Tuesday, July 16, 2019

Page o' coordination: Max's rubadub?

This is a page of jazz comping exercises based on Max Roach's playing on Sonny Rollins's Freedom Suite, which I'm transcribing right now. There's a lot of interplay between the snare drum and bass drum, and there's clearly a concept happening; everything seems to hang off of comping notes on the & of 1/& of 3. It jumped out at me immediately like “this is a thing”, very similar to Mel Lewis's rubadub thing, but not.

How many pages of jazz coordination patterns does the world need? I don't know. This isn't about writing more patterns, it's about forming a concept. Max's playing on Freedom Suite, Mel Lewis's thing, those are concepts. Also with John Riley's thing, with all the things we do with Syncopation, there's a concept. You don't really get that by just playing through the endless junk in Advanced Techniques, or whatever jazz book.




Swing the 8th notes. Use patterns 1, 7, and 13 as your key. Think of them as a sticking pattern played in a swing rhythm: RLRR RLRR. Or RBRR RBRR. Or the two combined with ex. 13-18. Use those as your foundation, learn them well, and hang the added notes off of them.

If you listen to the recording there's a lot more happening than is represented in this one little idea. I'll probably rewrite this page, or at least add to it, if I can deduce any kind of formula to Max's thing.

Get the pdf

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