NYT article about recreating the Funky Drummer

dizzybull

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/06/arts/music/dylan-wissing-funky-drummer.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20201007&instance_id=22889&nl=the-morning&regi_id=105942261&section_index=4&section_name=play_watch_eat_drum&segment_id=40077&te=1&user_id=67d8c42a78cbf301b9aad75e195be5b3

Not sure if it is behind a paywall or not

klezmer electro-thug beats

Ha! As a drummer who has struggled mightily with recreating some of Clyde Stubblefield's recordings this is weirdly specific to me. It's really heartening, weirdly, to see a pro session guy say the same things I say about him, like that he does 16th notes on his right hand with ungodly time and endurance and I don't think I'll ever be able to do what he did.

I'm always willing, as some schmo, to say that kind of thing - I'll never have musicality like Purdie, I'll never have ghost note/hi-hat chops like Stubblefield, they're just too good - but to hear somebody for whom drumming is their career say that is like revealing a secret that most professionals don't want to. Some people are just history-making good, it's not an accident what came of these guys' drumming.

Loads of pros will show you "how to play" such-and-such a beat from Tony Allen or Zig Modeliste. I respect somebody who says they might know how something was done but is honest enough to say it can't be done as well through a lesson or even a career's ambition. There's such a thing as a perfect recording or performance - not a technical perfection but that scratches the right itch in people.

Yemsky

Glad to see that this article was not behind the NYT paywall. 

His obsession to match Clyde's playing is surely interesting from a musician's perspective but I find the commercial motivation behind it at least equally fascinating:

"Clearing samples to incorporate them in new songs can get expensive if you follow the proper legal channels. Since music involves two types of copyright, one for the musical work (the composition) and one for the recording (the capture of a performance), producers came up with the cost-cutting idea of recording new versions of those vintage fragments.

“One reason a cover version is automatically easier to license than a sample is that it only implicates one of the copyrights, the composition one,” .

Here's another way to go about this issue: