Perennial nuggets of wisdom on improvisation, performing, and living a musical life from the great pianist and composer Thelonious Monk - as heard and recorded by soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy during his tenure in one of Monk's band.  This has been saved on my phone for a really long time. I often go back to it.  Some of my favourites:

"Don't play everything (or everytime); let some things go by"

"A note can be as small as a pin or as big as the world, it depends on your imagination"

"You got it! If you don't want to play, tell a joke or dance, but in any case, you got it! (to the drummer who didn't want to solo)"

I recently came across this video showcasing a really cool way of representing rhythm through animation:

Traditional Western musical notation, is just one of many ways to represent and communicate music in a visual form.  Especially when it comes to cyclical rhythms like a short ostinato, or a drumset groove, using a circle based visual method just seems to make natural sense!  It's immediately accessible, and because it's so tactile, it really helps to reinforce and support your listening - which is always the ultimate goal!

For some time, I've been using a similar method (though much lower tech!) with students of all ages, and I've found it to be very helpful for getting them started with reading, making that key visual-aural connection, and just making it a more fun process using colour!  Bars are represented in cycles, with beats and their subdivisions around a circle diagram and you can assign different colours to different sounds on the drums.  You can actually get fairly complex as well, indicating RH rhythms to notate polyrhythmic grooves.

This method can apply to any percussion instrument - assigning colours to different sounds - strokes on the congas, djembe, pandeiro etc.  It works very well for percussion ensembles too. My partner and I actually developed this notation originally for a March break camp for 6-8 year olds. You can quickly create many interlocking patterns that are easy for each student to follow (I usually use a modified version that just uses numbers for the counts).   It's a fun and empowering activity for students to create their own rhythms too, and a great listening exercise as well - ask the members of class to listen for who's playing with them on their number, or which sounds do they hear on beat 3 etc.

The inspiration for this notation stems from an analysis that one of our teachers, Jesse Stewart developed for examining cyclical rhythmic structures in music connected to African, and African diasporic roots.  The article is definitely worth checking out.

Offering different systems of notation, and ways of communicating sound is very helpful to reach students with different learning strengths, and opening their experience up to practices beyond the Western common practice tradition.

If you're a teacher interested in trying some of these ideas out with your students, feel free to get in touch and I'd be happy to pass along some more info and templates!