Ikutaro Kakehashi, Engineer Behind Revolutionary Drum Machine, Dies at 87

[JSngry]

Yeah, it's like how nobody can make change anymore because of debit cards...

[JSngry]

And you can never get the damn tv at the right volume because of remote controls.

[Hardbopjazz]

When I was a inspiring musician, I used a Roland drum machine when I did an album back in the early 90s. 

[rostasi]

 

[ep1str0phy]

Thank you, Rostasi. A thousand times yes.

I don't know why the majority of threads about music that does not emanate from a specific continuum of experience seem to end in excoriating screeds about such and such thing being ruined forever. 

I'm not trying to shit on anyone's opinions because--hey, opinions and feelings and experiences are very real things--but the sheer otherness of newness has a great deal of nuance if you're willing to take the time.

Miles guitarist Reggie Lucas produced on Madonna's debut. Leon Ndugu Chancler played drums on Billie Jean and a bunch of really histrionic and experimental WC jazz. Arthur Blythe did the admittedly not good Put Sunshine In It but then tried to integrate that music into his concept--to some success--with Da-Da. As detailed elsewhere, David Sanborn came up around a bunch of loft jazz greats but elected to play smooth jazz. Ethan Iverson recorded with Dewey Redman almost a decade before the first Bad Plus record. Kamasi Washington comes from the same lineage of black LA jazz that Horace Tapscott once cultivated (and we could, or couldn't/shouldn't, get into the history of black jazz in LA here). Madlib's dad is a jazz singer and his uncle is Jon Faddis. Nas's dad is Olu Dara.  

All love to the hardened veterans who like to call bullshit on stuff, and I recognize that there is history there that is beyond me--but I haven't found much to refute that this hardline shit exists only on forums and in private debate and has minimal practical application in reality. 

[clifford_thornton]

Musically people can do whatever the hell they want with whatever they have or do not have at their disposal. One can like the results or not, but that doesn't change the fact of the results' existence.

Drum machines are cool. RIP to the inventor.

Here's some black music with a Roland:

 

[Dmitry]

Was playing a random selection of Stevie Wonder yesterday, and yes, I Just Called to Say I Love You, sounds pathetetic comparing ro You Are the Sunshine of My Life. Like the whole track, aside from the vocals, was programmed/synthesized, with no living breathing musicians at all.  Here's the original, that was playing on every pop radio station in the world in 1984. 

Here's the version with real human band. I do like this a whole lot more.

 

[rostasi]

Yes, I agree that the live musician version seems to be better,
but it's not solely because of live musicians, but rather it's the
lackluster attempt at electronic programming - even for the mid 80s - 
that makes the backing not only sound like a backing,
but seems to convey that the lyrics are the primary thing you
should be enjoying. Minimal wave or coldwave would do this "properly,"
(with complementary lyrics) but I don't think this was the intention here. 

[JSngry]

Hydraulic lifts are why you can no longer buy biscuits in the bottle.

[sgcim]

It's no use Dmitry, the pod people have taken them over. We stand as much chance of convincing them as Kevin McCarthy in 'IOTBS'.

Just keep repeating like I have through this thread, "I for one, welcome our electronically programmed percussion Overlords. It is the 'Perfect Beat!"

 

 

[Guy Berger]

On 4/5/2017 at 9:13 AM, Ken Dryden said:

I've always considered the drum machine to be the Cheez Whiz of musical instruments. If a real drummer isn't used, the music is unlikely to be of any interest to me.

I've always considered the piano to be the Cheez Whiz of keyboard instruments.  If a real harpsichord isn't used, the music is unlikely to be of any interest to me.

On 4/5/2017 at 2:00 PM, ep1str0phy said:

As a total aside and not meant to reflect on any of the conversationalists here, each of whom I know deserves a great deal of respect--but while jazz as a sound and institution has my heart, very little jazz of this century has captured my imagination like the most creative music in other major genres, hip-hop and dance music included. I do think it's funny that this (very well educated and listened) jazz forum frequently lapses into discussions about the validity of decades old production techniques. It's as if we spend more time discussing what we should do rather than what we did and what we will. RIP Ikutaro. 

Also interesting to note that a lot of well-regarded straight-ahead jazz drummers explicitly incorporate rhythms imitating "drum machines" (term used loosely) into their playing.

On 4/6/2017 at 11:27 AM, JSngry said:

Yeah, it's like how nobody can make change anymore because of debit cards...

Coins ruined the beauty of the barter system forever.

[JSngry]

Weather vanes are what made the wind start blowing in different directions.

[ep1str0phy]

3 hours ago, sgcim said:

It's no use Dmitry, the pod people have taken them over. We stand as much chance of convincing them as Kevin McCarthy in 'IOTBS'.

Just keep repeating like I have through this thread, "I for one, welcome our electronically programmed percussion Overlords. It is the 'Perfect Beat!"

 

 

Come on, man. For real?

So we're not going to address the fact that a gigantic proportion of musicians whose music might be considered "live" have worked with electronic instrumentation--and vice-versa? And we're not going to talk about how many of these musicians on both sides of the divide have moved freely between artificial studio environments and live performance (and live documentation)? 

No discussion about how Miles overdubbed on Miles Ahead or the studio artifice on Mingus Ah Um? Is the difference that they used live musicians? Because live musicians alone did not play the edit of Better Get Hit In Your Soul. 

Are we going to talk about the use of drum programming on Tutu? Bullshit, right? Because there's a sizable roster of live performers on that album. Billy Hart is on that album, for chrissakes. That record could not have been made without the cooperation of both parties.

Are we going to talk about how Ali Shaheed Muhammad, the musician you dismissively refer to as "some hip-hop 'genius'", is a champion of live instrumentation in hip-hop contexts? It was Ali's idea to perform the music of Luke Cage live--he apparently wanted to do it since the project's inception:

Are we going to talk about the sheer volume of albums recorded by hip-hop musicians--many of them producers who make frequent use of samplers--that rely on the integration of live performance from various genres? I'm sure you've heard a lot of these records from 16 years of listening to HOT 97. Examples: virtually everything Ali's bandmate Q-Tip has done since the end of A Tribe Called Quest--including assembling a band that featured Kurt Rosenwinkel, Gary Thomas, and Kenny Garrett--Outkast's The Love Below, everything by The Roots, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, J Dilla's Welcome 2 Detroit, almost all Beastie Boys records, Madlib's Yesterdays New Quintet albums, Flying Lotus's Cosmogramma (w/Ravi Coltrane), Chuck D and B Real with Prophets of Rage, Ice-T's Body Count records, Kanye West's use of a live orchestra on numerous recordings, Run the Jewels 2, Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp A Butterfly, and so on. 

Is the problem that the inflection of electronic music is wrong? That any playing that is either informed by or committed to the rhythmic mechanics of electronic music is somehow stiff, unswinging, or unfunky? Well cool, dude. Take it up with, again, James Brown, who bothered to work with Afrika Bambaataa on Unity--but of course that's late stage James Brown, and he'd lost his "edge" or was merely doing it for the money.

In that case, let's talk about Prince, who we seem to be upholding as some gold standard of musicianship in the 1980s onward. Was drum programming too good for When Doves Cry? The minute we dispense with 1999 as a valid piece of 20th century art is the minute that a lot of people get off the boat with the "electronic music is bad" thing.

If Prince is somehow--inexplicably--too archaic for this conversation, we can talk about the multitude of 21st century drummers who borrow from or are informed by the mechanics of electronic music and hip-hop. A small set of examples: Chris Dave, Tyshawn Sorey, Ronald Bruner Jr., Karriem Riggins, Dave King, Rudy Royston, Gene Lake, Zach Hill, Questlove, Damion Reid, Guillermo E. Brown. Many of these guys trade in vastly different genres of music. If you argue that all of these guys suck, you're either fooling yourself or are far too moldy for the fig tree you're on.

Is the argument that all popular music after 1980 or so sucks? If so, fantastic--we've left the world of empiricism and fact and entered the realm of opinion. You're welcome to it. Alternately, if you want to get into a hyper-technical discussion about the nuances of quantization, syncopation, and feel in the hip-hop area, let's go. I have Sibelius cued up and would love to spend my weekend transcribing. If we're getting all technophobe, I can do it by hand, but I have to warn you--my notation handwriting is pretty awful.

Is the argument that sampling has robbed working musicians of real jobs? That gets into dicier territory. All the same, I can think of at least half a dozen other factors that have been way more detrimental to the mechanics of being a working musician in the 21st century--including gentrification and the seemingly systematic destruction of live performance spaces in major cities, the death of the record industry and the inability to properly monetize streaming, the emergence of internet piracy and sharing, the dilution of listening options emergent to the inception of the digital age, the rise of music education as a necessary precursor to professional status (and the entry barriers at the point of enrollment), and yes--the emergence of DJs as an alternative to "live music." Keep in mind that being a DJ does not necessarily equate to playing, producing, or recording electronic music with a sampler--we're talking about a subcategory of live performance with its own specific genres and practices. Any one of these issues could easily take up a whole thread and is probably best addressed elsewhere. 

What is the ultimate argument here? That every time live instruments show up it's good, but every time electronic instruments show up it's bad? This is an unwinnable argument, because the universe that divides these two extremes does not exist.

Again, with all due respect, please dispense with the pod people bullshit. The idea that there is no way that trained musicians can develop an appreciation for electronic sounds--not without the intervention of alien mind control--is deeply condescending and the worst kind of straw man argument. 

Edited April 8, 2017 by ep1str0phy
Hugely incoherent

[Dmitry]

Why not focus on I Just Called to Say I Love You original album version, for starters? It sounds like crap to me, precisely because of the instrumentation, incl. the Roland drum machine.

 

[JSngry]

It's just so....rigid!

49 minutes ago, Dmitry said:

Why not focus on I Just Called to Say I Love You original album version, for starters? It sounds like crap to me, precisely because of the instrumentation, incl. the Roland drum machine.

 

That's a turd song with turd production, all of which is the sole responsibility of the human involved. A live band doesn't make it any less of a turd of a song, although it might render it a more pliable turd for some ears.

I love Stevie, but he, as a human, creates turds on occasion. It's what happens in life. Not all ladies (or showers) are golden.

[JSngry]

Technology ruining everything natural about time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMPTE_timecode

Oh, but wait, before technology destroyed the soul of black music tradition or whatever the fuck is alleged to have happened, let's bitch about click tracks

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_track

and oh shit, you can actually fuck around with a drum machine, it's willing to listen to your reasoning, a click track will just drill you into zombie nations suitable for loving your 20th Century Fossil Fuel Economy Overlords, and oh btw ain't what you do it's the way that you do it, hello continuing relevancy of Black Music Tradition.

Too bad this shit don't swing.

 

 

 

[ep1str0phy]

2 hours ago, JSngry said:

It's just so....rigid!

That's a turd song with turd production, all of which is the sole responsibility of the human involved. A live band doesn't make it any less of a turd of a song, although it might render it a more pliable turd for some ears.

I love Stevie, but he, as a human, creates turds on occasion. It's what happens in life. Not all ladies (or showers) are golden.

This is the crux of this discussion. If electronic instruments (like samplers) are tools, they can be used as well or as poorly as anything else. 

I happen to think that the original recording of "I Just Called..." does hame some sort of musical value, but that's absolutely down to taste. The rigidity of the rhythm, the syntheticness of the production, all of those cheesy arpeggios and synthesized strings--it's absolutely overstylized. It's also horribly dated and hugely square compared to a lot of Stevie's other music.

At the same time, I can appreciate the fact that it's a deliberate and assertive exercise in a particular sonic terrain. This isn't "Superstition" or "Golden Lady"--it's as overtly and intentionally stylized as the stuff on McCartney II or Let's Dance. 

It's fair to find the musical result repulsive while appreciating the craft, intention, and nuance behind the work. Turd it may be, but it's the kind of turd one arrives at after a substantial amount of conceptual digestion.

Bad music remains bad music, good music remains good music--with allowances for taste, of course. The issue arises when condemnation of a few desultory examples of a particular conceptual practice results in a blanket dismissal of all exercises in said practice.

If you want to say "I hate that stuff" or "that music isn't for me"--please, by all means. All day. At the same time, I'm deeply suspicious of sweeping statements like "all hip-hop sucks" or "the use of samplers in contemporary pop music is bad" or, yes, "The drum machine has destroyed the beauty of Black Music forever" when I find no evidence of critical engagement or dialogic nuance.

For example: when I hear Sonny Simmons shit all over contemporary free jazz players, I respect that--he was there--in the trenches--for the earliest waves of free jazz and engaged firsthand with many of the practices he is on the record as having found objectionable. 

Other people who have gone on the record against early free jazz--guys like Roy Eldridge, for example--I wouldn't go to those folks for informed, intelligent, evenhanded opinions on the financial, social, and conceptual viability of that music. Roy may have sat in with Ornette, but there's no evidence that he took the time to study that stuff with an earnest and unbiased interest. Roy also didn't record with Marion Brown or sit in the recording booth for Ascension. That's not a knock on Roy, who was of course a legend--it's only a knock on Roy talking bigger than his frame of reference should have allowed. For what it's worth, I wouldn't go to Ornette for opinions about swing music, either. 

[rostasi]

4 hours ago, Dmitry said:

Why not focus on I Just Called to Say I Love You original album version, for starters? It sounds like crap to me, precisely because of the instrumentation, incl. the Roland drum machine.

But I just did that in my comment.

[sgcim]

7 hours ago, ep1str0phy said:

Come on, man. For real?

So we're not going to address the fact that a gigantic proportion of musicians whose music might be considered "live" have worked with electronic instrumentation--and vice-versa? And we're not going to talk about how many of these musicians on both sides of the divide have moved freely between artificial studio environments and live performance (and live documentation)? 

No discussion about how Miles overdubbed on Miles Ahead or the studio artifice on Mingus Ah Um? Is the difference that they used live musicians? Because live musicians alone did not play the edit of Better Get Hit In Your Soul. 

Are we going to talk about the use of drum programming on Tutu? Bullshit, right? Because there's a sizable roster of live performers on that album. Billy Hart is on that album, for chrissakes. That record could not have been made without the cooperation of both parties.

Are we going to talk about how Ali Shaheed Muhammad, the musician you dismissively refer to as "some hip-hop 'genius'", is a champion of live instrumentation in hip-hop contexts? It was Ali's idea to perform the music of Luke Cage live--he apparently wanted to do it since the project's inception:

Are we going to talk about the sheer volume of albums recorded by hip-hop musicians--many of them producers who make frequent use of samplers--that rely on the integration of live performance from various genres? I'm sure you've heard a lot of these records from 16 years of listening to HOT 97. Examples: virtually everything Ali's bandmate Q-Tip has done since the end of A Tribe Called Quest--including assembling a band that featured Kurt Rosenwinkel, Gary Thomas, and Kenny Garrett--Outkast's The Love Below, everything by The Roots, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, J Dilla's Welcome 2 Detroit, almost all Beastie Boys records, Madlib's Yesterdays New Quintet albums, Flying Lotus's Cosmogramma (w/Ravi Coltrane), Chuck D and B Real with Prophets of Rage, Ice-T's Body Count records, Kanye West's use of a live orchestra on numerous recordings, Run the Jewels 2, Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp A Butterfly, and so on. 

Is the problem that the inflection of electronic music is wrong? That any playing that is either informed by or committed to the rhythmic mechanics of electronic music is somehow stiff, unswinging, or unfunky? Well cool, dude. Take it up with, again, James Brown, who bothered to work with Afrika Bambaataa on Unity--but of course that's late stage James Brown, and he'd lost his "edge" or was merely doing it for the money.

In that case, let's talk about Prince, who we seem to be upholding as some gold standard of musicianship in the 1980s onward. Was drum programming too good for When Doves Cry? The minute we dispense with 1999 as a valid piece of 20th century art is the minute that a lot of people get off the boat with the "electronic music is bad" thing.

If Prince is somehow--inexplicably--too archaic for this conversation, we can talk about the multitude of 21st century drummers who borrow from or are informed by the mechanics of electronic music and hip-hop. A small set of examples: Chris Dave, Tyshawn Sorey, Ronald Bruner Jr., Karriem Riggins, Dave King, Rudy Royston, Gene Lake, Zach Hill, Questlove, Damion Reid, Guillermo E. Brown. Many of these guys trade in vastly different genres of music. If you argue that all of these guys suck, you're either fooling yourself or are far too moldy for the fig tree you're on.

Is the argument that all popular music after 1980 or so sucks? If so, fantastic--we've left the world of empiricism and fact and entered the realm of opinion. You're welcome to it. Alternately, if you want to get into a hyper-technical discussion about the nuances of quantization, syncopation, and feel in the hip-hop area, let's go. I have Sibelius cued up and would love to spend my weekend transcribing. If we're getting all technophobe, I can do it by hand, but I have to warn you--my notation handwriting is pretty awful.

Is the argument that sampling has robbed working musicians of real jobs? That gets into dicier territory. All the same, I can think of at least half a dozen other factors that have been way more detrimental to the mechanics of being a working musician in the 21st century--including gentrification and the seemingly systematic destruction of live performance spaces in major cities, the death of the record industry and the inability to properly monetize streaming, the emergence of internet piracy and sharing, the dilution of listening options emergent to the inception of the digital age, the rise of music education as a necessary precursor to professional status (and the entry barriers at the point of enrollment), and yes--the emergence of DJs as an alternative to "live music." Keep in mind that being a DJ does not necessarily equate to playing, producing, or recording electronic music with a sampler--we're talking about a subcategory of live performance with its own specific genres and practices. Any one of these issues could easily take up a whole thread and is probably best addressed elsewhere. 

What is the ultimate argument here? That every time live instruments show up it's good, but every time electronic instruments show up it's bad? This is an unwinnable argument, because the universe that divides these two extremes does not exist.

Again, with all due respect, please dispense with the pod people bullshit. The idea that there is no way that trained musicians can develop an appreciation for electronic sounds--not without the intervention of alien mind control--is deeply condescending and the worst kind of straw man argument. 

That didn't sound at all like the theme to Luke Cage. I couldn't hear the melody, but I'd rather hear that band funking out than what I heard on my TV.

And I said I loved most of the soundtrack to Luke Cage, especially when they played Donald Byrd after they murdered that guy that ran the barber shop.

It brought me to tears.

It's not electronic instruments, it's the fact that a whole generation of kids are coming up who only respond to music with a robotic, steady beat, rather than the  nuanced funk of P-Funk.

If you tried to play P-Funk's music with a drum machine, it would feel like you're listening to a polka.

You bring up some good points, and touch on the central theme of my favorite writer, William Gaddis, the theme of 'mechanization and the arts: the destructive element'.

Though Gaddis wrote the novel J R back in the 70s, his predictions about tech taking away the human element from the arts have more or less come true.

Even Robert Moog was disgusted about the way they used the synthesizer to replace acoustic instruments. He even said that synthesizers would always be just an inferior electronic copy of the actual vibrations of 'real' instruments.

But as Jsangrey said, it all comes down to the fact that I'm left cold by hip-hop, unless Kanye samples 'Home is Where the Hatred Is' by Gil Scott Heron, and then I;m deeply moved.

.

 

[Dmitry]

10 hours ago, rostasi said:

But I just did that in my comment.

Yes, I read it, thanks. My post was directed more at epistrophy.

 

 

14 hours ago, JSngry said:

That's a turd song with turd production, all of which is the sole responsibility of the human involved. A live band doesn't make it any less of a turd of a song, although it might render it a more pliable turd for some ears.

I love Stevie, but he, as a human, creates turds on occasion. It's what happens in life. Not all ladies (or showers) are golden.

You've advocated for music worse than this, so... 

[JSngry]

not in this thread!

 

 

[ep1str0phy]

Sgcim, thanks for that--that I can wrap my head around. I admit that the implications of automization are way more convoluted than the practice of automization, and I'd imagine that most self-respecting musicians would rankle at the idea that we'd one day be replaced, wholesale, by the materials with which we're supposed to be creating.

I do question the degree to which electronic instrumentation has consumed the landscape, since on an experiential and observational level I can't see live performers going anywhere any time soon. Wasn't this the fear provoked by the inception of the synthesizer? And yet I can't imagine that the historical use of mellotron is for anything other than the specific effect of synthetic strings--e.g., "Strawberry Fields Forever" or even something as esoteric as "Water Torture" on the second Mwandishi album. Even the use of the Moog by Dick Hyman or Wendy Carlos is meant to be stylized in character--those sounds posit an alternative to the piano or harpsichord rather than an outright replacement.

The other big fear of mechanization is the economic issue I mention above, and I have no idea how to quantify the lasting effects of synthesizers or drum machines on the business of making music. Setting aside the other relevant factors (gentrification, streaming, etc.), isn't it true (as stated in that video that rostasi posted) that we need people to program the robots? I see an expansion in the repertoire of musical skills that are both offered and asked for across the board--people to play the synthesizers, to man the trigger pads, to program their own interfaces, and so on. And then we're back in the realm of talking about automization as a tool rather than a dictate.

If folks are left cold by hip-hop--yeah, I hear that--and as a fan of a lot of hip-hop, I recognize the historical limitations of the genre and the many ways (not just musical, but also social, political, aesthetic, and soon) that it can be perceived as objectionable.

The idea of the "cold steady beat," though, is fraught. The sort of icy drum sounds characterized by the 808 are still there--in trap music, electro pop, IDM, and even the more creatively nuanced, hugely theatrical alternative hip-hop that has prevailed in the past several years. That being said, even the mainstream has had a taste for and fetishization of organic drum sounds and classic R&B for a while. G-Funk was a big deal in the 90's and I don't think that much of that music has aged well outside of attitude and social relevance--the Parliament lifts on The Chronic border on cover act schlock and are more important for what they managed to do than for how they actually sound. 

But--and returning to the theme of instruments as tools--sampled content can sound pretty fresh and nuanced in skilled hands. I'm sure there are people here who won't dig this and/or don't get it, but J Dilla is largely responsible for disassociating beat music from quantization, and he had a panoptic knowledge of the mechanics of multiple genres--sampling at this level is as much about developing coherent, living collage as it is about providing a canvas for miscellaneous lyrical content. You can be sure that the drum feel here is thoroughly developed and calculated--from the timbres to the envelopes of the transients to the shuffle of the eighth notes to the actual drum pattern and intensity of attack:

 

And speaking of P-Funk rips, this is what happens after Dilla's logics are thoroughly digested and reanimated in a hybrid synthetic/live context. George Clinton even shows up. The producer, fwiw, is Alice Coltrane's grand-nephew: 

 

[sgcim]

Now that i remember back to those 16 years of CD day (one day a week, I'd turn the classroom over to the kids), and some of the brighter, more creative ones would bring in something like that (wesley D.) once in a great while, and get extra credit for sparing their teacher the agony of listening to an A minor chord for three straight minutes.

I liked one artist that put together these collage-like, episodic things that offered a lot of contrast, that I'd always use for listening tests- changing meters, textures, tempos, dynamics. etc...Forget his name.

One of the kids was 'making beats' for the Roughriders and other people, and still involved with jamming at his church. I brought in a  Grover Washington Jr. video, and he sat there spellbound saying, "That's what I want to do with my life!".

Another kid, also an organist for his church, who could walk bass lines with the foot pedals,also did some hip-hop sessions. He could blow away me and other professional jazz musicians i used to bring down to the school with just blues scale licks. I got him lessons with Roy Ayers pianist, Mark Adams, and now he's playing more than blues scale licks.

Hopefully kids like that will change the music for the better

[ep1str0phy]

2 hours ago, sgcim said:

Another kid, also an organist for his church, who could walk bass lines with the foot pedals,also did some hip-hop sessions. He could blow away me and other professional jazz musicians i used to bring down to the school with just blues scale licks. I got him lessons with Roy Ayers pianist, Mark Adams, and now he's playing more than blues scale licks.

Hopefully kids like that will change the music for the better

I mean, I hope that's something we can all agree on. 

This kind of blew me away when I first heard it--nothing particularly special or innovative from a "jazz technical perspective," but definitely unexpected:

Glasper is playing these very idiomatic quartal harmonies, and the horns are on this young lion/80's Marsalis brothers kick. The excitement isn't so much with the content as with the fact that it's the second track on an enormous hip-hop record--and Kendrick asked for it. So much of the lexicon of jazz/hip-hop collaboration is this boring, self-conscious beast, and and it's kind of breathtaking hearing a cutting-edge MC dig into the backwaters of jazz with intention and excitement. I'd heard that Lamar's next album was supposed to be a left turn into less esoteric "hardcore" fare, and both the jazz fan and the hip-hop fan in me got hit with a wave of disappointment.

To put things another way, the part of me that would like nothing better than to play a casual gig or spin Grant Green records all day is still very much happy that I could hit virtually any rehearsal or session and call for a Dilla shuffle feel without being met with blank stares. But, you know, I like Art Blakey, too. 

[sgcim]

Wow! Too bad I'm retarded. I mean retired from teaching; I would've loved to play that one for the kids. I'm glad kids are being exposed to stuff like that.