Learning Afro-Cuban and Brazilian drumset styles

As I have been attempting to grow more comfortable playing Afro-Cuban and Brazilian music, I was curious about others' experiences in learning these beautiful and challenging musics. Did you find one style more difficult than the other? Did you find problems mainly in the area of independence/coordination? Achieving the appropriate feel? Did you have any "lightbulb" moments?

Mostly I am curious in reading about how others have approached learning what i consider to be two essential musical languages for the drums.

Also I wanted to thank Todd Bishop for his extensive series on samba, which, along with the Duduka du Foncesca book, has provided some excellent material for exploring Brazilian rhythms.
 
Getting the hang of playing clave patterns on the left foot was incredibly hard. Thankfully I do not play double bass so I was able to focus on really getting clave beats in Afro Cuban music. It has taken me years of work (given my available practice time) to get that down reasonably well. I also thank Frank Malabe and Bob Weiner's book "Afro-Cuban Rhythms for Drumset" for so much guidance.

You know you've climbed a big hill when you can drop a left-foot clave beat into just about any music, Afro-Cuban or not.
 
Bob Weiner and Frank Malebe have a fantastic book on afro cuban set playing.

also hit up Chuck Silverman....he is a fantastic teacher....I tell you this first hand
 
jeromesteele hi!

I am actually a bit envious as you are going to spend time improving in two of the most fun and beautiful styles - awesome! :)

For me the way into these styles was, after a lot of listening and your basic practicing, through playing with experts. I got some gigs in a batucada with Brazilian musicians. That way I got to learn the percussion parts. Then a Brazilian drummer needed someone to sub for him on a few gigs, so he actually taught me the rhythms (his band played Afoche, Foho, Samba-Reggae, originals, covers of Djavan, Olodum - it was great) and made sure I could replace him on those shows. I went to as many gigs as I could of that style, and since Brazilian music has a lot of loops in the drum parts, one night I transcribed the whole gig played by my mentor. It was a great learning tool!

For Cuban music, I found the co ordination to be more of a challenge, but El Negro and his book "Conversations in Clave" came to the rescue.

Some things you could do are:

1) Immerse yourself in the music you want to play. Learn the songs, melodies and all. Not too many tunes to start out with, but learn them well. Figure out what the drummer is playing, transcribe or memorize and learn the parts.
(I read an interview with the great Omar Hakim in which he said dancing to the beat you want to learn is a great way to get it.)

2) Break down difficult bits into exercises. Loop the challenging parts at a slower tempo.

3) Listen to the groups playing those styles with no drummers, just percussionists. (Afrocuba de Mantanzas for example, and for Brazilian check out some batucada's).

4) If you can play for some groups where everyone is good at those styles, it will be very helpful. If there are Brazilian batucada groups you can join and just play surdo or caxia, it will really help and give you a great vocabulary for drumset.

5) For Cuban, check out Conversations in Clave by the great Horacio "El Negro" Hernandez. To me that is one of the best tools out there for gaining freedom within this style. He takes no shortcuts, so going through it is a slow process, but pays off! (I spent a long time learning a few tunes he played on someone's CD, but then found out I didn't have the ability to actually play freely in the style. Luckily he brought out the book, and 6 months of practicing with it really helped!)

(reading this I realize 1 & 2 are probably old news to you and everyone else, apologies if I'm repeating what you already know.)

Hope this helps. Once you have some results, let us hear them!

:)

Ami
 
Oh, thanks for the mention, Jerome- I'm glad that stuff helped. Basically I'm doing my studying in public there, and was noticing things about the music that none of the authors were saying. With both of those musics I very much do the American jazz musician thing of adapting personalized versions of them, especially with Afro-Cuban. It happens that some of the people I play are very into Brazilian music- or one guy is actually Brazilian- so I wanted to go a little deeper with it.

Some things that will help with that are listening to a lot of samba and bossa nova, starting to learn the standard tunes (not just Jobim), and becoming familiar with the parts of the batucada instruments- preferably by playing in a bateria. I highly recommend using Ed Uribe's book- the method he uses is one of the strongest I've seen on any subject.

Getting the feel is the same as with assimilating any organic music; you block in the notes somewhat mechanically according to a simplified rule- similar to the way triplets are used to teach students to approximate a swing feel in jazz; as your playing matures this eases into a more authentic feel. Even if you never truly achieve it, at least you're in the ball park. If you're not raised in the culture, I think it's very hard to get in the ball park just by ear with Brazilian music.

I know even less about Afro-Cuban music, so I'll let other people comment on that. One of the things I always remember is something Ignacio Berroa said- or did- at a clinic at Berkley years ago; a student asked what you do with the hihat in that kind of music, and he picked up the stand and set it off to the side, and took the next question. I keep the feet simple when playing that kind of music.
 
Hi,

With regards to clave and afro-cuban,

I'm sure there are people more qualified than me but I'll say my bit anyway. I'm not convinced that learning to play things while playing clave with your left foot is the way forward.

Without years of practise, that will just distract you from the music. Its better to imply the clave, play around it. That is much less demanding and will allow you to immerse yourself in the music.

If you want to play afro cuban authentically then someone else is going to be playing the clave anyway. Better to play less and play something that fits.

You'd be better pre-recording rumba or son clave and looping it and then playing on top of it. That way you will learn how its "feels". Learn to feel the tension as you play against the time. Traditionally its more than one drummer anyway so its better to play against something than try and play everything yourself.

Hope that makes some sort of sense. I think others can explain it better. Just don't try to play everything all at once. I guess thats what I'm saying.
 
I've been studying Afro-cuban and the Clave for a few months now and it's alot of fun! I don't have a foot cowbell but the songo and mozambique really inspire me to do linear grooves with one limb doing the clave and the rest doing something else. It's great fun and if you know you're claves and patterns it can really incorporate with you're playing. I use some Afro-cuban rhythms as drum fills in my music, which is crazy but it works! Very well.

So hard to master the Afro-Cuban. Good luck!
 
I just wanted to thank all of you for your thoughtful responses. I am definitely in the process of seeking out other musicians who are either native to these brilliant percussion traditions or siginificantly further along in their study. It is difficult, however, as the city in which I reside has a music scene focused primarily on metal, and classic rock cover bands that keep the beer flowing from the taps. I have nothing against those who enjoy that music, it just makes it a struggle to find other musicians who share my interest in diverse musical cultures.

Until I can find others to play with and learn from, I suspect I will be doing some "immersion listening" in hopes of some elements of the musical language seeping in by osmosis. And I will definitely check out the Ed Uribe book on the Brazilian percussion sections. Doesn't he also have a similar book dealing with the Afro-Cuban percussion tradition? If so, does anyone have any experience with it?
 
Hi,

With regards to clave and afro-cuban,

I'm sure there are people more qualified than me but I'll say my bit anyway. I'm not convinced that learning to play things while playing clave with your left foot is the way forward.

Without years of practise, that will just distract you from the music. Its better to imply the clave, play around it. That is much less demanding and will allow you to immerse yourself in the music.

If you want to play afro cuban authentically then someone else is going to be playing the clave anyway. Better to play less and play something that fits.

You'd be better pre-recording rumba or son clave and looping it and then playing on top of it. That way you will learn how its "feels". Learn to feel the tension as you play against the time. Traditionally its more than one drummer anyway so its better to play against something than try and play everything yourself.

Hope that makes some sort of sense. I think others can explain it better. Just don't try to play everything all at once. I guess thats what I'm saying.

Looping is good for a training aid, but it should not become a clutch.

It isn't always necessary to explicitly play the clave in these genres, but anyone who hopes to play them authentically and proficiently should be able to play clave with the hands and, preferably, the left foot as well.

This isn't a "distraction" any more than the rudiments are a "distraction." Clave is an essential component of Afro-Cuban styles and you should always be able to put it front and center. It worked for a solid year in my limited practice time to get that down with my left foot.

On the other hand, I've never touched a double pedal, which I feel to be a distraction. If I ever wanted to play metal, though, I'd have to pick it up.
 
Looping is good for a training aid, but it should not become a clutch.

It isn't always necessary to explicitly play the clave in these genres, but anyone who hopes to play them authentically and proficiently should be able to play clave with the hands and, preferably, the left foot as well.

This isn't a "distraction" any more than the rudiments are a "distraction." Clave is an essential component of Afro-Cuban styles and you should always be able to put it front and center. It worked for a solid year in my limited practice time to get that down with my left foot.

On the other hand, I've never touched a double pedal, which I feel to be a distraction. If I ever wanted to play metal, though, I'd have to pick it up.

I suppose that what I'm talking about is practising using the clave as a metronome rather than a normal click. That will help internalise the feel much better than trying to physically do it yourself.
 
Doesn't he also have a similar book dealing with the Afro-Cuban percussion tradition? If so, does anyone have any experience with it?

Well, I've flipped through it. It's twice as big as the Brazilian book, partly because the parts for a given style vary according to the available instrumentation. There is more focus on learning correct parts, because that seems to be the nature of the music. The book seems pretty essential if, say, you were going to try to join a Son band in a year and wanted to appear minimally clueless. I need to own it at some point- I'm just not doing anything with that type of music where any kind of correct/authentic approach is necessary.
 
Left foot clave is something that I tend to be ambivalent about. It is a cool trick, and very impressive to see performed properly, but I think it was Dafnis Prieto who said something to the effect of it being a great way not to get called back to a gig. And that dude is from Cuba and can play clave in 7 with his foot while playing in 5 with his hands!

In short, probably a good thing to practice at home, but not of incredible importance on stage. I've talked to a couple people about getting too wrapped up in clave. You definitely want to internalize it, and forget it. And unless everyone else you are playing with understands it, it is probably not worth losing too much sleep over.

I play with a traditional Afro-Cuban percussion group. We generally are very strict about our claves with that group. We do rumba columbia, comparsa, iyesa, bembe, guaguanco, mozambique and a good amount of bata rhythms as well. Those all have distinct claves (not always different) but very important when it comes to being on the right side with your part. I've tried playing a little bit of foot-clave with some 3-conga parts, but it takes waaaay more focus and time than I have, plus we're usually trying to sing as well. I'm lucky to get 20 minutes a week to practice anything, so that's not something I spend time with. We give the new folks the claves, make them play it for us and then give them the stink-eye when they f*** it up.

On kit however, unless the whole band knows what's up and has that stuff internalized, it doesn't make a difference what you are doing with clave. It's really just more of a texture than any kind of road map for the tune. I supposed in that sense you probably could play whatever the hell you wanted with your feet, but it wouldn't matter to anyone anyway, and my guess is it would probably limit you a lot more than help you in terms of phrasing with your hands.

In a lot of contemporary salsa these days (and timba as well) the groups flip the clave from 3-2 to 2-3 for the montuno section. I've seen people get the evil eye for missing that kind of thing on stage. But with a group like that you are talking about 7-10 players (3-4 percussionists). Those guys are usually rehearsed to the hilt, so missing something like that in a performance means you just weren't paying attention, or you couldn't take your eyes of the boobs swirling around the dance floor.

The Malebe books are awesome, as well as El Negro's "Conversations in Clave". There are so many great resources for this stuff now, it's overwhelming. The best thing to do is find a few folks who are really interested in learning it. You really have to put some time in before you start to feel the music. Obviously listening, and living in an area where you can see it/play it live is a huge plus as well. But the internet is a beautiful thing when it comes to being geographically isolated. I bet you could find 3-4 folks nearby who are also fascinated with this music. And if you are lucky enough to find a piano player who plays montunos, you hit the jackpot!
 
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