What would pros think of your jazz playing?

Ever wonder what faculty members at Berklee, or MSM, or Juilliard, or NYU, would be listening for if you played jazz drums for them?

Ever wonder, if you sat in at Smalls after one of your jazz heroes, what he or she would be listening to to judge your jazz playing?

Well, of course, it’s impossible to know exactly.

Everybody’s different and values things differently. Plus, if there’s a way to read minds if hasn’t made its way to me yet.

But we can make educated guesses.

I can judge based on what past teachers have told me, and based on the things I learned to value more highly in the process of becoming a better drummer. And I think we can get pretty close.

Many of these things are, by definition, subtle. If we knew what they were we’d probably be better.

But over the years of listening to jazz drummers who have the bare minimum package to swing and those still proto…that point (and there’s nothing wrong with that)…

…one develops an intuition. One overhears others sitting on an audition panel quip “if I could just hear one person xyz before the end of the day, my faith in humanity won’t be utterly destroyed.”

(Audition panels are a grind.)

If you’re an aspiring jazz drummer, wouldn’t you like to know what “xyz” is?

In this video, I’ll tell you.

Five subtle sings pros listen to to determine whether or not a jazz drummer is legit.

Watch it here.

See you soon,

N

3 Fills for Purdie Shuffles

Grab your transcription here!

Greetings!

Today I bring you three easy sounding fills for purdie shuffles, “that sound hard”.

The whole “easy thing that sounds hard” thing isn’t usually my jam, but in this case “hard” really means “interesting”.

The usual fills we pull out in triplet or sextuplet situations are boring for a couple of reasons: predictable phrasing, and predictable orchestration. I like to begin a lot of my fills on the snare and hats, and practice orchestrating them creatively, so that’s the genesis of these 3.

The first 2 are just specific patterns you can play on various parts of the kit, or on various parts of the beat…

…but the third is more like “glue” - just a simple pattern to allow combinations of the previous two. I know once you mess with these a little, you’ll start having fun and making some new shapes.

Hope you enjoy!

The Best Jazz Tunes for Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced Drummers

This week’s lesson is a highly-requested one.

Quite often, people ask me “what jazz tunes should I learn?” And there are thousands to choose from, from musical classics of Cole Porter and Johnny Mercer, to big band suites from Duke Ellington, to Charlie Parker reworks of famous songs, to the originals of everybody from Dizzy to Monk. (Not to mention the “modern classics” I did a whole video about.)

The obvious answer is “whichever tunes inspire you to play, and fire you up to learn fastest”. Which is still an answer I’d give, but I’d hedge a little with this: “also, probably learn the tunes people are most likely to call at jam sessions.”

It’s not about prestige, or bragging points, though if you can make it through these tunes you’ll certainly get a little of that. On a basic level, if you want to play jazz with other humans, in a jazz scene, much less at music school, it helps to know the canon everybody’s going to be drawing from in addition to everything else you think is cool/that inspires you.

Once I had the nine tunes I’ll discuss in this video under my belt, it became fun to start suggesting other tunes I’d heard on various records: Boo Boo’s Birthday, Time After Time, Blue in Green, Cheek to Cheek, etc.

So it’s in that spirit that I’m going to recommend these nine tunes: what I’d classify as the 3 most commonly-called in my experience in New York’s public and private jam sessions, at each of the 3 levels - beginner, intermediate, and advanced.

A quick word about what makes a jazz tune “hard”: none of these is exactly “movie hard”, the way the Caravan arrangement in Whiplash appears to be (or something like Gary Smulyan’s Lickety Split is in real life) - i.e. with tons of unpredictable figures and changing meters. The “hardness” of a jazz standard comes from the fact that you have to play the form reliably, and keep the exact number of sections/bars/harmonies in your head while the soloist is playing over them, often taking liberties with phrasing, etc.

In a word - can you keep the form in Stablemates when Aaron Goldberg intentionally plays a harmonic change 2 bars early, just for fun?

(That’s why I also chafe at the trope that drummers don’t know harmony. Ask me to whistle an unaccompanied solo over any of these sometime. Or at the very least hum a bass line. And I’m not unique. Any jazz drummer worth his/her salt knows these forms deeply.)

So the “beginner” catalogue is tunes that are pretty easy for a beginner to play over, with a soloist, without losing the beat or the form.

And as they get more “advanced”, they require a more and more experienced drummer not to get lost.

I had a ton of fun making this one, and I hope you enjoy.

Drum Like Steve Gadd

Gadd - zooks!

It’s an afternoon with the Gadd - fly.

You know what they say: thank…

Puns aside, the Gaddfather has been front-of-mind since the beginning of the year, when I started looking into the Boogada.

One doesn’t simply disregard the Aja solo in considering that tradition. So I’d had it - and the Manhattan School of Music Clinic where Gadd explains the vocabulary - seared into my brain.

And, what-do-you-know, I started hearing “Gadd-esque” things in my head while walking down the street. Doing the dishes.

I’d chafe to get back to the studio so I could see if what I was hearing would really work on the drums. So, I decided to make you, the good people of the internet, a video on it.

Far from force-feeding myself some Gadd licks I could regurgitate, this is a video I couldn’t not make, given how much Gadd vocabulary is bubbling up emergently in my playing.

Anyway, hope you enjoy!

Oh - and grab your transcription here.

I Said Good Day 😜