Hemiola funk series - basic logic

I want to walk through the logic of this hemiola funk series of posts— at least the logic of one part of it, which may be difficult to see on playing through the materials. I feel I have to explain myself if I'm going to post a lot of pages developing an idea live on the blog like this. Here are the basic steps I am doing on those pages, with a little explanation:

Start with a basic 3:2 polyrhythm, written with 8th notes representing the 3 side. Notated here for cymbal and snare drum:

The native */4 meter for this is 3/4— that's the shortest */4 meter that can hold the uninterrupted pattern in a single measure. We get that by playing that pattern twice:

To be clear, this is not necessarily about a literal 3:2 polyrhythm, with three pulses played against two pulses. It's about fitting a running dotted-8th note rhythm into */4 meters— mainly 2/4 or 4/4. The 3 side of the polyrhythm, the 8th notes, just represent the context— the implied subdivision of the time signature. Our main interest is the dotted 8th notes:

As these rhythms occur in nature, they don't always start the same way. Here's the above pattern starting on its second beat:

Extend the pattern one more beat to put it into 4/4. The dashed “imaginary” barline divides the measure in half, which will be significant in a moment.

Now the weird/interesting part— reverse the pattern to start with the second half first:

...we see that same type of move in clave-based music, with 3-2 and 2-3 clave orientations, and we see it in Brazilian music. It's not so weird if we think of the rhythm as two measures of 2/4 rather than 4/4; I use a single measure of 4/4 only because it's common in modern North American music. The idea of reversing the parts may seem strange in the first place, but it certainly must have evolved organically. I think it's only seems strange because we're imposing a “1” on music that isn't as 1-centric as we are accustomed to— at least in the musics where these rhythms first came into common usage.


PROOF THIS IS NOT SOME JIVE I'M JUST MAKING UP:

The rhythms resulting from the above system turn up everywhere in nature. Two quick examples, using that last rhythm: it is the same as this common bossa nova rhythm, frequently mislabeled “bossa clave.” Here it is in a complete groove:

And it occurs in DC Go-go music— it's the bass drum rhythm that is the foundation of the entire style:

Now, the end game here is not to theorize about rhythm. I'm more interested in developing a fairly complete funk drumming vocabulary with a few simple drumming ideas, based on these concepts. The vocabulary already exists— I just want to turn it into a method. It's also good to understand the extent to which this 3:2 polyrhythm is truly the life blood of African-American music, and Afro-Latin music, and all of their derivatives. Without this, we would all be playing marches.