First things first - grab your free transcription here.
I’ve got a feeling the title and thumbnail will go through some further iteration before the public sees them.
So if you’ve been following the channel, you know we’ve done a fair bit on “grand unified theories” of improvisation. Like - first order: arranging phrase lengths creatively while keeping 4/4 in your head. Below that, attaching specific drum licks of the same length, and learning to play them. Below that, substituting specific licks and shapes creatively to create your individual “tool kit”. To extend on that, different phrase lengths that can create “odd” shapes.
And we’ve looked at this taxonomy for…shall we say…fusion…styles of improvisation.
But it’s no less useful for jazz. After all, everything has a length. And through my teaching this year, it’s occurred to me that this rhythmic system can solve one of the more fundamental issues learning to improvise for jazz drums: how to get transcriptions of the greats into our playing.
Sure others have put this together, but not we’re doing it!
But, super-broad-strokes, “mainstream” approach to learning jazz drumming was:
Rudiments
Transcribing the greats
Long ellipses
Mastery
Like the South Park Underpants Gnomes, those ellipses were doing a lot of unheralded work. They were actually the main part of the challenge. Because it’s obviously one thing to transcribe verbatim, then copy greats like Max Roach.
And there’s probably a “long way” where if you transcribe enough, eventually the vocab will get in there via brute force, like a newborn learning language.
But I think we can do better.
And the “lego blocks” system, or whatever the name-of-the-week is, helps this immensely. If we start by learning to sequence and rearrange “lego blocks” - i.e. basic vocabulary - while keeping 4/4 in our heads and taking care of all the details like timing, touch, subdivision, the hats on “2 and 4”, etc…
…then we can just substitute any hotlick from Max, Philly Joe, et al, right into the matrix, as long as we account correctly for the link.
It’s…ALIIIIIVE.
Or something.
Anyway, in this video, we start by presenting the system, in brief, then move swiftly to substituting real jazz drum vocabulary. All in the hopes that you can shorten the process between not playing jazz solos at all, and being a complete master, by having a useful toolkit you can deploy even as you’re doing into greater detail learning the masters.
Hope you enjoy.