!]) No, I am not playing it here. Well, it’s hard to do that on something fast. You can’t do that on something that is extremely fast, unless you are playing without a bass player. (Listening to Sonny solo) Bad dude. Sonny Rollins!

His sound has a lot of bottom, with a large, muffled bass drum with a soft beater. The snare drum is tuned high and crispy. He's using a smaller, medium weight ride cymbal. Toms are medium size, with the top head tighter than the bottom... if you were wondering what that sounds like.

Get the pdf

Reed tweak: RH lead triplets - fast within slow

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Bishop) — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 17:07:00 +0000

This has been an item of interest for a long time— playing fast in a slow tempo. In a master class Peter Erskine mentioned that Jack Dejohnette was the only drummer he knew who could play fast on a slow tempo. He was referring to Jack's playing on John Scofield's Time On My Hands, which Erskine had produced the year before. I've mentioned it a bunch of times here.

Here are a couple of ways of doing this as a Reed system, reading out of Syncopation, with both 16th notes and 16th triplets, within 8th note triplets.

I've chosen to lead the filler with the left hand, favoring an inverted diddle sticking, with the diddle up front, beginning with a LRR where possible. See this page from last year for some other options. Obviously there are a lot of possibilities for stickings, and linear patterns. And it's real similar to some things on the recent 3/8 and 4/8 fills pages. And see this page as well.

Where there are two cymbal hits in a row, you can also play them with the R then L hand.

Get the pdf

Two measure Reed phrases - 02

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Bishop) — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 19:27:00 +0000

Another cut-and-paste, hack-and-slash job, extracting some two measures phrases from the full page exercises in Syncopation. For when I want a particular kind of phrase, and don't want to hunt around the eight pages for it, and don't feel like writing it my damn self. These ones all end the same, with a dotted quarter note's worth of space. And they all start with a note on 1, not a rest.

I had the right hand lead triplet system in mind for these, or any number of the straight 8th RH lead tweaks, that have something special happening in the longer spaces.

Get the pdf

More 3/8 fills - 01

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Bishop) — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 17:24:00 +0000

Here are some things I was playing around with while playing my page of 3/8 fills— embellishments on things on that page. Some odd stickings, or normal stickings I would play in an odd way. Stuff to fool with.

This entire recent framework for fills has been working really well, in teaching, and in my own practicing. We practice a lot of endlessly running patterns on the snare drum, but the thing about a fill is that it has a start and it has an end— you have to get to it from the cymbal, and end it on a cymbal, usually. Kind of obvious, but including that, and doing it in a specific duration of space is working a lot better for me, and my students.

The mission is pretty clear, drill the living bejeezus out of these things, move them around the drums. There are some other obvious sticking possibilities that I didn't include because they're obvious. Vary stickings/accents as you like. I can't control what you do.

Get the pdf

Daily best music in the world: Michael Griener solo set

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Bishop) — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 15:30:00 +0000

Here's an incredibly beautiful solo set by my friend, and friend of the site, Michael Griener. News of Roy Haynes's death broke during the set, and it feels like we're sending him off...

At Richten 25, Berlin, 11/12/24.

RIP Roy Haynes

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Bishop) — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 15:30:00 +0000

The last old master drummer has died, Roy Haynes, at age 99. He was the last of the “magnificent seven” (coined by Lenny White): Kenny Clarke, Max Roach, Art Blakey, Roy Haynes, Philly Joe Jones, Elvin Jones, Tony Williams. He, Elvin and Tony especially are the real triumvirate of modern guys. He was a very slick, modern player from the beginning— he plays a lot of the same stuff on his early records that you hear later on. Maybe I can attempt to write a full blown analysis of his playing and influence soon.

I used to listen to this record in my headphones constantly when I was at USC, it's a fitting send off:

I think the late 80s weren't a real high point for his public profile— this record put him front and center in a lot of people's consciousness:

I've written about him and transcribed him pretty extensively in ~13 years of writing this site, I suggest you spool through that. I also have an e-book of 5 transcriptions.

And here's a very short list of recommended listening:

Miles Davis - & Horns

Thelonious Monk - Misterioso

Roy Haynes - Out Of The Afternoon, We Three, Cracklin', Hip Ensemble

Oliver Nelson - Blues And The Abstract Truth

Steve Lacy - The Straight Horn
McCoy Tyner - Reaching Fourth

John Coltrane - Selflessness Featuring My Favorite Things

Gary Burton - Duster, Like Minds

Chick Corea - Now He Sings Now He Sobs, Trio Music, Trio Music Live

McCoy Tyner - Blues For Coltrane

Pat Metheny - Question & Answer

There's a comprehensive discography here— I'll be going through that and filling in some gaps in my listening.

Fills in a 4/8 framework - 01

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Bishop) — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 16:55:00 +0000

Continuing the concept of that last thing, Fills in a 3/8 framework. Here we've got four 8ths of space to deal with, a cymbal accent, and three 8ths of fill. I'm very pleased with how this broad system is developing— I finally have a way of practicing fills, and teaching them— to all levels of students— that is systematic and realistic to how you actually play. It was always something you just had to figure out by playing a lot. None of the books on the subject made it for me.

This page may see some revision— my office is still blown to hell and I haven't been able to play through them. Some of the stickings are unusual, replace them with whatever more obvious thing you want. I'll probably add/change some stuff.

You know the routine, drill the individual things relentlessly for timing, movement around the drums, dynamics, and lastly speed, then play them in the practice phrases on p. 2. All of the phrases are limited to having three 8ths of fill, and that's pretty limiting— next we'll get into some phrases that are more realistic, and varied.

Get the pdf

Very occasional quote of the day: epic

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Bishop) — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 15:37:00 +0000

From Hal Galper on Facebook:

“I’d heard a recording of an interview with Coleman Hawkins that stuck in my brain. He said you had to go to the city twice. The first time to learn the city, the subways, where the jam sessions were and meet the doorman at every jazz club in town. You can then evaluate your playing relative to the scene, figure out what you had to get together and go home to prepare yourself for your next and hopefully permanent visit. It took me three times

Boston at the time had two top level jazz clubs. George Wien’s Storyville was across the street from The Stable. The NYC bands came to town I'd interrogate them to find out what it was like to go to the city. Everybody had a different story. That's when I realized what happens to you in New York City only happens to you!

I was failing miserably in high school except for Shop as they called it. Grasping at straws, my parents got the idea to send me to a technical prep school my sophomore year in Boston’s Copley Square, coincidentally just across the street from The Stable, Boston’s local jazz club. I had my lunch breaks there, eventually taking a couple of bongo lessons from the club’s janitor just do do something jazzy. I’d bail on the classes spending the rest of day hanging around the club catching the sounds of Serge Chaloff rehearsing from my perch at the top of the ramp that led down to the basement venue. That was where and when I first met and took my first ever jazz piano lesson with Ray Santisi. He hand-wrote out a lead sheet with the melody to Moonlight In Vermont with some simple, nice sounding changes telling me to come back when I’d learned it. I didn’t tell him I couldn’t read. My 2nd lesson, Ray asked me to play the tune. I sat frozen staring at the lead sheet. He opined “forget it kid, you’ll never play.” I remember hearing the receding Doppler Effect of his shoes as he walked up the ramp and out of the club.

Back in Salem again I came home, unkempt but unbowed. But It was too late, I’d caught the bug. Didn’t know if I could play. How could I? I knew nothing. I spent my senior year of high school cutting classes, jamming with my first trio in the back room of the school’s music director, Mr. Devoe. My bass player was Mary Burke from Tennessee and local drummer, John Pramis. Mr. Devoe, he got me. With an unending supply of pre-signed absentee approval slips in hand I jammed my way through my senior year ostensibly working on “the senior revue.,” which was actually true. Having the courage of my ignorance I played my first trio concert at the Review. Two originals. The first was in the key of C, the only key I knew a little bit about at the time, following with another in C minor, which I knew even knew less about. I knew nothing about form or structure. Considering the absolute silence that ensued, it was at best a head-scratching performance.

You want this record.

I was facing a bleak and uncertain future until I learned Massachusetts had a State program offering financial support to disadvantaged students for tuition to go to college. I had lost my left eye in a childhood accident and qualified for full tuition at any institution of higher learning of my choosing. Really? Looking forward the end of the semester I expected to be called down to the Dean’s office because my attendance record was so bad. He said, “Mr. Galper, if you do’t start doing any better you won’t graduate.” Prepared, I gave him a mental F—K you, asserting I didn’t didn’t need no stinkin’ graduation because I was going to be a jazz musician. I left triumphant. My path was clear and didn’t attend my graduation.

A year later I was studying with Ray again at Berklee College Of Music. He’d play the piano while I sat beside him, watching his small hands skitter over the keys in awe. If you were quick enough to stop him and ask, he'd show you what he played. I hadn’t become much of a better musician since our abortive encounter at The Stable and didn't learn a thing that semester. However, I studied with him again a year later and redeemed myself. I was much faster and copped royally!

Ray had been playing 6 nights a week at The Stable forever when he handed his seat over to me! I mean, who does that? I was playing seven nights a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays with Herb’s big band, the weekends in a Varty Haroutunian’s quintet with Herb Pomeroy and Monday nights with Sam’s quartet or Gene Distatio’s Quintet. One night he came into the club, pulled me aside to remind me of our first two lessons. I had completely forgotten the incident. He told me he’d learned an important lesson as a teacher. “Never second guess a student, they can surprise you.” Considering the context, his gesture was incredibly sweet and generous. He didn’t have to tell me that and he did so without ego. A lesson in humility learned and never forgotten.

“Never second guess a student, they can surprise you.”

Following 3 years of intense study with the great Madame Chaloff I was overly protective of my new chops. Alan Dawson was the drummer with Herb’s big band. A great drummer and a prince of a man but he was a lick-stepper, following my lines too close, duplicating the rhythms I was playing. I Hate That! Duplication is death to the music. Playing what you play isn’t dialog. All that tells me is you can hear. Don’t play my ideas, play your own ideas! Can’t have a conversation if the other person says the same thing back to you. I’d have to breakup my phrasing to get away from him. Not bad training in itself but I was staring to lose my hard won chops. The crazy part of me got out of the box and I lost my cool. Like an idiot I pressed Herb with an ultimatum, it’s either me or Alan. No one else in town could play the band’s drum charts and they had Ray Santisi. I was promptly fired having unknowingly broken protocol, instantly becoming persona non grata in Boston. Lesson learned. I have since never given an ultimatum to anyone. In any case, no matter what, it’s inevitable you’ll eventually bypass the musicians you came up with. You’ll know when it’s time to leave town when they make you leave. You’re a reminder they didn’t stick to the true path. So I left, giving what few gigs I had to Mike Nock, split with my first wife to Berlin to Paris to test the waters. I was back in Boston a few months later month without a wife, broke with a brick of hash strapped to my chest, the proceeds of which kept me alive for six months. I figured, gee, I guess it’s time for me to go to The City. Duh!

Stuffed my life into an old blue Navy B4 ever-expanding suitcase and took a bus out of town. Was told to get off at the Port Authority unawares there were two Port Authority bus stations. I got off at 178th St at 2 am with nineteen cents in my pocket, dragging my B4 down a deserted Broadway to West 75th St where I had a couple of friends I’d met the previous summer who’d let me sleep on their floor until I got my shit together. Tried to bum a penny to get 20 cents for the subway but everyone I asked gave me a weird look. Had I known more about NYC culture I would have asked for a dollar. As I walked downtown B4 in hand I kept thinking “welcome to New York Hal, welcome to New York.”

Looking back, I'm more than ever convinced most of the important decisions in our lives are made below the level of consciousness, something I expect to expound upon in the future.”

Abstract art

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Bishop) — Sat, 09 Nov 2024 17:00:00 +0000

Helen Frankenthaler

Talking about abstract painting, and attitudes towards it in general, countering some things I've heard said many times over the years, sometimes about my own work. Modern painting is easy to relate to what we do as drummers— in both disciplines we deal in simple forms, and the craft of it is not always obvious. People who don't know anything enjoy not respecting either of them.

Some drummers are happy to be— no disrespect— pure knuckleheads and live their lives strictly in paradiddles and flam taps; I like people who have interest in art beyond that. Therefore, some things to think about approaching this other art form:

What's similar, and different
It's easy to see an improvisational element in music and in that kind of art. They seem to be analogous to each other, both coming from a similar cultural place and time, with a similar hip modernity. For a long time, though, I could only see how they were different. For example:

Painting is production craft, music is performance craft. Art happens in a work shop, like any other artisanal endeavor— woodworking, pottery, wine making, jewelry— producing objects to sell. Unlike those applied arts, art-art is made to be somehow enriching for being what it is, as a kind of visual literature or music, inspiring some kind of feeling of emotion or creativity in people. Or whatever someone is looking to inspire.

If paintings have an applied purpose, it's to decorate a wall in a home or business, and some of it is strictly that— commercial decoration. The difference between the two is like a quasi-poetic greeting card vs. legit poetry. The difference may be real obvious, or not. Some artists have gotten very skilled doing abstract art that looks great and is visually impactful, but doesn't say a lot.

Of course painting is visual and static, and music is aural and changing. Either way we want sustained interest— for people to look at the picture longer, or to listen to the recording again.

Ellsworth Kelly

Which is where some artists lose me— not enough reasons to look longer. They'll function as an attrative design element as part of a larger space, but there's not a lot to look at in the piece itself. You see Ellsworth Kelly's work in the picture here— he was a great, appealing, creative artist, his work in total is a master class on design possibilities, but there's not a lot to look at in individual works, once you get the initial design idea.

Some have tried to make painting a performance art, but if the main thing is not the end product, then you're really just doing avant garde theater. As long as the end product is the point, it is a production, work shop craft, no matter how you stage its creation.

Likewise, with music, whatever you do with the performance aspect of it, the thing you listen to is the sound. Take that away, you're more doing performance art, or a theatrical spectacle, with incidental music. I don't know if anyone ever bought and listened to a Gwar record, for example.

There is a “performance” aspect in painting, in the sense of real time application of skill, with some or all of a painting are done “live”, in one sitting— alla prima, it's called. Or freehand drawing. Which is usually what we do in music, playing complete performances at once. Commercial music and art, in the interest of production, use a whole range of technical tools and techniques to minimize the need for that real time pure skill performance. More so in commercial art.

“I could do that.”
In fact, yes, you could. If you chose to. In art or music. Many or most of my drum students can deliver credible performances in some type of music, without being full time players. Anyone can do it, and should. It doesn't make it less good, or worth less. But you have to do it.

Getting that easy money faking a career as an artist would require renting studio space, outfitting it, stocking it with materials, and then confronting the problem of trying to make something other people want to look at, that people who look at art all the time would approve to show in their gallery, and that someone might want to spend money on to own it. You would find that it takes many hours of your time, and considerable dedication, not to mention financial investment. You would also have to be able to convey belief in your own work, which you can't do cynically— hard to get away with it, and sustain it. After you do all that, you really are just an artist.

Art likers will counter this with, no, it really is amazing, it is really hard, and piling on the superlatives, which is really not the point. Something does not have to be hard to do— or time consuming for the artist— to be worth looking at. Elvin Jones played Up 'Gainst The Wall in three minutes and thirteen seconds. I'm sure this very large Jackson Pollock painting below was done in an afternoon. What's the difference?

Jackson Pollock

As a technical matter, anyone could have composed John Cage's 4'33". They would have to think of it, and then present it, put it into a performance. Then the real trick is getting it published, and publicized, and getting others to perform it, and listen to it, and have it be persistent in the culture as a work of art. Even if you're convinced that the work is a pure fraud (you'd be wrong), John Cage had to organize his entire life around perpetrating it, he could only do it if he had built up some credibility as an artist. You couldn't say he wasn't committed.

There's more below the fold....

What is it
It's a common question, and for some a source of deep annoyance: what am I looking at.

In his essay Form And Spirit In Art, which you should read, Aldous Huxley says purely abstract art can achieve perfection “within narrow limits.” He points out that some of the most powerful representational art may actually be mostly abstract, but:

[O]ther things being equal, a work of art which imposes aesthetic unity upon a large number of formal and psychological elements is a greater and more interesting work than one in which unity is imposed upon only a few elements.

Basically, he says not having the representational element at all results in a more limited work. That may be. Maybe we're limited as drummers only having the two tom toms, and a couple of cymbals, or if we play as a quartet vs. a full orchestra. Or if we don't have a singer. Maybe a haiku has less power for all the syllables they didn't use, a silent or black and white movie is lesser to one with sound and color.

I think they're simply different things, and the particular attraction of one is not compatible with the other. One may be larger-scale, more grand, longer, more whatever than the other, but we're all filling time with some sound, in a particular way. Or filling some space on a wall.

Often I'll see a painting I like, thinking it's an abstract work, only to realize after a few seconds, oh... it's a mundane picture of some cows, or of a quirky old coot. They have imposed aesthetic unity upon a larger number of elements, but one detracts from the other. Imposing aesthetic unity— meaning “they finished a painting”— also imposes psychological unity on me in viewing the thing, and I can only see an old coot, semi-abstractly or expressively rendered. I don't generally find works that demand I think of old coots to be interesting.

Some common subjects aren't so loaded— landscapes, nudes, interiors, still lifes. But the more particular they are, the more they take you out of the free land of abstaction and into mundane illustration. Not that something can't be great that way, but it becomes something different.

Even if you were a skilled illustrator, you would have to edit out a lot of things in the world that would be visually confusing in an artwork— a lot of objects that are mostly obscured by another, that would be unidentifiable and unaesthectic in a painting.

People don't fully understand how disordered ordinary visual reality is; it's highly abstract. A big mess, and with many elements that would unidentifiable if you put them in a painting. The only reason you put up with it in your daily life is that you can move around and identify things that bother you. Possibly that's where some of the negative reactions come from when viewing abstract work— Where am I? Why did you bring me here? What are these objects?

“[Bryon Gysin] was, of course, the inventor of the cut-up method, which did introduce an element of chance into selection of material for writing. And of course then he realized that life is a cut-up. Every time you walk down the street or look out the window, you're conscious is being cut by these random factors. So it's really closer to the actual facts of perception.”

Sol Lewitt

Deep meaning
Some feel that when they see a painting, some demand is being put upon them to take it seriously as having “deep meaning.” They can be very irritable about that. There may not be deep meaning. If we're dealing with minimalists, they may be just illustrating a simple mathematical logic. You just look and let it run through your mind for a moment, and go to the next thing.

Price tag
People will object to the high price put on something they don't like, that looks easy to them. Those same people mostly do not object to the bass player in AC/DC making a lot of money doing what he does. I don't know if it's harder to be Cy Twombly, or the bass player in AC/DC, or somebody who owns a toilet paper factory, or who inherited a billion dollars and invested it in the stock market. People get money for stuff, not always in balance with their labor, apparent talent, or perceived value to us.

And art speculation and the art market is different from the art itself. This country is insanely wealthy, and any items deemed to be valuable, or unique, or historically important will be extremely expensive, out of all scale to the actual thing itself. So artworks may exist that are only of passing interest to you, but are valued at many millions of dollars. But the art is still the art— it says what it says, regardless of the economics surrounding it.

Willem de Kooning

What I like
I like some mystery, some magic. I don't want to see how it was done. I think that's where the difficulty of some work comes from— the plain fact of the picture is so obvious that they don't sense any mystery.

I don't care for production work, I like paintings to look like a war zone, that there was some conflict in it, an evolution. It shouldn't look too easy, I want to see that someone took some pains with it.

I'm not deeply moved by obvious feats of skill.

I want things to communicate as a piece of design— it doesn't have to be the dominant element, but it should be there.

I do want work to be conventionally attractive somehow, I don't need it to challenge me by being repellent, I have been sufficiently challenged.

I don't want to sense the machinations of the social scene in which the work was produced. Increasingly I'll look at a work and just see the artist's ego and career ambition, and be thinking about who was sleeping with who.

I don't want theater that's too bound up in theatricality— the artificial vernacular of the thing they're doing. Maybe in music that manifests in genre— like with Blues musicians bound up in bluesiness. Literature about literariness, songwritery songwriting. There is a similar thing in art, and when you sense it, the work gets much smaller. It's most analogous to theater, and it can be very difficult to avoid.

There you go— a big, messy post in the aftermath of yet another heartbreaking United States election. I've got other projects to tend to. More drumming stuff coming this week.

Triumph of the worst

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Bishop) — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 16:43:00 +0000

UPDATE: Toning this down a bit— mainly removing a very unkind assessment of the American electorate— and moving on. My current state of mind is that I'm not going to worry about all the horrible things he's going to do until he actually attempts to do them. I'm priviliged enough to not be as vulnerable as many are.

I'm still not convinced the cast of ding dongs he has assembled are competent enough to acheive the total restructuring of government into the pure kleptocracy/theocracy they envision. And they won't be unopposed. They seem congenitally unable to do anything legally, which get them a lot of attention from state attorneys general, at least. They can certainly do lasting damage and hurt and kill a lot of people.

I'm also retiring my Twitter ("X") account— there's a big migration away from it right now. If you want to follow me on social media, I'll be on Bluesky, where the vibe is much nicer, less tension-inducing.

‘recrudescence’ (17th century): the return of something terrible after a time of reprieve.

kak·i·sto·cra·cy

noun

1. Government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state.

2. A state or society governed by its least suitable or competent citizens.

Quite remarkably and apparently decisively, the United States of America has elected D***** T**** to be the nation's president. Running a virtually incoherent, intensely negative, divisive, openly racist and sexist campaign, that was virtually content-free in how it would improve the lives of Americans.

What will happen is that he believes he was elected dictator for life, having been giving some form of immunity from prosecution by the Supreme Court he largely appointed. He will have fewer limiting influences, fewer sane, non-corrupt voices around him. He will have the support of a Republican party that largely believes he is destined to rule as a king, if not worships him as a virtual deity.

...quite sanely, you do not understand what that man has ever done to deserve to be regarded that way. Neither do I.

But he is old and losing energy. The worst excesses of his administration will be conducted by his underlings, whom he will not have the energy or interest to supervise. We'll see how effective they are at that.

Hope: We all didn't just vanish over night. T**** and his vice president and their policies are deeply unpopular with about half the United States population. We were not stripped of our political power. There is still a legal system, both federal and local. There is a federal bureaucracy which the new administration will be seeking to dismantle and disempower— we will see how durable it is. The military has been well aware of its constitutional role, and institutionally resistant to committing crimes at the behest of the executive branch.

There will be another election in two years. He may well try to stay in office beyond his legal term— if he lives that long— but I don't believe he will cancel elections altogether. But Republicans will increase their voter suppression efforts. He is an old man, and is deteriorating mentally and physically. It is unknown whether he could ever be so mentally disabled that the American people would not re-elect him, should he seek an unconstitional third term at age 82.

The power of his movement is that it encourages corrupt, horrible, criminal people to believe this is their time to rule completely. In their hubris, they commit crimes, which will be resisted at some level, and for which they may eventually be prosecuted.

The country and the planet has seen worse, darker times. Possibly worse times than these have been the normal state of affairs for most humans, and things did improve. Barbarians don't just breed more barbarians— intelligent civilized people came from them, civilization came out of barbarism.

Young people came out decisively for Harris— they are the actual future, and they will remember this outrage.

Doom is not an option— there are people who pose as allies, who really are abusing us emotionally with doom content. Shut them out. The situation sucks, that's all. Remember your love and do your work.

And who knows, maybe when he is sentenced for his 37 felony convictions later in November, the judge will simply throw him in prison.

“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

-Toni Morrison

RIP Quincy Jones

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Bishop) — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 15:23:00 +0000

Quincy Jones passed away early this morning. I'm not equipped to write anything meaningful about him, so here are some links: notices from the Associated Press, and from Variety.

“I've never been bored or lonely in my life. I'm an orchestrator, a musician, a producer. I love everything. I've studied languages from Farsi to French. How can you get bored?”

A short video of Jones in the studio with Herbie Hancock, 1984. And a Rolling Stone piece on the making of the “We Are The World” song and video, and another about the Netflix documentary on him.

And famously colorful interviews in GQ, and in Vulture. From that interview— this is really how art works, our whole lives are based on this principle:

“God walks out of the room when you’re thinking about money. You could spend a million dollars on a piano part and it won’t make you a million dollars back. That’s just not how it works.”

As a kid I was most aware of his TV music. There's a lot of forgettable music on TV, even if you heard them a hundred times. A few of them etch themselves in your brain, they're so well structured. There's not one wasted note here, everything has a function, everything connects to something else and leads to something else:

And a more trivial item— from Bill Cosby's first series in 1969-71. I saw it when I was very young, and then when it was syndicated in the late 80s. Jones got screen credit for the song, and that's when he jumped out at me as someone with whom to look deeper:

See the links for more meaningful stuff. RIP.

Fills in a 3/8 framework - 01

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Bishop) — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 17:29:00 +0000

UPDATE: I added a couple of 2/4 options for running the fills by themselves, and also changed the practice phrases— the jazz phrases need a dedicated treatment beyond the scope of this post, so I took them out, and added one more rock phrase.

Big item, closely connected with the other recent things we've been doing with fills— see especially this beats to fills post, and this one, and this collection of right hand lead tweaks. The general idea is to hang the fills off of 8ths notes, and including the surrounding cymbal/bass drum hits in the equation— it's all about frameworks for doing that, and what to do on the fill itself.

Here I've written a lot of fill possibilities to play over the space of three 8th notes— a cymbal hit, plus two 8ths of drums— covering the full gamut of fills from simple and functional, to very dense and soloistic.

Play each of the fills, in each sticking, many times, working out moves around the drums, and accent possibilities— and any further embellishments that occur to you. On the mixed sticking patterns, you can accent the singles. There are a lot of fill ideas, but any single one of them that you learn to use really well is a big deal.

At the top of the page we have the basic framework, with the 3/8 idea played once in 3/8 time, and twice in 3/4 time, and as a running pattern over three measures of 4/4 time. Accents are the important cymbal crashes, slashes are to be replaced by any of the fill options. On the second page there are some practice phrases for practicing them in rock, jazz, jazz waltz, and 12/8 feels:

Everything other than the slashes and accent is ad lib time— play what I've written, or whatever you want in that style.

Get the pdf

History of cymbal manufacturing

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Bishop) — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 17:38:00 +0000

An interesting article by Fritz Steger, author of A History Of Drums Made In Germany, written in German: Welches Becken passt zu meiner Musik und Spielweise? In English that's “Which cymbal suits my music and playing style?”— which is a little misleading, because before he gets to talking about which cymbals passt zu meiner Musik und Spielweise, he gives a pretty detailed history of cymbal manufacturing, mainly in Europe, mainly since the 1800s.

For you non-German speakers, and myself, also a non-German speaker, here is the English translation (from Google translate) of the history portion. Thanks for DFO user type85 for sharing the link— he has a cool YouTube channel you'll want to subscribe to.

This article is intended to provide a basis for the development of drum cymbals and their various metal compounds from ancient times to the present day. After a historical introduction and presentation of the important manufacturers, the second part deals with the sound properties of cymbals and the various alloys with their advantages and disadvantages.

Part I: Where do cymbals actually come from?

Cymbals are of Asian origin and can be found on Assyrian monuments (2nd millennium BC). They were also part of Indonesian gamelan music in the form of tuned bronze gongs. According to Greek belief, they took away the power of demons, so they were beaten at funerals for the deceased. Western miniatures show them up until the 15th century; then they seem to have been forgotten, probably because the art of hammering them was lost. 200 years later, they reappeared in what is now Turkey and found their way into local military music with their Janissary music during the Turkish wars. Soon after, they also found their place in classical music.

In the 1913 Real-Lexikon der Musikinstrumente, cymbals are defined as “a percussion instrument made of two convex bronze plates, hammered to the same thickness, about 40 cm wide, made in all sizes, without a specific pitch, with leather handles threaded through the hump.” “For special effects, the edges are gently clinked together or one of the cymbals is struck with a timpani mallet. Art music makes sparing use of this instrument; but in military orchestras and lower-ranking bands, which of course attach one cymbal to the bass drum and thus coarsen the effect, it has become indispensable.”

Since then, hand-made cymbals have fascinated drummers and percussionists in Europe and the “new world” with their complex sounds, rich overtones and unique character. But what makes them so special? The starting point of every cymbal is its alloy – the metal mixture that gives it its basic sound properties.

It's long, the rest of it is below the fold:

The bronze used since early times, the so-called bell bronze (B20), contains around 80% copper and around 20% tin. It is famous for its excellent sound properties, but it is also comparatively complex and can only be produced with heavy and sweaty[!!! -tb] physical effort. The metals are melted on a forge (an open fireplace with a hood and additional air supply) and cast into individual flat pieces. Since the metals bond more and more poorly as the tin content increases, various heating and cooling phases must be observed. This is the only way to roll the flat pieces into flat blanks and shape them by hammering them, while strictly adhering to precise time windows. Small deviations in this process can lead to cracks during production or when playing later.

But even if the processes are strictly adhered to, each individual cymbal is different from the other. Manufacturers also differ in their own "recipes", for example by adding small amounts of other metals such as iron or even silver. The only Turkish cymbal manufacturer to date, K. Zildjian, speaks of a secret formula that has been passed down from generation to generation since 1623.

The founding period (1880 to 1920)

The technology for producing cymbals from bell bronze was also known in Germany at the turn of the 20th century. One brand name was "Krone"; these cymbals were priced at the same level as Chinese cymbals, which suggests that they could not compete with Turkish cymbals, which were more than twice as expensive. However, the majority of B20 cymbals were imported from China and Turkey, and only major orchestras could afford Zildjian corners[??? -tb]. Instead, the focus was on producing cymbals based on industrially manufactured sheets, primarily brass and nickel silver. The alloy is cast into a large bar and rolled hot into a thin sheet from which the so-called round blanks are punched. These round sheets are much more homogeneous and hardly differ from one another. They are formed into cymbals when cold. At first, this was also done by hammering.

A brand name that appears in several catalogs from this period is "Smyrna". In addition to the brass and nickel silver that are still used today, basins were also made from so-called composite metal. This was an alloy of 80 - 90% tin, 2 - 6% copper, antimony and bismuth, which was also used to make cutlery and jugs.

There were a large number of cymbal forges in China, the most famous of which was the Gaohontai company in Wuhan Province, which looks back on a history of almost 2,000 years. The factory was renamed Wuhan in the 1960s. The manufacturing process differs in some ways from the Turkish method.

In Italy, the Agati-Tronci workshop, a manufacturer of organ pipes, had begun to manufacture cymbals using the Turkish method. A special feature was that the liquid alloy was spun into a basic shape using centrifugal force. A process that is still used today under the name "rotocast" (in English, centrifugal casting).

And in St. Petersburg, Estonian musician Toomas Paiste hammered the first cymbals in 1906. He had served in the Russian Imperial Guard and retired in 1901 to open a music shop. The First World War brought development to a standstill, as the metals needed for cymbal production were needed for armaments.

A significant step was that Avedis Zildjian III left Turkey, settled in Boston, USA, and founded a candy company there. In 1927, he received a letter from his uncle Aram informing him that he was to inherit the secret formula for cymbal production. In 1928, Avedis III began manufacturing cymbals in Quincy, Massachusetts. However, since the K. Zildjian factory continued to operate in Turkey, and the Gretsch company held the marketing rights for the USA, he named his company Avedis Zildjian Co.

In the meantime, music had changed dramatically. Previously, only orchestral and marching cymbals had been in demand, but the drum kit had changed to a combined instrument made up of various drums and cymbals played with sticks. New styles of music such as swing and jazz became very popular. Avedis III sought out jazz drummers to understand their needs for the new playing technique and quickly put their desire for thinner cymbals into practice. From this time onwards, cymbals began to be named according to their purpose. In Germany, they were called “hissing and gong cymbals” or later “hit and accompanying or working cymbals”, with the English synonyms being “crash and ride cymbals”.

In order to keep up with the rapidly growing market, the process of making cheaper cymbals - similar to pots and pans - began by no longer hammering the discs, but pressing them into shape on a rotating disk using high pressure. The Nazi regime and the Second World War interrupted this development, at least in Europe. Metal was again important for the war effort and the new music was considered degenerate anyway.

The economic miracle years (The 1950s)
The Paiste family had an eventful history, marked by flight. Their path took them via Estonia to Poland and then to Schleswig-Holstein, where Michail M. Paiste set up a cymbal and gong factory. However, his sons Robert and Toomas, worried by the Cold War, were looking for a "safe country". After being denied a visa to the USA and Canada due to their Russian origins, they settled - more by chance - in Nottwil on Lake Sempach in Switzerland. An absolute stroke of luck, as it later turned out, because in Dornach, about 80 km away, there was a rolling mill that was able to produce B20 bronze using the strip casting process. From this, Paiste developed its "Formula 602" series, which they presented in 1957. Since the bronze produced by strip casting was more homogeneous than individually cast rounds, the individual cymbals are much more similar and also less earthy, which suited some musical styles.

In Italy, the Marradi-Benti, Zanchi & Biasei, Rosati Leopoldo and A. & B. Fratelli Tronci families joined together to form the Unione Fabbricanti Italiani Piatti (Union of Italian Cymbal Manufacturers), or UFIP for short.

In Germany, Roland Meinl founded Meinl Cymbals in 1951 as a one-man business in his basement and produced the two cymbal lines Meteor made of brass and Roman Mark made of nickel silver. Another producer was the company Korn and Riedel near Munich, which produced inexpensive, pressed cymbals under the names Korri, Estrella, Zymbor, Tyrko, Luna, Sultan and the beautiful name Schu-Schu-Türk.

In the GDR, cymbals were pressed by machine in the state-owned company Trowa VEB (Trommelwaren) - the former Sonor factory. Rodjian made hand-hammered cymbals by hand.

In England, pressed cymbals made of nickel silver were available under the names Zyn and Krut (Turk spelled backwards).

In Graslitz – today Kraslice – in the Czech Republic, the former centre of musical instrument making in the 19th century, there were both hammered and pressed cymbals from the still active wind instrument manufacturer Amati, later under the name Magic (until 2005).

The Beat Era (The 60s and 70s)
The appearance of the Beatles with Ringo Starr brought Zildjian full order books worldwide. They were busy automating production processes while maintaining as consistent quality as possible. But guitar amplifiers quickly became larger and the music louder. Just as Zildjian addressed the needs of drummers in the jazz era, it was now the Paiste company that was in tune with the times and was looking for a solution to develop cymbals for this new music. The goal was a softer basic sound with brighter overtones and better durability. With industrially manufactured bronze made of 92% copper and 8% tin, from 1965 onwards they succeeded in developing professional cymbals with a frequency spectrum that gave the cymbals more power than the B20 cymbals. The "Giant Beat" series evolved into the legendary 2002 series in the early 1970s, which made drummers such as John Bonham, Ian Paice, Nick Mason and Cozy Powell, to name just a few, world famous.

Roland Meinl, meanwhile, developed a machine that could produce cymbals fully automatically using the pressing process in a matter of seconds. In the mid-1960s, he was one of the first to import Japanese drums from the companies Star (now Tama) and Pearl. His goal was to sell each of these relatively inexpensive instruments with a set of his cymbals if possible.

The big split (The 1980s)
According to tradition, the Zildjian secret could only be passed on to a male successor. The few times this was not kept resulted in bitter fighting and division. However, Avedis III let his two sons Aram and Robert in on the "Zildjian Secret". After the enormous success, Zildjian opened a second factory, the Azco factory, in Meductic, New Brunswick, Canada in 1968. The background was that Canada could sell to the Commonwealth countries at a much lower price due to the customs union. In addition to cheap, pressed cymbals with the name Zilco, certain Avedis Zildjian models (Canadian A's) were also manufactured there. In the same year, the original Zildjian factory in Istanbul and all trademark rights were regained.

From the mid-1970s, cooperation with the Turkish regime became so difficult that it was decided to close the Turkish factory and bring the remaining family members Mikhail and Kerope Zildjian to North America. Since immigration to the USA was refused, they came to the Canadian factory and began producing hand-hammered K Zildjian cymbals there in 1976. These "Canadian K's" are now among the most sought-after and most expensive cymbals. At the beginning of 1977, Armand Zildjian was appointed president of the Avedis Zildjian Company by his father. A fight broke out between him and his brother Robert over the future direction of the company. Robert Zildjian then separated from the company and in 1981 began producing Sabian cymbals - named after his three children Sally, Billy and Andy - in the Canadian Azco factory.

At the same time, a former cymbal smith from the Zildjian factory in Istanbul, Agop Tomurcuk, together with his partner Mehmet Tamdeger, began to produce hand-hammered cymbals in the old Turkish tradition under the name "Zilciler". The cymbals were clearly different from the cymbals that were largely machine-made in the USA and were also cheaper. Shortly afterwards, the brand name was changed to Istanbul.

After the German company Meinl introduced its first semi-professional King-Beat cymbals made of B8 bronze in 1976, it expanded its range to include the Laser series, the completely robot-hammered Profile series and the Raker series designed for heavy drummers.

New paths (The 1990s)
Due to increasing competitive pressure in the metal industry, the production plant where the B20 bronze, which was produced using the strip casting process, was shut down. But Robert Paiste and his team had something completely different in mind anyway and let the Formula 602 series die - at least temporarily. He wanted to develop a completely new bronze that would outshine everything that had come before. It should combine the advantages of the frequency response of professional B8 series with the balance of B20, "the best of both worlds" so to speak.

The result was the Paiste "sound bronze", which consisted of 85% copper and 15% tin. Even though in theory up to 18% tin can be added to the copper without the second temperature stage, Paiste soon faced problems in practice. The first series, which was produced in 1989 in a rolling mill in Eastern Europe, suffered from quality problems, and these were only resolved when the production of the raw material was moved to southern Germany. Although this alloy was convincing in terms of sound, one disadvantage was the huge loss of material during production and the resulting high costs. The Paiste series Signature, Traditional and Dark Energy were created from this material. When Paiste's patent for the alloys B13 to B18 expired, Zildjian experimented with B15 under the name Project 391, but abandoned it, probably due to the poor cost-benefit ratio.

In 1996, Agop Tomurcuk died in an accident, and it was decided that the Istanbul company would be divided between Agop's sons Arman and Sarkis and Mehmet Tamdeger, who founded a separate company.

In 1990, Meinl introduced the Tri-Tonal series, developed in collaboration with Billy Cobham. It was Meinl's first professional series, on the basis of which the "One of a Kind" line was created at the end of the decade.

Modern times (from 2000)
From the new millennium onwards, practically all manufacturers stopped concentrating on the series they were known for and instead began to serve all niches, from simply pressed brass to hand-hammered cymbals. And the range of alloys was expanded again.

The companies Meinl and, somewhat later, Paiste came to the conclusion that hand-hammered B20 cymbals could only be produced in Turkey and therefore entered into cooperation with Turkish manufacturers who delivered the hammered cymbals to the respective factory where the final finishing took place. Well-known series are Meinl MB20 and Byzance as well as Paiste Twenty and Masters. In the hope of selling larger quantities of B20 cymbals, Paiste with the Formula 602 Reissue series and Meinl with the M series then returned to the strip casting process and cooperated with a southern German metalworks. However, the timing was unfortunate because the high investment in a second temperature stage meant that the production costs were extremely high. The success of both series was rather moderate.

After the split in Istanbul, Turkish cymbal manufacturers sprang up like mushrooms. Anatolian, Bosphorus and Masterwork were the beginning. A good 20 years later, there are over 30 companies.

B10 (Meinl MB10) and B12 (Zildjian ZHT and S-Family as well as Meinl Soundcaster and Pure Alloy) were new alloys that came onto the market. Meinl has almost completely dispensed with B8 bronze since 2024.

In addition to very cheap Chinese cymbals, which are sold by a Belgian wholesaler, Dream Cymbals, which come from China but are processed in Canada, occupy a special position.

Not bad. I also recommend The Cymbal Book by Hugo Pinksterboer for even more insane detail on every aspect of the history, manufacturing, playing of cymbals.

Latest practice loop archive

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Bishop) — Sun, 20 Oct 2024 17:32:00 +0000

Here we are, the latest archive of all my sampled practice loops, mostly categorized by style, mostly with tempos. I also have folders with all the loops I use the most, and with the ones that will be most useful to the most people, in all styles.

Put them on your device and run them through headphones, and practice whatever you're practicing. I think it's the best way to practice, because:

A. It's real music from real records. All the playalongs recorded for that purpose that I've used seem phony. Playing with them is not the same experience.
B. I believe your memory for recorded sounds is very good. Memorized recorded sounds are a natural form of this mythical “internal clock” people are so fond of theorizing about.
C. Because of that, I think this way of practicing is very good for your musical time— so long as you're actively concentrating on your time and accuracy while you're doing it. The only thing better is to play with a slow click— metronome sounding the 1 only, or every other 1. In fact you should do both of those things.
D. Playing with loops gives all the dumb things you have to practice a chance to sound like music— you play them musically, with a musical touch, in a way that matches the vibe of the recording. In essence you're testing out musical ideas vs. the music of the loop.
E. It's fun and tricks you into practicing longer.

Download the archive (5.7 GB)

In light of this splendid gift I've given you, this is a great time to contribute a little something to the site— a recurring cash contribution (see the sidebar), buy a book (sidebar), or buy one of these wonderful Cymbal & Gong cymbals you have inexplicably not bought yet. Or get some lessons— in person if you're in Portland, or on line. I don't make significant money through this site, so a few people doing any of those things are a big encouragement for me in doing it. Thanks! tb

Two measure Reed phrases - 01

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Bishop) — Sat, 19 Oct 2024 17:39:00 +0000

Another cut and paste item— a specialty of mine— extracting some two measure phrases from the full page exercises in the book Syncopation. In lessons I have to hunt around for phrases I want, and this puts most of them together on one page. These are all pretty tight rhythms, with no greater than quarter note spacing between notes.

These will make good jazz solo phrases, in a right hand lead triplet interpretation, here based on pattern 8 on the page (written here with the RH part on cym/bad; the other usual way to do this has RH playing accents on the snare/toms, no bass drum, and LH ghosted on the snare):

They'll also make slightly less-good funk phrases, with a half time feel funk rhythm in the first measure, and straight 8th right hand lead in the second (again, RH in second measure can also be played on SD/toms, no BD):

Get the pdf

Bill Stewart

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Bishop) — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 16:17:00 +0000

I've been listening to a lot of John Scofield this week, and realized I basically never talk about Bill Stewart here. It's weird, he's on anyone's short list of top living jazz drummers, particularly of those who became known in the past 35 years. As a massively influential drummer, he became well known right between Joey Baron and Brian Blade.

I first heard him on Scofield's 1991 record Meant To Be, and it was one of those epochal moments, like the first time I heard Dave Weckl— like this undeniably is the new thing. I associated what I was hearing with Roy Haynes, who was getting revived about that time via Pat Metheny's record Question & Answer, and it seemed cool that Stewart seemed to be influenced by him.

In particular there was one spot where he just played some quarter notes— Big Fun, the track below, at the end of the head— from which I took a big lesson, about using the full range of what you could play, having creative access to all of it. Any time something like that jumps out at you, it's a big deal.

He definitely seemed like a completely fresh animal, a new generation of player— highly musical, a highly skilled improvisor, clearly with broad tastes, a very sharp musical intellect, and creative with all four limbs. He seemed to be on a new level with all of that, while not being merely amazing.

He has been massively influential in terms of sound— I'm thinking about his sound on three fairly early recordings, that were very influential on me, at least: Scofield / Meant To Be, Pat Metheny & John Scofield / I Can See Your House From Here, and Joe Lovano / Landmarks. It's a very cute sound, with a cranked snare drum, and high, round-sounding toms and bass drum. It's very clean, pretty, and musical— maybe Jack Dejohnette's sound was the closest recent influence to it. It's so ubuquitous now that it seems inevitable, but the other big people before Stewart were Joey Baron and Jeff Watts, both of whom used bigger bass drums, and had punchy or medium tunings with their toms, respectively.

His cymbal didn't jump out at me so much, but it's clearly an exemplary sound— a smaller, more transparent K sound than Brian Blade's, the other big recent influence in that area. Youtubers have turned his sound and technique into a meme— of course it came simply through him dealing with a slightly too-light cymbal, a familiar situation:

And listen: I'm not being disparaging calling his sound cute, it's a particular vibe to me, like Jan Garbarek here:

He has a distinctive touch on the snare drum as well— expressed here in a New Orleans-type street beat groove, which was hip “new” thing about that time. Since then it has become an expected regular type of groove in jazz, largely* off the strength of what Stewart was doing with Scofield.

* - I can't not mention Jeff Watts here, who had the famous recording of Caravan with Wynton Marsalis, and also Terri Lynn Carrington, who played the groove on a previous Scofield record.

Finally, here's a great interview with him, by Pablo Held— I hadn't listened to it before writing this, and I'm happy to see a couple of my observations confirmed.

There's a great part about improving time at about 43 minutes in:

So, I don't know why I don't talk about him much— partly I've been more immersed in older players since I've been writing this site. He's clearly a durable artist, he's doing the real stuff— I'll listen to some players, and they may be great, but their concerns clearly seem different from mine, and I can't sustain a lot of interest. Stewart is not in that category, I'll be listening to him a lot more in coming weeks.