Calibrating your internal metronome

A few years ago I was in a class taught by Wil Blades at the Jazz School in Berkeley, CA and Wil told a story about a bass player who got on a gig with Idris Muhammad. The bass player was struggling with the rhythms on a tune and kept missing the first beat of the measures. After several takes, Idris turned to the guy and said something like "Go on down to the music store and buy yourself a box of 1!"

Few of us like to admit that we sometimes have trouble counting to 4 (or other numbers depending on the meter). I was admitting this to myself recently while rehearsing an arrangement I came up with for "Straight, No Chaser" (Thelonious Monk). It goes like this:

• First time through the head: No time! The drums don't play swing and the bass doesn't walk. The rhythm section just plays kicks on that coorespond to accents in the melody.
• Second time: Rhythm section comps normally.

After solos we do the above except in reverse order, ending with the chorus where the rhythm section just plays kicks and doesn't keep time. Pretty hip! Um…if we can execute it.

Here's the chart. The red marks indicate the kicks:

I think these kicks are pretty common. Jimmy Cobb plays something close to this on Miles Davis at Newport 1958.

My arrangement presents a couple of challenges. We should all be able to:

1. Play serval choruses of the melody with just the kicks happening behind us without dropping/adding beats nor rushing/dragging.
2. Play several choruses of just the kicks with no melody or time without any of the above problems.

To that end, I've created a practice suite of mp3s (generated by a really old version of Band in a Box (running in a VirtualBox VM on Ubuntu)). Each track lasts for 8 choruses. If you make it through the 8th chorus, you rock! Try the next tempo. When you're done you might have a fighting chance if you get a call from Idris.

Here's one of the files from the practice suite. Try it out right here!

I started with the 120 bpm tracks and worked up in tempo. Then I put on the breaks and tried the 60 and 80 bpm tracks. Woo…that keeps me honest!