Baby Dodds - Dodds' Drumming Style

Dodds' Drumming Style

Dodds continues to be admired for the creativity of his playing. He believed in playing something different for every chorus of every tune. Most of his contemporaries would play a short buzz or press roll on the back beats (the 2nd and 4th beats), but Dodds would play a long roll that lasted till the following beat, which created a smoother time feel that he later developed into the jazz ride pattern most commonly used ever since. Dodds was most well known, however, for what he called his “shimmy beat,” which he first used in 1918 at Jack Sheehan’s in New Orleans. He describes it in his autobiography: “One night a French soldier came in. When he heard the music he couldn’t dance to it, but he just started to shake all over. That’s the way it affected me. I saw him do it and I did it, too”. Dodds' unique shimmy beat caught Louis Armstrong's eye as well, who said: "To watch him play, especially when he beat on the rim of his bass in a hot chorus, he sort of shimmied when he beat with his sticks. Oh! Boy that alone was in my estimation the whole worth of admission”. Besides his unique drumming style, something important to Dodds was paying attention to the musicians in the outfit and fitting his drumming into the style the band was playing. He tried to get to know each member in the outfit and learn about how each person played his or her instrument. Throughout his autobiography, Dodds talks about listening to the different band members and using his role as drummer to help the band come together: “It was my job to study each musician and give a different background for each instrument. When a man is playing it’s up to the drummer to give him something to make him feel the music and make him work. That’s the drummer’s job”.