Why Memorize?

When I was a younger drummer, I rarely had the patience necessary to memorize anything I was working on that was longer than a couple of bars.  I was so eager to get on to the next thing, that spending painfully frustrating hours just memorizing what I was working on felt like a waste.  Furthermore, I think I carried over a very common bias from the rest of my liberal arts education into my approach to jazz; that is that it is less important to memorize particular facts than it is to understand the overall scheme of things.


As I have matured in my playing and my approach to learning music, I have come to the realization that this imported bias towards memorizing is actually fundamentally wrong.  In fact, the only way to learn jazz (and music generally) is to spend real time and energy memorizing.  There is simply no alternative, here are a couple of reasons why:


1. Jazz is an oral tradition
Unlike the western educational tradition, jazz comes from an older oral tradition.  That is to say, information is transmitted through memory, not the written word (or note).  This is not to say that reading music isn't useful, but rather that is helpful secondary skill.  Essentially, just about everything that you do in jazz needs to come from some combination of your memory and imagination. 

Essential books for jazz drummers

This is a list of books that I consider essential for anyone who wants to learn jazz drumming:

1.  Progressive Steps to Syncopation for the Modern Drummer

This book is a classic reading text that I recommend not so much for the book itself, as for the curriculum that has been built up around this book over the years.  "Syncopation" has been used as the basis for innumerable exercises for developing jazz coordination, most successfully and famously by Alan Dawson in the following book on this list.