First things first. Download your free transcription here.
There's a drum beat that's suddenly everywhere.
And maybe you're "get off my lawn" type. In which case you might not care.
But think you should, and here's why:
There's no "classic" beat or drumming style that wasn't at one point "the kids" or "the new thing". I'm sure I can find headlines about how ragtime is corrupting our kids and destroying the family.
The it was jazz. Then bebop. Then rock and roll. There was always something "the kids were doing" that was scandalous at the time, which has since become the incumbent music.
Some of you will say "it's all notes" or "it's too busy". Know who else they said that about?
Charlie Parker. Then Coltrane.
Maybe I'm being too defensive. But there's a lot of blanket dismissal of "what the kids are doing" in my YouTube comments these days.
But what are we actually talking about?
It's a style that's suddenly everywhere. Like some of the other styles I've covered, it's a little hard to describe, but you know it where you hear it.
And if you squint, you hear echoes of In A Silent Way and Red Clay - an era when a generation of musicians with a new level of technical facility were stretching musically.
To my mind that's what you hear when Jharis Yokley plays...well, Red Clay...or when some of the latest generation of artists "mess around" with what's essentially a vestige of all the exercises they had to learn to improvise. A sped up version of what I'd call a "switching exercise".
Phew.
Anyway, that's why to make hide or hair of any of this stuff, the key in my opinion is understanding the movement system that underlies all this stuff. And my way into that was the funk clave system.
So in this video, we appy the funk clave system to decode what the kids are doing. Hope you enjoy!