Word: drummer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...seems that all a drummer has to do these days to get himself recognized is to knock out a few thirty-two bar choruses full of technique and nothing else. I realize that it has a terrific commercial appeal: witness what Krupa's pyrotechnics did for the Goodman band three years ago. But at the same time, Krupa had something else on the ball, an intangible rhythmic sense that makes all the difference in the world between a good drummer and a lousy one. It's all right to play flash now and then. I get a lot of kicks...
...hardly hear Cozy on this record, but you can feel the beat, and the way he builds it up. Cozy has a superb sense of phrasing, and everything he does fits in with the band. And this is the point I'm trying to get at : if a drummer doesn't fit in with a band, he's playing flash and is a one-man band himself. This seems to me to be extremely important in jazz music. For drums are naturally the loudest instruments in an orchestra, and consequently a bad drummer can do more harm to a good...
Just ask a musician who his favorite drummer is. The answer will be "Jo Jones" or "Cozy" or "Ray McKinley," It won't be "Buddy Rich." That's for the boys with the crew haircuts and bow ties to whom nothing is music if it's not noise...
Pacesetter at last Sunday's session, as at earlier ones, was saucer-eyed, head-bobbing, jelly-wristed Zutty Singleton, Negro drummer, pronounced the greatest of all time by French Expert Hugues Panassie. Baby-faced Artie Shapiro, once a child wonder at 16, slapped the bull fiddle...
...sports "A Man From The Band" can be decidedly convincing. Most of the first act, in which Ernie the drummer boy woos and wins Miss Channing in half an hour after she had been dropped by her socialite lover, is a very careful and tender piece of writing. But too much of the play is inexcusably tedious and full of long speeches like Ernie's final plea for "la vic jazz" which in almost a twinkling convinces his wife that he ain't a bad guy after...