Groove o' the day: Peter Erskine — Clint

Because I like challenging you to hear past things that most people perceive as cheese, here's a little relic of the later fusion era, by the great John Abercrombie trio with Marc Johnson and Peter Erskine. Honestly, this is a case where it sounds cheesy to me, too. The tune is Clint, from the album Current Events.

On the head, the only things happening are the drums, the melody, and a little synth pad, so what Erskine plays is very exposed; he treats main part of the tune as something like a commercial arrangement, and it's a good idea to study how how he interprets the whole thing— it's very deliberately constructed. It's really textbook. The groove for the main part of the tune, then:

From the middle section. There's more activity with the rest of the group, and he plays more interactively. Play the unaccented notes very softly:

The triplet at the end is an embellishment; usually he just plays 16th notes through that.

Audio after the break: