Transcription: Cabbage Alley breakdown

Polishing my backbeats-playing for kind of a big record date later in August, I've been playing along with this track quite a bit: Cabbage Alley, by The Meters; and noting to myself how much more rewarding and educational it is to play with real music, rather than commercial playalong tracks. Here we have just the breakdown from this song, which is sixteen bars long, starting at 1:42. Drumming is by Zigaboo Modeliste, of course.

The variations in the groove are pretty inconsequential; you can see that he'll drop out some notes on the hihat occasionally, and vary the volume of the filler notes on the snare drum, and drop out the bass drum when the piano comes in. The roll in the last measure sounds smooth enough that it could be a 5-stroke, but that would throw off the moves to the toms, so it must just be a very long and smooth single buzz, tied to the following note.

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