Very occasional quote of the day: you call it swing

“You call it swing, but what I’m saying is it’s a rhythmic sophistication that causes a euphoric reaction, and on a folk level that reaction can go anywhere from sensual feelings, to partying, to dancing, to actual meditation… That positive feeling can actually cause healing. 

I sincerely believe that’s one of the main purposes for rhythm, if not for music period, to cause that kind of healing effect.”  

- Billy Hart, Billy Higgins memorial roundtable, by Ted Panken

[h/t to @thenuge at DFO for the link]

View from the outside of a swing feel

Another item from the outer limits of usefulness, for most people. Sorry. The main interesting thing about that misguided jazz quintuplets page is that it gets us pulling around a jazz rhythm a little bit, hopefully leading to some organic flexibility. It's like an actor trying different ways of saying a line. 

...which— there's a wrong way to do both things. My wife, a trained actress, likes pointing out bad line readings in movies— places where the actor clearly didn't know what he or she was saying, and sounds wrong for the context. And with the drums— there's a tradition. Good players expect you to sound connected to it somehow. There's a lot of freedom in jazz, but it's got to serve an expressive end.  

Having thus established pure intent, here are a few different patterns for exploring that. 

We'll do it by mutating this: 

None of what follows requires any kind of swing interpretation— play the notes exactly as written as best you can. So long as the quarter note pulse is steady, drum corps precision isn't necessary.  

Same notes, in some different 16th note rhythms: 

And in quintuplets— see the other page for a some supporting patterns to get the timing: 

“Tripteenths”— a way of playing 16th notes in Brazilian music, fitting four notes in the space of a triplet. The 1 and the a of the 16ths land on the first and last notes of the triplet. The timing is literally this: 

Here's a snare drum exercise for developing the timing of that— the accents should sound the same all the way through: 

Mid-beat subdivision change— at slow tempos, Elvin Jones will sometimes push the last note of a beat into a different subdivision than the beginning of the beat. The first two notes in a triplet timing, and the last note with a 16th note timing. Or the first two notes in a 16th timing, and the last note in a triplet timing. I've noticed him doing this in a single beat, at phrase endings, but he may do it more often— it's where part of the organic quality of his rhythm comes from.  

I'll illustrate the concept with this phrase:

We'll change the timing of the last note of each measure to match the rhythm of the measure after it: 

It's highly weird to write that in 4/4, it's not so bad in 2/2: 

It reflects something that I think is essential to swing— the last note of a beat treated not as the end of the beat, but as a pickup to the following beat. So rhythm is perceived not as: 

1& 2& 3& 4&
1&a 2&a 3&a 4&a
1e&a 2e&a 3e&a 4e&a

But as: 

&1 &2  &3  &4  &1
a1& a2& a3& a4& a1
a1e& a2e& a3e& a4e& a1

So, a little view from the outside that will hopefully strengthen your fundamentals. Enjoy it, but not too much. In the field your job is still to swing. 

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First jazz lesson

Here's an item for teachers. This is a process I improvised in a lesson with a 6th grade student yesterday, to introduce him to playing the jazz rhythm on the drums.

We did this verbally, reading only p. 11 from Syncopation, lines 11 (running 8th notes) and 15 (jazz cymbal rhythm). I only intended to teach him to count 8th notes with a swing interpretation, but as we started playing line 14 on the cymbal, the lesson evolved into teaching him some basic drumset coordination.

Steps we used were:
1. Counting the rhythms normally.
2. Counting the rhythms in a swing interpretation. Swing is an interpretation of 8th notes, and I explained it as a legato feeling with the &s of the rhythm falling late. I then sang the rhythms for him, and we sang them together. At no point did I mention triplets. Students tend to sing swing rhythms very staccato at first, so we took a moment to get a legato feeling in his singing.
3. Learning a logical series of simple playing exercises for putting the rhythm on the drum set.

Note that all exercises should be finished on beat 1; don't end exercises with “4-&.” The lone beginning quarter note can be confusing to some students, so you can also start the exercises on 2— taking care to get the counting right. After learning these patterns, I had my student play through them all without stopping— again, the only written music we were using was line 15 from Syncopation, p. 11.

Depending on the student, I might take these steps in a different order, or go another direction entirely. Subsequent steps might be to learn a few more obvious coordination ideas, or to improvise with the combinations learned so far. Teachers who emphasize quarter notes on the bass drum as part of the basic jazz beat will probably want to develop a slightly different sequence of exercises to teach that.

With this student my next steps will likely be to reinforce counting swing 8th notes, to introduce the idea of writing swing 8th notes as triplets, and to teach him some coordination using my “skiplet” concept. He instinctively understood the premise of that method— that the cymbal rhythm is oriented around 2 and 4. In playing the exercises, he would often start on 2. It will take a little bit of creative teaching to exploit that, while making sure he still understands where the 1 is.

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Practice loop: The Sermonette

Here's a jazz practice loop in 4/4, a sort of gospel 2 feel, sampled from The Sermonette, by Cannonball Adderly. It has a nice deep pocket and is good for all your jazz practicing needs. The tempo is 124 BPM.

“Skiplet”?

In some ways I feel I'm watching (and contributing to) the death of the familiar jazz ride cymbal pattern as a musical thing, for a lot of reasons, but partly as the result of a whole lot of practice room abuse by uncommitted players. Lots of drummers are working on it, but very few of them are even listening to much actual jazz music, let alone making music with it. It's becoming just an obligatory drummer-thing, and we're starting to see people feeling free to invent their own stylized way of playing it, and making their own totally wrong pronouncements about it, seemingly without fear of being corrected by actual jazz musicians.

So I have mixed feelings about going further with the theory of it in an open setting like this. I don't really want to teach non-jazz musician teachers how to fake out their students better. But for all the people of noble purpose out there, this is one I've been working on for awhile:

The way I learned all my basic jazz coordination was through brute force; my teacher pointed me at some pages of Reed or Chapin, said “learn that”, and cut me loose to go figure it out how to play them. I didn't have any kind of system for doing that, so I just kept hacking away at them until I got it. There may be benefits to doing it that way, but it left me susceptible to weak spots in my playing— certain little coordinational things I learned well enough to get through the page, but not really well enough to be able to use in real playing.

To remedy that, in my own teaching, I want to have absolute clarity on all the little internals of the idea, and came up with my “kernel” theory of practice, in which you isolate clusters of notes, and coordinate around them. With jazz, that means using a single time through the basic unit of the pattern, “2, &-3” (or “4, &-1”, if you prefer):

Now, I don't like the idea of giving everything in music a name— I think it's orthodoxy-creating— but I've also wasted a lot of time and confused a lot of students calling the above thing “the 2, &-3”, or “the ding-da-ding”, and I wanted an easier way to refer to it as a discrete entity. Kind of like the tresillo in Salsa music. Tresillo means triplet, and refers to the three notes on the “3” side of clave. The middle note of the jazz pattern is sometimes called the skip note, so it only took a minute for my little rat-brain to come up with the word skiplet.

...

Stupid? Yes, it's stupid, but I can't be bothered with that. Jazz theory is full of made-up shit. Just be aware that it's something I made up, and if go into your next lesson with Billy Hart and say “skiplet”, he'll probably either laugh in your face or throw you out, maybe both. Soon we'll break this down a little further, looking at how you handle Chapin from a skiplet-oriented perspective...

Swing coordination: Dahlgren & Fine format — 01

In the swing section of their book 4-Way Coordination, Marvin Dahlgren and Eliot Fine created a fairly ingenious framework for writing related exercises in multiple time signatures. With my Pages o' Coordination I've been following their basic approach— writing an ostinato for cymbal, bass, and hihat, plus independent snare drum parts— but in one meter only. So, I thought I would try writing in their actual format, using here an ostinato we've explored before, distilled from Elvin Jones's groove in 6 on Out Of This World.

I should mention that reading single measures of fully mapped-out drum parts is not the ideal way to practice— it's not the way we read and play actual music. What we are doing here is acquiring things that can't be arrived at through more practical/realistic Syncopation-based methods; the patterns are a little too hard, or are too irregular.

Swing the 8th notes, and do the tom moves. Play each measure individually, then combine measures to make other meters; the main ones are given on the first line, but there are other possibilities. There are a couple of ways of making 7/4, for example.

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Kenny Clarke plays an intro

Putting together a bebop podcast (which we'll see here whenever I get it finished), this intro from 1941 by Kenny Clarke jumped out at me— the tune is Hot House, and the playing feels more like the end of the swing era than the beginning of bebop:

I have it on a record called The Immortal Charlie Christian, but it has apparently been released under Dizzy Gillespie's name, too:




There's also a little history lesson here. This is very early in the bebop era, and throughout the tune Clarke plays the time on the hihat— Papa Jo Jones's thing, and immediately before bebop, the hip way of playing. He only uses the cymbal as punctuation, like on the little choke he does in the third measure of that intro; he wasn't actually riding on it yet, as was the standard thing a few years later. Thanks to Clarke himself, to be clear.

Examples after the break:

VOQOTD: Dave Liebman on rhythm

   

Eighth notes are the main denomination of jazz time, much like the penny is to the American dollar. Although one may not play only eighth notes, they still serve as the underpinning of jazz time, similar to what the clave beat is in Afro Cuban music, meaning if not necessarily stated it is implied. A note here on terminology: what are called eighth notes in jazz may also be conceptualized as triplets with a space between the first and third part of the three part division, or it can be seen as a dotted eighth followed by a sixteenth note. For the purposes here the distinctions are not important. In short, when a jazz musician sees eighth notes written on a page, (s)he immediately plays the rhythm either like a dotted eighth followed by a sixteenth or the above described triplet.

Read more by Liebman here.

Read what I've written about swing.

What it is: swing rhythm

Extremely preoccupied with tour preparations, obviously, but fortunately I have a couple of things on deck:

Swing interpretation is something we use a lot here, and I've mostly assumed people know what it is— you probably wouldn't be reading all of this high-flying jazz drumming nonsense if you didn't. It's still a good idea to spell it all out, so people aren't working with partial information; so here are my ideas about it. I'm a player who happens to also be a teacher, and not a scholar, so other people may have different, better, or more complete ideas about it, despite the unequivocal-sounding title of the post.

Swing is a way of playing 8th notes. If you look at a fake book, a big band chart, or sheet music for standard tunes, for the most part they are written in regular old 4/4, using mostly 8th notes and longer rhythmic values:

Often explanation of how to play that with a swing feel is limited to this, or its verbal equivalent:

Swing = triplets. Got it. NEXT!

Except... no. Swing = triplets approximately the same way a “flesh”-colored Crayola = the color of human flesh:

That is, the circumstances under which flesh is flesh crayon colored are actually rather few, depending on the complexion of the individual, and the lighting in which he or she is viewed. Likewise with music, swing interpretation varies according to the player, the tempo and style of the piece, and what's going on musically at the moment.

Continued after the break:

Butch Miles on ensemble playing

Big band drumming tips from Butch Miles, from the Oct. 1977 issue of Modern Drummer. They apply to all types of music, of course: 

SUPPORT. If the band has a difficult passage, support them strongly. Let them rely on you for cues and dynamics.

DON'T GET IN THE WAY. There's no reason for you to play something rhythmically difficult if it detracts. Simplify it. You're responsible for keeping the band together.

DIRECT. Learn the entrances for ensembles and cue them in with authority. Always let the band know where they are.

DON'T OVERPLAY. Sometimes a well-placed rim shot in an arrangement has more impact than 10,000 notes. Learn the importance of silence.

KEEP THE ENERGY LEVEL UP. There's nothing that sounds as sad as a band dying in the middle of a passage.

LEARN THE CHART. Get your nose out of the music and be comfortable.

LEARN TO PHRASE. This is an art in itself. You don't have to play every note the band plays. Let them breathe. Learn when to punch, and when to back off. Talk to the leaders of the other sections and ask them exactly what they might want in the way of support in an ensemble passage. They may have some very valid ideas that you hadn't thought of. Don't be afraid to ask.

TIME. Never lose sight of the fact that you're the keeper of the time. That's the first and foremost job of a big band drummer - much more so than that of a small group drummer.

LISTEN, LISTEN, LISTEN. Learn the nuances, the dynamics of the arrangements. My boss, Count Basie, put it all together when he simply said, "LISTEN". As a big band drummer, you must be listening all of the time; listen to the soloist and support him; listen to the ensemble and guide them — cue them correctly; listen to the dynamics and play within that framework, but most importantly, listen to the overall sound and to yourself in the whole picture. Do you detract or do you support? A tape recorder is a great help. Listen to yourself on tape and be your biggest critic. That tape recorder never lies.

After the break are a couple of clips of Miles playing with Count Basie's band in the late '70's.

Transcription: Jo Jones - It Don't Mean A Thing...

Here's a  transcription  of Papa Jo Jones playing the intro and head of It Don't Mean A Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing, from a 1970 Black Lion recording, Paul Gonsalves Meets Earl Hines. There's a strong quarter note pulse on the hihat throughout, and no comping at all in the modern sense. The sketchy arrangement has some drum breaks, and Jones plays some interesting linear things on the later ones. We can assume he's playing the bass drum all the way through, though it's only audible on the punctuations.

Download the pdf

YouTube clip of the track after the break:

The DNA of swing drumming

I picked up this interesting book- Charley Wilcoxon's Drum Method- as one of my local sheet music stores was going out of business. I'd been working with Wilcoxon's more advanced Rudimental Swing Solos, but this seems to be the true key book (as far as a book can take you) for understanding pre-modern jazz drumming.

The emphasis here is on rudiments and syncopated phrases, in the the 30's swing drumming mode, before before four-way coordination, and before use of the ride cymbal and hi-hat were universal. The approach to rudiments is different than in traditional military-style drumming, as in Haskell Harr. Even the march-like etudes have a distinctly swinging feel absent from the other style.

Most of the book deals with quarter and 8th notes in 4/4 and cut time, plus 3/4 and 6/8. Syncopated and even meter-within-meter rhythms and accent patterns are introduced early, in the quarter note section, and exercises generally have a swing lilt. Remarkably, 16th notes in #/4 meters are not fully explored until page 91. Notably absent are the mathematical/logical sequences of exercises that became a primary feature of many drum books after George L. Stone's Stick Control. Often sequences of exercises will be related by embellishments, or sticking variations as in the single page of 16th note exercises, which shows the unadorned rhythm, then several sticking, accent, embellishment options. Usually they just follow a musically-related progression.

It's somewhat easy to miss the fact that this is a drum set method book. The bass drum is used simply throughout, playing either quarter notes or half notes, and occasionally filling in breaks or supporting an accent pattern in the hands. Aside from a few dedicated hihat exercises, most of the book uses only the bass drum and hands. Jazz ride cymbal and hi-hat patterns are presented as stand-alone time feels, with no comping in the modern Kenny Clarke/Max Roach/Chapin mode. Brushes are mentioned, to introduce the left hand sweep, and to mention that "brush technique is usually developed individually by each drummer." There are a number of multi-voice exercises and etudes using tom toms and cowbell.

I've found it to be very useful in my own practice- I'm very fond of the pages of two bar breaks, "rhumba studies", 3/8 studies, 16th notes, and triplet/8th note combinations. Along with several of the later etudes, which are less dense and more focused on a single idea than those from Wilcoxon's other books. And it's nice to see earlier versions of the the type of phrases used in more modern books, like Ted Reed's Syncopation. The history lesson plus the dozen or so pages I actually use make it well worth the purchase price.

Purchase the Wilcoxon Drum Method.

Wilcoxon rhumba studies in 5/4

Here I have rewritten a page from the Wilcoxon Drum Method, which I've been using a lot lately. I've put his "swing or rhumba" studies (p. 31, two-measure syncopation and accent studies in 4/4) into 5/4. The book offers a lot of insight into the background and methods of the swing and early bebop drummers- they all worked through Wilcoxon- and I'll be giving it a full review soon.

Download the pdf.

Jo Jones in the '70's

I stumbled across this piece about Papa Jo Jones late in his career, at Michael Steinman's Jazz Lives. Steinman was able to speak to Jones and see him perform a number of times during that period, and has some interesting stories and insights:

[...] In person, Jo was animated, inscrutable, vehement. Something in his manner and approach defied easy explanation. It felt as if we were speaking to a character in a play — and only Jo had the script. There was also some element of unpredictability, even of danger, as if he might suddenly get furious at you in the middle of a conversation, as I saw happen with Ruby Braff.

(Ruby, incidentally, told us a wonderful story about working with Jo at Storyville, almost twenty years earlier: Jo would never say, “Let’s play ROSETTA,” but start a rhythmic pattern and tempo on his hi-hat or snare and leave it up to the musician to guess which tune might best go with that tempo. Ruby shook his head in disbelief when he recalled, somewhat in desperation, picking some song that he thought might be fine at that tempo, and Jo saying, “That’s it! You got it!” as if Ruby had telepathically found the answer. “I don’t play with him any more. He’s nuts,” said Ruby.)

Learning to comp with 16th notes is a necessary misery.

Here I'm elaborating on what some comments in a Drummerworld.com discussion on these pages/recorded example from Jim Chapin's Advanced Techniques for the Modern Drummer:

I could just be trying to drag everyone else into my particular personal hell, but I think everybody hates the 16th note section in Chapin. I have three different 1986 assignment dates marked in my copy because I basically flat refused to work them up. OK, it's a minor hell.

My operative theory/makeshift dogma at the time went something like: 1) I'm an Elvin man! I don't want to be messing with my nice triplety ride interpretation by introducing that nasty dotted-8th/16th thing, 2) the patterns don't swing, 3) double time is wack. 16th notes suggest double time, and double time is wack!

I don't know what I was about with that last part. I was a little dogmatic at one point about double time being nothing but a CS means of evading moderately uncomfortable tempos. I did eventually learn that 1) Elvin plays a lot of 16th notes, and I did not in fact have a nice triplety ride interpretation to mess up 2) ideas are not swinging or non-swinging, it's how and where you play them, and 3) double time is and is not wack, but it also simply is.