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Ideas for Jazz

Drumming
Ideas for Jazz Drumming

Copyright © T.R.Lake; drumming.timsparlour.com “Jazz Drumming Blog”; 2013

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Reproduction in any form or by any means without the written consent of the author is
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 Ideas for Jazz Drumming

This is an ever expanding compendium of ideas that I developed for the “Jazz Drumming
Blog”, and rather than endlessly adding ideas and pages to the blog I decided it would be
better to turn them into a digital book that is regularly updated.

I am fond of the word “idea” as it implies something that is not concrete, something amor-
phous. Ideas change and develop, and that is entirely the point of this collection; an idea
is not restricted to boundaries. Theses ideas are little snippets of things I have found inter-
esting and useful to work on but it is up to you to let the idea take hold in your mind, to
find a way to develop and interpret it in your own way. Each of these ideas is a starting
point for your own creativity; hence they should be a spark for your own ideas of how to
use them and what to play. I don’t believe in spoon feeding a fixed set of rules for any-
thing, especially jazz, but prefer to give you a framework and a few guidelines. This will let
you think and discover for yourself; that way the ideas are more likely to stick and become
part of your self-expression.

Have fun and be creative.

T.R.Lake

http://drumming.timsparlour.com

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 Idea #1

This was a little idea I heard at a gig. It is a nice subtle embellishment of the comping fig-
ure in Jazz Time using a drag onto the “and”, in this case, of beat 3 and works nicely at a
medium to slow tempo. Fig.1 is the basic idea. Fig.2 is the most useful way to understand
and practice it. Fig.3 shows two other ways to think of it that will work at faster tempos.
Just make sure you don’t slip into dragging onto the downbeat.

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 Idea #2

Having been working on the idea of playing continuous triplets between the left hand and
the right foot underneath jazz time, using John Riley’s ”Headroom Triplets” among other
exercises, I wanted to come up with a way to expand this into playing more broken time
with the RH over the triplets. The obvious starting point was thus to play the exercise in 3/
4. The Hi-Hat here is just written on beat 2, but in the pdf is a HH variation that starts to im-
ply the 4/4. Start slow and then try to play one bar of 4/4 followed by the exercise (which
gives a total of 4 bars in 4/4!). Also practice starting the exercise from bar 2, bar 3 and bar
4 and looping back round.

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 Idea #3

I’ve been playing around with a lot of similar ideas to this for a while, grouping triplets into
groups of 4 is a nice way to build some tension, both in time playing and soloing. It works
well across 3 sounds on the drum kit and, as you can see in the exercise, leading from the
ride cymbal seems to work better. On replacing the hi-hat for the bass drum, fig.3 in the
pdf, you can add the bass drum on the very last note, the ‘and’ of 4, to create an ac- cent.
This should be tied over, as it should in fig.4, to beat 2 of the next bar.

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 Idea #4

This is a little exercise for developing the ever useful 5 stroke roll at medium-up to fast tem-
pos in Jazz Time. It is important to focus on the landing on the ‘and’ of 4 and really nailing
it, picking up the time again on beat 2 of the next bar. Play exercise 1. as R L; then double
each for exercise 2. RR LL. Re- verse the sticking. Exercise 3. is two buzzes rather than
double strokes. Exercise 4. is the same thing but landing on beat 4. To expand the idea ap-
ply these rolls to landing on all other down and up beats! As ever start slow and work up.