Here’s another short but sweet transcription: a little drum break from Idris Muhammad on the Rusty Bryant tune “Fire Eater.” This particular record was unknown to me before I stumbled into it this week — it’s nice when the universe gives me something like this rather than the usual deluge of reasons to regret picking up this instrument.
“Fire Eater” is a pretty long jam, but I’m focusing on about 45 seconds towards the end of the tune, right after the organ solo. It’s a totally unaccompanied 16-bar drum feature, which eventually takes us back into the head of the tune as the song wraps up.
This is some classic 70s funk drumming — a lot of offbeat 16ths, busy cymbal work, some linear stuff, etc. There are also a lot of ghosted kick notes, which are generally an unusual sight in my transcriptions. In the full mix, I suspect many of these are inaudible, and even in the drum solo, there are a few that are very nearly so. I have these ones notated with [] brackets; I read about this years ago on Wikipedia, but it’s not a common convention, and I don’t think I have ever used it before. And frankly, these notes may just be noise from Idris shifting his weight as the kick beater is pressed into the head.
All of the crashes sound like they come from the ride cymbal, and I have these notated with accents and tenutos. It’s another obscure technique, but I want the tenuto to delineate that it’s a hit with the shoulder of the stick, and not just a louder tap with the tip. (Tap with the tip? Ahem.)
As the drum solo winds down, there are seemingly two extra beats before the groove that sets up the head. Usually, random time signature changes make me think I’m counting the downbeat in the wrong spot, but I don’t think there’s any other sensible way to feel it other than changing time signatures. Perhaps Idris just miscounted — it is hard to notice with the offbeat 16ths that come beforehand. (So I guess, strictly speaking, this is a 16½-measure drum break.)
I finish out the score with a quick look at Idris’ drumming on the head.
Bonus: The 45 single is available to stream, which has “Fire Eater” pretty gracefully truncated down to 3¼ minutes. Not a trivial thing to do in the era of tape — I know as much because I did such an assignment in college. The single (surprisingly) still retains the entire drum break. Starting around the 2‑minute mark, it makes up about 25% of the track all on its own. Sadly, the single sounds like it’s in mono, although the album mix has the entire drum kit panned right, which isn’t much better…
Edit (March 2026): Alright, the jig’s up — I actually listened to the single version for the transcription, since I initially thought the mono mix would be better for picking up details. While the drums are front and center in the single, everything is heavily compressed, so I missed some things towards the end. Also, the album version has a ride crash when the band comes back in that the single does not have. I have to wonder how complicated this edit is, and if the musicians didn’t just rerecord the tune. Anyway, I updated the sheet music.
