Mel Lewis – Practicing Drummer

It’s been a busy couple of weeks here, but I’m happy to announce that I have plans to record another podcast interview soon. Hope everyone is having a good start to December.

New Releases From Smoke

Billy Hart – Multidirectional (live from Smoke)

Al Foster – Live at Smoke

This isn’t from Al’s live record, but it’s a great video that I keep going back to.

Mel Lewis on the History of Jazz Drums

I was reminded about this on the on a recent episode of Drummer Nation where Michael Vosbein and Adam Nussbaum are joined by Kenny Washington and John Riley to talk about Mel Lewis.

This is a 32(!) video playlist of Mel Lewis on Loren Schoenberg’s radio show in 1989, exploring the history of jazz drumming from Baby Dodds to Elvin Jones.

Bill Stewart with John Scofield

I saw this band a few weeks ago in Minneapolis and just found this great video of them from SF Jazz.

Greg Hutchinson with Pablo Held

This is a very nice concert. I spend so much time listening to Pablo’s podcast that it was nice to hear some more of his music. Very impressive player and composer. I’m inspired to dig deeper.

Allan Mednard @ Stephan’s Basement

This series is so cool and Allan is just fantastic.

Philly Joe Brush Solos

Finally, here’s something fun I found the other day. I’m not sure how complete this is, but it’s inspiring to hear all these solos back to back.

For years my friend and mentor, drummer Phil Hey, has been telling me about the 1973 Gretsch Drum Summit in Central Park that he was lucky enough to attend. I’ve often daydreamed about being there and how unbelievable it would be to see Elvin Jones, Mel Lewis, Freddie Waits, and Papa Joe Jones all in the same afternoon. Incredible!

In telling me about that afternoon, Phil raved about Papa Joe’s solo hi-hat performance and that Jones joked from stage that his solo was a “TKO: Time Killer Only.”

There’s a great post on the official Gretsch site with lots of detail about this afternoon. Better yet is that audio is available! This may be old news to some of you, but it’s new to me so I thought it’s worth sharing.

You can find the audio on Wolfgang’s vintage archive. If you click on the large “play” button at the top of the page you’ll get the impression that you can only listen to samples. Don’t let that fool you. Clicking on each track will allow you to listen to the entire thing and I believe you can also purchase the recording.

This is a real treasure and I’m thrilled to have discovered it after hearing about it all these years.

Tag: Mel Lewis

Journal #4