Coltrane - Favorite Things

[aboylikedave]

As a relative beginner I'm getting together with a sax player to play My Favorite Things and other tunes. There's a couple of things I'd like to ask if anyone can help me with.

Firstly, I can't make out exactly what Elvin Jones is doing with the hi hat - is he playing the chick on 2 and 3, or just 2, or varying it?

Also, any advice generally on jazz comping/playing in 3/4?

[Boomka]

As a relative beginner I'm getting together with a sax player to play My Favorite Things and other tunes. There's a couple of things I'd like to ask if anyone can help me with.

Firstly, I can't make out exactly what Elvin Jones is doing with the hi hat - is he playing the chick on 2 and 3, or just 2, or varying it?

Also, any advice generally on jazz comping/playing in 3/4?

He plays it pretty much everywhere you can imagine. As I recall, he plays it on the & of 1 and 3 quite a bit on that take, but he also does as you suggest. Part of Elvin's sound was incorporating the hihat into his comping rather than it simply being a steady timekeeper.

Since you're new to playing waltzes, I'd keep it simple. See if you can just get a nice swinging feel going, anchored by the hihat on 2 or on 2&3 for the whole tune. You might even very, very lightly feather 1 on the BD just to anchor your time. Practice playing different variations of a basic 3-beat RC pattern over top of that - i.e. Ding--Ding--Ding-a : Ding--Ding-a-Ding : Ding-a--Ding--Ding. Play all three many, many times until you are completely comfortable hearing/playing them over the foot pattern. Play them along with the tune if you can keep up. Play just the RC pattern if need be. Listen to how each one has a different resolution point over 3/4.

Once you can do that, the most obvious thing to do to start comping is to fill the spaces left by the RC pattern with SD notes. So in the first RC example, you'd be playing the offbeats of 1 and 2 on the snare, and in the second you'd be playing the & of 1 and the & of 3. Incidentally, that'll give you the basic outline of one of the primary feels the band uses on My Favorite Things. Essentially you simply add SD notes to your RC pattern so that every note of a shuffle is played by one hand or the other but your hands don't play together.

The next step would be to fill in those spaces with triplets.

[aboylikedave]

Cheers Boomka, v.helpful, thanks.