Back To School

On rudiments, George Lawrence Stone, and Charles Wilcoxon

Fall is here, time to go back to school. This year I’m happy to be teaching more than I have in a few years.

The center of the drumset is the snare drum, and drum lessons are, by definition, concerned with technique and reading, so we’re gonna study the snare drum. That means rudiments.

Just off the top of my head, Cozy Cole, Buddy Rich, Philly Joe Jones, Alan Dawson, Tony Williams, Billy Cobham, Marvin Smitty Smith, Kenny Washington, Vinnie Colaiuta, Terri Lyne Carrington, and Dan Weiss are some of the greatest technicians to ever play the instrument. I’m sure I’ve left out a few essential names. But all these folks know a lot about the rudiments.

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Military drumming, which gave us the snare drum and the bass drum, has deep roots, stretching back hundreds of years all across Europe. During and immediately after the American Civil War, American drummers began compiling and notating the elements of military drumming, which they called ‘rudiments’.

By the early 20th century, after much back and forth, American drummers had a list of twenty-six rudiments— rolls (double strokes ending with one or two single strokes), flams (two single strokes), drags (a single and double), paradiddles (combinations of single and double strokes)— and a national organization, the National Association of Rudimental Drummers (NARD), tasked with promulgating this tradition far and wide.

Rudiments and rudimental solos are all about rules. Everything is proscribed— sticking, accents, tempo— nothing is up for interpretation. Play them and you feel the military mindset in your hands. On the surface, this is light years from what I care about: folklore, playing in a band, swing, social dance, clave. So why teach rudiments and rudimental solos?

Simple— because I don’t know the student’s future. Whatever a student does or goes on to do, a basic understanding of drum technique via the rudiments will only help. Rudimental training guarantees no wisdom, it’s true, but how could I ignore it and call myself a teacher? What kind of teaching would that be? “Hey, let’s NOT learn this stuff that I and a host of the world’s most beloved drummers all practiced, cause what if you don’t like it. Sound good?”

Since there’s only two choices— learning or not learning rudiments— I opt for learning. You might get deep into rudiments, you might just be aware of them, it’s ultimately your choice. But drummers learn rudiments, and that’s pretty much it.

The two rudiment-based books that I keep coming back to are George Lawrence Stone’s Stick Control and Charley Wilcoxon’s Modern Rudimental Swing Solos For The Advanced Drummer. Like most drummers, these books have been with me since my early teens. When I use them now, I’m always impressed by how quietly revolutionary they are, for these books bring together previously-incompatible drumming and musical traditions. There is wisdom here.

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George Lawrence Stone, born in Boston in 1886, the son of a drummer and drum maker, had been making his way through the teeming miscellany of American music-making for a few decades when, in 1935, he published his most well-known work, Stick Control, helpfully subtitled “for the SNARE DRUMMER”.

With its gray cover, 19th-century spellings (“How To Practise Stick Control”), stern instructions (“PLAY EACH EXERCISE TWENTY TIMES”), and endless two, four, and eight-bar patterns, Stick Control generally inspires initial awe followed by deep confusion. There are no etudes or compositions, just 46 black-and-white pages of exercises, broken up into sections with titles like "Single Beat Combinations” “Short Roll Studies”, “Flam Beats”, and “Combinations in 3/8”. This is old-school rudimental thinking, now quite arcane and esoteric. Mostly we stick to the first three pages, combinations of right (R) and left (L) over two bars of eighth notes. The rest of Stick Control seems, at first glance, simply baffling.

I was lucky that my drum teacher from age 12 to 17, Mr. Rick Compton, was into Stick Control. Rick, combining some of what he had been taught with a lot of his own ideas, had a yen for the whole book— we studied every page, and played them together in our lessons. Now I see what Stone was doing in Stick Control: kicking open the door to the future musical world by gently extending the rudimental tradition.

For example, towards the end of the book, Stone subdivides the beat first into five, then into seven. The few weeks I spent in my teens playing through Stone’s fives and sevens, on the snare and around the drumset, was invaluable. Cleverly, Stone presents these ‘new’ rhythms as variations on the old twenty-six rudiments. The brave new world— five, seven, polyrhythms, asymmetrical time signatures, mixed meters, et cetera— was, to George Lawrence Stone, just an extension of the old, of twenty-six rudiments, alla breve, 6/8, 2/2, and “The Downfall of Paris”. Play Stick Control and you can feel the connection between the old and the new in your hands.

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Charles Wilcoxon, born, according to the Percussive Arts Society, in 1894, was thinking along similar lines. With a background in vaudeville, pit orchestras, and dance bands, Wilcoxon, like Stone, showed how flexible the rudimental tradition could be. When Wilcoxon’s Modern Rudimental Swing Solos For The Advanced Drummer appeared in 1946, it served as an endorsement and a beautiful suggestion— how to combine the rudimental (European) tradition with Swing (Black American) tradition.

Wilcoxon saw a way for ragtime, swing, Louis Armstrong, Gene Krupa (which really means Chick Webb), and the African rhythmic sensibility to coexist within the rudimental tradition. Wilcoxon’s book, consisting of a few pages of rudimental variations and 31 brand new, updated rudimental solos (most for snare drum, but a few are written for drumset, and one even calls for bongos) beautifully and elegantly brings rudimental and jazz drumming together.

It’s said that Cozy Cole, famously with Cab Calloway and a rudimental expert, got ahold of Wilcoxon’s book and showed it to his students at the drum school he and Gene Krupa had in NYC in the 1940s. One of Cole’s students was Philly Joe Jones, who later studied with Wilcoxon himself. Philly Joe’s soloing is very much aligned with the Cole/Wilcoxon project, a synthesis between the rudimental/military world and the jazz/dance/musical comedy world.

There’s a real generosity in George Lawrence Stone’s and Charles Wilcoxon’s work, two white men born in the 19th century. They’d spent all their lives mastering rudimental, vaudeville, and symphonic traditions, and here they were, writing drum books that throw open the doors to modern composers, swing rhythms, and jazz drummers.

They were correct.

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Everyone is my teacher, and I owe my teachers everything. Teaching, playing, composing, and this Substack are my chance to give back, pay it forward, be a part of something much greater than myself and my daily worries.

Teachers are seldom aware of the vast good they do, and students usually don’t notice when they’ve had a lesson that will one day be foundational to their understanding of themselves. I’m living proof of this.