Ghost Notes
There’s no point in trying to explain what James Brown is doing. Er, does. Er, did. In Moby Dick, Ishmael asks Stubb, “Who is Ahab?” Stubb replies, incredulously, “Who is Ahab? Ahab is Ahab.”
Well, James Brown is James Brown. Here, I’ll draw you a Venn Diagram to explain it better:
Well, I hope that helped. The drummer in that video is Clyde Stubblefield. He’s pretty well-known in drumming circles. You’ve heard his drumming scores of times because it was sampled and used in umpty-nine hip-hop records. He passed away in 2017. He was, by all accounts, a nice man. He played with James Brown for six years or so. You’ll also notice there’s another drummer in that video. That’s Jabo Starks. Everyone in James Brown’s band was a drummer, although they played drums on different instruments, so having two trap sets isn’t that weird.
He moved to Madison, Wisconsin, of all places, after his stint with James Brown. He played in a nightclub in Madison every Monday for more than twenty years, until he got sickly.
Stubblefield never had a drum lesson. He said he liked seeing drummers in parades, and thought it would be cool to try. He liked listening to rhythms in everyday things, like trains passing by and and machines banging away in factories, and incorporating them into beats.
Unlike James Brown, Clyde could explain what he was doing. He’ll even show you, if you’ll pay attention:
He says, “They call them ghost notes. I’m not sure I understand what they mean by ghost notes. Notes that’s not there, but I put them there.”
There are only a few musicians in any generation who hear things in their heads that aren’t there yet, so they put them there. Clyde was certainly one.
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