Wine, Tears, Men, Women, and Wynton Marsalis - Autumn Leaves
- Simple and forceful, increasing one by one from 1 to 8.
- Decreases back to the 1
- Drum scoring that requires patience
This is probably the first jazz drumming post on this blog! This is from Wynton Marsalis' album Marsalis Standard Time, Vol.1 released in 1987. The drummer is Jeff "Tain" Watts.
Simple and forceful, increasing one by one from 1 to 8.
From this album, I check out Autumn Leaves, the standard among standards. However, the arrangement of the theme is not standard at all. From the beginning of the song, the drums go like this!
(0:00-)
In general, if you want to score 4 beat jazz, you should double the tempo, i.e., you should write one bar of the above as two bars in double tempo. I write in half tempo here to make the trick easier to understand, and left out Swing notation because it would be too ambiguous.
There are triplets, quintuplets, sextuplets, and septuplets that cover one whole bar, and even triplets inside those tuplets. It looks complicated when you see it in the score, but in reality, the idea is simpler than it looks. If you listen to the song for the first time, you will immediately understand. Yes, it's simple and forcible, increasing one by one from 1 to 8. The main beats of the ride cymbal (and the bass) can be written out like this:
Decreases back to the 1
When you get to the end of the theme with 8 ride cymbals and fast 4 beats, it starts to decrease little by little.
(0:19-)
If you write out just the main beats of the ride cymbal (and the bass), it looks like this:
8-6-4-3-2, then back to the beginning of the theme, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8 again. That is an unlikely musical structure. It's a dignified way for musicians who have grown tired of playing the standard normally. They here realized it which we would never do even if we had thought of it.
Drum scoring that requires patience
Unless you have a special case like this one, jazz drumming is pretty hard to transcribe. This is because it is often played more freely than other genres, making it difficult to transcribe, and it is not very meaningful to accurately transcribe such improvisations. Nevertheless, I remembered that more than 20 years ago, Drums Magazine in Japan published a complete score for a whole jazz drum piece, perhaps from the album Four & More - Miles Davis. And the painful was that the song is played by Tony Williams, a well-known free-spirited drummer. The more I learned about the labor involved in transcription, the more I could imagine the patience required for this task. I guess it's not so bad if it is not an one-man-operation like me. It's getting hard to write articles with transctiptions even though this blog is just a monthly issue!
The number of people huffing and puffing on Frank Zappa - Zomby Woof :
- Frank Zappa - Zomby Woof continues!
- 5 notes grouping and pointless melodies
- A long guitar solo and a superfunky section!
- Condensed Zappa-esque albums
Frank Zappa - Zomby Woof continues!
Let's continue with Frank Zappa's Zomby Woof from his album The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life!
See my last post too!
5 notes grouping and pointless melodies
'I am the zomby woof!'. The rocking, soulful vocal section is hot and cool again, followed by a section where the beat changes to odd ones again. As always, bars in odd meters are highlighted in red.
(1:30-)
The 5th and 6th bars are two bars of 5/4, and the content is grouped into 5 units, as is obvious from listening to the melody. 5/16 * 8 bars can have the same meaning and length, so the actual score might be in 5/16. Here, the notes are finely divided into 10 pieces of 32nd note with the hi-hat, instead of 5 pieces of 16th note. Considering the position of the accent and the sharpness of the hi-hat sound, the sticking may be alternated (RLRLRLRL). That's kind of quick. The ability of the drummer Chad Wackerman shines through. Sure, his technique shines in other parts as well, not just this one!
From 9th bar, a strange and mysterious section starts based on a, dare I say, completely nonsensical melody motif; notice how the melody in the 9th bar is repeated in the 10th bar with the same pitch up and down, only the rhythm is different. As usual, let's see if someone with absolute pitch can confirm it. This is a very mechanical way to write music.
A long guitar solo and a superfunky section!
After the above, a long guitar solo begins, which is a frequent feature of Frank Zappa's music in this period. Although Frank Zappa is a composer and a bandmaster, he likes to play guitar solos more than anyone else. He even released an album entitled Guitar, which emphasizes his own guitar solos. And it was a large serving with the 2 CDs set. It's right after the end of his guitar solo:
(4:35-)
The 5th bar is the section where the vocal part is prominent again. Only the drums and the vocals perform, and the rock song stands out hot. The backbeat of the drums here slips forward by a 16th note, and this works synergistically with the vocals to make for an extremely funky music. Even so, he doesn't slip a 16th note in every bar. I'm impressed that he doesn't stick to a same phrase and can come up with various phrases quickly. It's not an odd meter, but it's another highlight of this song. After this, in the middle of the 12th bar, it gets triplets and becomes a 6/8 rock ballad-like section. Then in the 14th bar, it gets a sudden and strange fill to return to the first verse from the 15th bar in no time. How abrupt!
Condensed Zappa-esque albums
I have covered all the problematic parts of the song in my Zomby Woof series (two articles in total). I'm sure you'll be ready to play any day now.
When I re-listened to the albums around the time of the release of Zomby Woof, I found that many of the songs that I consider to be Zappa-esque were released around 1973-1975. Zappa-esque things are condensed especially on Over-Nite Sensation, which has Zomby Woof in it, but also Apostrophe, Roxy & Elsewhere, and One Size Fits All released right after Over-Nite Sensation. Unfortunately, Zappa-related articles are not very popular on this blog, but I'd like to continue to highlight drumming from these rich-tasting albums in detail.
Humans were too early to manage Frank Zappa - Zomby Woof
Now, it's Frank Zappa's hour with very few requests! Discover Zomby Woof, where we can easily view the unique feature of Zappa's songs.
Frank Zappa - Zomby Woof
Firstly, it was released on the album Over-Nite Sensation in 1973. Since then, a number of live recordings have been published. Listen to the live recording of The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life in 1991. This is the best version where the weiredness of the odd meters is evident in the song and musicians follow it perfectly. After all, it's The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life. Naturally, songs other than Zomby Woof are of the greatest quality as well. I strongly recommend listening to the cover version of Stairway To Heaven - Led Zeppelin.
I must say, that is a violation of the rules
The song, which is so abstruse that even Zappa's musicians cannot follow, starts like this. The drummer's name is Chad Wackerman.
(00:00-)
No way. The fact that 5 different types of beats appear in the first 5 bars is a little shocking. 15/16 is also a tricky one. On the 9th bar, it barely stabilizes to 4/4. Good. I was relieved to hear that, so I decided to colour 4/4 of the score in green to express my sentiment.
The 5x quintaplets in the 4th bar seem to be very complex, but it would not very hard in RL sequence or hand movement since he just repeats RLRLL as follows. The right hand moves on the toms, while the left hand gently taps the snare to fill between the tom notes. We need to focus on capturing the flow of the quintaplets at this tempo and generating the rhythm of the quintaplets accurately.
A variety of "5" come in
And right afterwards, starting at the 11th bar:
At the 15th bar, RLRLL is used to play the 5 notes as in the 4th bar, but I found that the left hand beats a tom instead of the snare only at the following red highlighted note. Whatever the timing of the toms, it is important to generate the exact quintaplets notes in the tempo.
From the 24th to 34th bar, a "5" appears again, but the key is that the speed is different from that of the previous 5. Instead of dividing a quarter note into 5, there are 5 notes in 16th notes. In other words, the speed is slightly slower (have a longer interval between notes) than the previous 5. It's interesting to see how the toms move from top to bottom in RL RLL, and then back again in RLL RL. In fact, the melody here is inverted as if a mirror were placed in the center of the 29th bar. Check with someone who has absolute pitch.
Then, it comes back to 4/4 of safety and security again in the 35th bar. The green color is suitable for 4/4. But 4/4 passes in a moment, in the next phase, a new and unstable musical architecture comes in unfortunately. We will verify this in detail in my next article.
