philly joe jones – Practicing Drummer

Journal #9 – Kweku Sumbry, Philly Joe, Tain, Chop Busters

It’s been a lot longer than I planned on between journal entries. The summer has flown by, partially thanks to an incredible trip to Italy.

I’m working on some new podcast episodes and am planning to be back here posting at least once every couple of weeks.

Here are some things from the last few weeks.

Ron Fink – Chop Busters

I got this recently and honestly can’t remember where I heard about it. It’s a snare book of individual technique exercises and it’s become my morning warm-up this summer. Very fun and just challenging enough.

Chop Busters at Steve Weiss Music

New Philly Joe Jones videos!

Billy Drummond shared these two recently and they’re incredible. It’s always great to see new footage of him.

The Pace Report – Jeff “Tain” Watts

The Pace Report has been showing up in my YouTube feed lately. Brian Pace has been doing these interviews out of Harlem for years and there’s a deep archive there. This new one with Tain is great.

Kweku Sumbry

Kweku has quickly become one of my favorite drummers. I mostly know him through his work with Immanuel Wilkins (check out the live albums from the Village Vanguard), but here’s a concert he played with Charles Lloyd. There are two incredibly musical drum solos. The first is at 47:26 and the second at 67:57.

Bonus: Go-Go

I’ve been going down a go-go rabbit hole lately and this video is mesmerizing. I first heard about go-go from some D.C. drummers when I was at Berklee in the 90s.

Have a great weekend.

Journal #4

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.

Philly Joe Jones Interview

There are a couple of new videos up on Youtube that I discovered last week that lead me to an amazing resource: The Howard University Jazz Oral History Project. Some great stuff there.

A couple days ago I posted the Max Roach interview. The next video I want to share is a one hour interview with Philly Joe Jones. It’s full of great stuff and like Max, he also plays some piano during the interview.

The video abruptly flips over to a Sphere concert with Charlie Rouse, Kenny Barron, Buster Williams and Ben Riley around the one hour six minute mark, cutting off the interview. There are audio clips of the interview here, which seem to extend beyond the length of the video, though I haven’t listened in full yet.

Enjoy!