Monday, February 07, 2022

An Elvin-inspired lick

A page inspired by something that came up on Elvin Jones's solo on the tune Crisis, which I partially transcribed last week. It's not even a lick, it's something funny that happened with his timing, that's worth exploring.   

Pattern 1 is the key part— the triplet portion is really just a distortion of the alternating 16th notes. The sticking for both parts is RLRL, we've just pushed the rhythm around and put in an odd accent. Apart from this thing as a solo idea, it would be worth playing pattern 1 for awhile as a stick control pattern— teaching your hands a triplet expression of that ordinary RLRL sticking. 



The rest of the page are some possibilities for moving it to the drum set. Play around with it, move it around the drums, have some fun. 

Get the pdf

2 comments:

Knob said...

There’s a very similar lick in John Riley’s ‘Jazz Drummers Workshop’ book taken from Elvin’s solo on ‘Black Nile’ by Wayne Shorters ‘Nightdreamer’ album.

Todd Bishop said...

Interesting, nice catch! I'll look that up....