Now for something.....

The artist is Harknox. The year is 1999. The song is Fire Like This:

Full disclosure, this track is featured (probably the best feature) in the film Me, Myself and Irene (view at your own risk)- I will not aid and abet by providing a link or clip. If you want a good laugh I am sure you can do better than this. 

The transcription has 32nd notes that should probably be played as single strokes. To make it easier to read I indicated them as double stroke 16th notes.

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ELECTRICITY!

                                            Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart)

I promised to post some Beefheartian drum transcriptions and promptly procrastinated. WTF-almost 50 years after Safe as Milk was released, the fist ever posting/publishing of a Beefheart drum transcription, albeit a rough transcription at best. First five measures are the introduction, the last measure is the main rhythm of the song which John French describes as a quasi conga line rhythm derived from the guitar lines. The transcription is from John's demonstration in the "corny/out of context" film  Captain Beefheart: Under Review.

                                              The year is 1967. The song is Electricity:

                                            The drummer is John "Drumbo" French:

                                                         .
                                                     The transcription is below:

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Captain Bacardi

OK, getting a little better at Muse, so here is an attempt at catching up on lost time. I know I intended to post some Captain Beefheart but instead... here have some Captain Bacardi instead.

So many Brazilian rhythm transcriptions (and lets face it, bands playing tired Brazilan grooves) get you ready to snore on another cliche; but Captain Bacardi is a very hip beat!

From Jobim's summer of love record- WAVE with Mr. Claudio Slon-drums. 

Transcription starts at beginning.

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Another Sophomoric Miniature

This piece reflects some of the things that got me obsessed on impractical things- Art, Music and Philosophy. So here is my unabashed homage to all things naive. Passion meets boredom.

Since this is a drum blog a quick note on the beat. It started out in 9/4 to keep with the Stephen Foster/Beautiful Dreamer and Claude Debussy/Clair de Lune ennui but morphed into even time (10/4).

Children's Crusade

Blast from the Past: Before there was YouTube, there was the very 1980's BBC/PBS show Rock School to help all us nubes!

Beware: Big hair, Spandex, Simmons drums, pixel graphics & classic synths, abound.

Omar Hakim explains how he came up with the groove to Sting's "Children's Crusade". 

The transcription starts at 0:34 sec.

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*Sorry, I will be posting more frequent, and hopefully more accurate transcriptions if I can learn how to use Muse. Right now I am still struggling with it! I have been avoiding posting scans of hand written pages but that would be the path of least frustration. Note, there is no last hi-hat eighth note in the last measure.

I like raindrops, santa claus, chocolate milk and miniatures

A self-indulgent post. I know. My first little FL Studio project.

A very tasty Jack DeJohnette- Transcription

Hubert Laws- Rite of Spring (CTI-1971)
J.S. Bach- Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, 2nd Movement

Do not let the western "classical music" cover selections and the 1970's birth date of this recording scare you away. While CTI could sometimes have it's over produced string/cheesy moments, at it's best CTI presented some modern classics. Some of the jazz-rock sounds CTI was producing would later become more specifically associated with ECM and Manfred Eicher's ethereal (and somewhat less groovy) Nordic palette.

As a side note, Jack DeJohnette has stated (in Rick Mattingly's book- The Drummer's Time)  that he helped formulate the classic ECM cymbal sound by having his cymbals recorded with a separate microphone over and under each cymbal to capture the ping and the overtones. DeJohnette has also pointed out that while he is often known for his ability to float lightly with cymbal shadings alone, that the bass drum is essential and has always had a solid foundation in Jazz. DeJohnette states that due to the historic poor recording (he calls out Atlantic Records as a prime offender) of the bass drum on so many jazz tracks, that often only the accents  were captured. This in turn helped lead generations of jazz drummers to think the kick drum was only for dropping occasional bombs as opposed to being part of the pulse as it is in all other American groove music. In the same article, DeJohnette pays respect to VanGelder's Blue Note recordings for their bass drum fidelity.

This recording like so many other jazz classics was recorded by Rudy Van Gelder in the land of my birth. For an idea of just how many jazz classics were produced by RVG in his North Jersey studios see- Van_Gelder_Studio

On this track, (a pre-Tribe Called Quest) Ron Carter evokes the primal awakening of the forest sound on the intro along with Law's, leading into DeJohnette's taut, linear, melodic drumming. This performance gave me a new appreciation for the musicality and similarity of DeJohnette's drumming with the logical yet still emotional polyphonic lines of Bach. Any organist who can play a Bach fugue, seriously puts to test the average drummers' multi-limbed coordination pretensions.

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