From a recent tribute to the late Ed Shaughnessy, here's Jeff Hamilton on his highly melodic version of the Duke Ellington/Juan Tizol classic, "Caravan":
Hamilton's impressive melodic approach to the drums is nothing new, there's great recordings of him doing this that have been around for a while now, but I really appreciate his overall approach to using melody around the drum set. Especially his technique of bending the pitch of the drums while on the fly. It's somewhat similar to what Ari Hoenig has also been doing for sometime as well. If you tune your drums low enough to give yourself enough room to get a good contrasting interval between pitches, this offers some really interesting possibilities.
Bassist John Clayton is a long-time colleague of Jeff Hamilton's, going back to their student days at Indiana University. Here's what Clayton has to say about his long time rhythm partner in swing:
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Hey, my friend Nick Fraser who is a great drummer from Toronto (and frequent reader of this blog!) is currently touring Canada with a great band featuring NYC tenor saxophonist Tony Malaby, promoting their latest album "Towns and Villages".
They play Calgary on Saturday, September 28th at the National Music Centre and I would highly recommend catching them either here in Cowtown or along the rest of their National tour.
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