OOP BOP SH’ BAM

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12/15/11 – The Hale School Jazz Orchestra visits Foxborough High School.

From Wikipedia:
While working in the bands of Edgar Hayes and Roy Eldridge, Clarke began experimenting with moving the time-keeping role from the combination of snare drum or hi-hat and bass drum to embellished quarter notes on the ride cymbal, the familiar “ding-ding-da-ding” pattern, which Clarke is often credited with inventing. This new approach incorporated the bombs, or syncopated accents on the bass drum, developed by Jo Jones, while further freeing up the left hand to play more syncopated figures. Under Roy Eldridge, who encouraged this new approach to time keeping, Clarke wrote a series of exercises for himself to develop the independence of the bass drum and snare drum, while maintaining the time on the ride cymbal. One of these passages, a combination of a rim shot on the snare followed directly by a bass drum accent, earned Clarke his nickname, “Klook”, which was short for “Klook-mop”, in imitation of the sound this combination produced. This nickname was enshrined in “Oop Bop Sh’Bam,” recorded by Dizzy Gillespie in 1946 with Clarke on drums, where the scat lyric to the bebop tune goes “oop bop sh’bam a klook a mop.”

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