James Brown. Funky Drumming.

Over the past week or so, I've found myself in an obsessive James Brown phase. I realized that, for some dumb reason, I had never bothered to really learn any of the essential JB grooves. After writing some of the drum parts down, I figured I might as well learn the corresponding bass lines as well. Closely listening to the bass and drum parts made me recognize how deeply funky and in the pocket the drums and bass are on these tracks.....hardly a unique revalation, I know. Anyway, Clyde Stubblefield and John "Jabo" Starks make these beats sound slick and effortless on the recordings, and I found that it was more difficult than I thought to make them sound "correct" (not that I succeeded in doing so). The jazz school grad in me initially wanted to turn this into some academic analysis of which 16th notes contain the most funk, so that I could create a fool proof funk algorithm........I quickly realized that would be wack. Super wack. So, I just decided to  do a lot of playing along, on both bass and drums, to just absorb the feel in a more organic way. I made a split screen video of me playing both parts together.....excuse the terrible filming and amateur iMovie editing. Here it is:

And here are the transcriptions. Have fun with them.

Ari Hoenig Stuff: Part 1???

I've recently been listening to a lot of Ari Hoenig. Those familiar with Ari's playing will already know about his mastery of complex rhythms and modulations; I've been trying to figure out and internalize some of that language. I've also been trying to remind myself NOT to play wacky rhythmic devices all over the place, which is tempting when you're thinking about them all the time. Anyway.....on Ari's 2011 album "Lines of Oppression", there is a fairly short track aptly titled "Rhythm". This track features only Ari and pianist Tigran Hamaysan on beatbox/vocalizations. They play a rhythmic "head" together, and then trade 4s for a bit, and then play the head again, which segues right into the following track, "Rhythm-a-ning" (more on that later). The head they play together is very rhythmically dense, and full of odd groupings of 16th notes/metric modulation, and I was having trouble keeping track of the time throughout it. I recently was away visiting my grandparents for about a week, and I took advantage of this time away from the drum set to transcribe the head and internalize the rhythms. Here is the 16 bar head (the transcription is "mostly" accurate, sometimes it was difficult to tell exactly what Ari was playing, because of the simultaneous beatboxed drums):

 Above is an audio excerpt of the head, and below is a video of me playing it.

Tricky stuff. It became easier to feel and memorize when I started to notice and hear the longer odd patterns and groupings, instead of thinking of it all as random offbeat 16th note stuff. Anyway, this track is immediately followed by an interesting rhythmic arrangement of "Rhythm-a-Ning". Here is the transcription of that melody:

The last A section is actually the Dizzy Gillespie tune "Wee", hence the title. I transcribed this because when I first listened to it, I kept getting thrown off at the bridge. They phrase the bridge melody in long groups of 5, starting on the last beat before the bridge. SO KILLING MAN. Anyway, there's a lot of stuff to think about and digest when it comes to Ari and the amazing musicians he plays with. Ari also has a few instructional books out, perhaps my next post (if not a house project thingy) will be a "part 2", with some more Ari stuff that I've been working on from those.