Here’s the free download to accompany this lesson.
While there may be no global conspiracy to keep aspiring jazz drummers in the dark, I find that certain things are…”under-emphasized”, perhaps because they came naturally to great players.
If you’re looking to learn jazz swing beats, you’ll find an abundance of material from the best drummers and teachers in the world, several-and-counting of whom have been on the podcast.
As I feel they do an adequate job communicating the tradition, and going through basic concepts like “walking the dog”, we’ll cover those only briefly at the top of the lesson.
What’s more interesting to me is stuff that was hard for me as a novice, and which - while teachers did tell me about, I needed a decade of grinding away on gigs and jam sessions to understand its centrality to jazz swing.
What I’m speaking about are…
(1) the precarious balance of kit voicing, subdivision, time, relaxation, and original ideas
(2) how to improvise “semi-broken” time, which all modern drummers do, but few seem to talk about
Naturally, we’ll have to tackle those in order.
So we’ll go through some of the traditional “walk the dog” instruction, but with an emphasis on maintaining that balance. (It doesn’t count as surfing if you can only balance on the board on the beach.)
Then, in the “list exclusive” second half, we’ll get into an algorithm my students helped me develop for improvising the meandering-but-anchored ride cymbal beats we associate with Max Roach, Connie Kay, Joe Morello, Mel Lewis, and more.
It was a lot of fun making this lesson, and I hope you get some utility from it.
Enjoy!