If you listen to Art Blakey’s 1958 recording of “Moanin’” and then to Jimmy Cobb’s 1960 trio version, you’ll hear two different approaches to the same musical material. The composition is the same. Bobby Timmons, the composer of the piece, is at the piano on both versions. But the musical environment around him has changed: the Jazz Messengers quintet with trumpet and tenor saxophone has become a piano trio by 1960. The first article in my Modern Drummer series explored why a transcription can never be understood as a completely objective representation of a performance. The present comparison puts that idea into practice. Here, notation does not serve as a final answer, but as a tool for listening more closely to two recordings and examining the musical function behind the notated strokes. When I transcribed and compared both versions, three things stood out in particular: the groove architecture, the approach […]

November 2026 Issue