Here I am playing the second exercise in the Papa Jo section of my forthcoming book "Melodic Syncopation". This is exercise is based on the song "Cubano Chant" by Ray Bryant as played on the album "The Essential Jo Jones". The song has a call and response structure which I play note for note on the snare drum with a bossa-nova style ostinato in my feet. I am also singing the melody while I am playing. If you are trying this yourself, don't worry too much about how your singing sounds/if your pitch is good. The point is not to develop your vocal performance skills, but to make your connection to the melody of the song really concrete.
One thing that I did differently than the recording was improvise my own response to the melodies call and then play that response throughout the form of the song. After playing through one chorus with this response I would come up with a new one and try it again.
This exercise is a jazz coordination exercise similar to what people often do with Ted Reed's "Syncopation", but I feel that using the melodies of jazz standards has a number of distinct advantages to that approach. I will discuss some of these advantages in another post, but for now you can give this exercise a try. I am hoping to have a more detailed version of this exercise published in a magazine article some time in the near future, so I will let you all know when that happens so you can check it out.
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