Drum Set: Jazz

Jazz is an American art form with its origins in the African-American culture of 1800s New Orleans. Due to the dispersal of many cultures through the slave trade, numerous African and Caribbean folk music traditions combined with French colonial drums and other Western classical musics over time to form the city’s unique cultural heritage.

Around 1900, popular music forms such as Ragtime were spreading from the city and its river system, and in 1922, New Orleans native Louis Armstrong travelled up the Mississippi to Chicago, where Jazz music spread to New York City, Kansas City, and St. Louis.

Download and print this worksheet to help guide your practice. The feel and timing of the shuffle is highly interpretive across all Jazz and R&B styles, so getting a basic version solid right away is important for your musical flexibility going forward.

“How to Jazz Ride” is a HUGE topic people go very deep on. This will get you used to the basics so you can understand and explore your sound.

Download and print this worksheet to help guide your practice. This is a kind of “Stick Control” for possible Swing/Shuffle rhythms. It’s time consuming, but missing this step is a primary reason why players get stuck and don’t know how to move ahead. Just like Stick Control, this not only builds common patterns for the style, but the toolkit to add any additional patterns in the future.

You can get this incredibly important book HERE. Google search it for even more content from the author himself.