World Jazz Drumming

Book excerpt: (Berklee Guide). Enrich your drumming with world rhythms and sounds. World music presents many learning opportunities and challenges, especially for drums and percussion. Learning grooves from Africa, Latin America, South America, and other regions will make you a more complete musician, and give you more ideas for creating your own sound and solos. Many jazz greats have been inspired by world traditions: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, John McLaughlin, and so many others. Follow in their footsteps, and discover how to use these elements to inspire your own music. You will learn to: * Incorporate world instruments into a standard drum kit * Coordinate stick, foot, hand techniques to enrich your palette of articulations * Play dozens of world grooves * Take inspiration from world grooves for your own improvisations * Perform advanced concepts, such as odd time signatures and metric modulation * Be prepared for many creative musical situations, through knowledge of more styles and greater mastery of drumming fundamentals Mark Walker is a multiple-Grammy Award winning artist, who is currently a member of Oregon and the Pacquito d'Rivera Quintet. He is an associate professor of percussion at Berklee College of Music.