[Dixielandjazz] Sweet Georgia Brown

Pat Ladd pj.ladd at btinternet.com
Thu Sep 22 02:46:25 PDT 2011


If you bump into that drummer again, point him at recordings by Big Sid 
Catlett >>

Hi Ken,

I have no doubt that the guy COULD play a dixie beat in the same way that 
Louis COULD have played the stuff that Marsalis was playing. It was just 
that their backgrounds and therefore theirsense of  HOW to play were 
different
For instance this drummers skins were tight as murder and the sound was very 
`bright`, his breaks consisted of a few bars of fantastic licks and a pause, 
not even a bass pedal to connect them and keep the rythm going, then into 
another brilliant few bars. Most OKOM drummers tend towards a duller, damped 
sound from their drums and there is a driving rythm underlying their breaks 
whatever ruffles and flourishes are goung on on the surface.. I realise that 
this is a pretty wide generalisation but that is the way it seems to me.
If you think that the whole of  the Marsalis clip of SGB was `driving` then 
we are obviously a long way apart in our view of OKOM as I consider that it 
stopped driving when Marsalis picked up his horn and stopped everything dead 
in its tracks.
Which of course why we call it OKOM.

Cheers

Pat 




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