Feel and style

Just a brief discussion of the musical terms feel and style. In normal professional musician usage they are often interchangeable, referring to the type of accompaniment to be played by the rhythm section. What kind of a feel do you want on this? What's the style? Swing, Bossa, Funk, Ballad, Calypso, etc. 

Possibly feel is more immediate to actually playing music, style may be more common in general conversation. Or not. That's my impression, different people/communities talk differently. Often terms are never explicitly defined, you just learn them in the field, in the course of lessons, playing, hanging, and rehearsing. 

We also say feel to mean playing in a way suggestive of a meter different from what is written. We may play a half time feel on a tune that is a fast 4/4. Or a double time feel on a slow 4/4. Or a 12/8 feel on a 4/4 ballad.  

In internet drumming conversation feel usually refers to the idea of having some kind of personal groove, a personal “feel.” “I need to work on my feel.” “My playing lacks feel.” I almost never hear professionals use the word that way— maybe in casual conversation, very broadly. 

That amateur usage is nice and non-specific— it's mysterious, so there's no way to be wrong, and you can talk about it forever. And it excuses lack of success, like, I just ain't got it. Usually what will improve a player's so-called feel is to fix their dynamics, time, and accuracy. And listen better, and play better stuff— all the things professionals spend their time thinking about. 

There's a common amateur usage of style is closely related to that— they'll talk about “my style”, meaning “the few things I know how to play, and like to play.”

That's similar to style in terms of being a stylist— not usually a desirable thing for players. It means you do your one thing and that's it. The focus is on creating a style and that's the product. Listen to any rock singer— Sting always does his Sting thing, no matter what he's singing. Watch the old We Are The World video from the 80s— all of those rock guys put their whole personal thing into the four words they get to sing. Billie Holliday is a pretty quintessential stylist as well. 

I don't know how a supporting player even does that, it's more a thing of front line performers— vocalists and some horn players. A telling exchange in an Elvin Jones clinic in Portland— he's normally thought of as being a very high-style player, right?— was when he was asked about developing “his style”, and he was skeptical that he had a style. I had to think for a long time about what's he doing then? 

Elvin has a particular voice, but it's a by-product of doing the real job, which is to build a piece of music with other musicians. It's not something you contrive. 

Among musicians, style is also used more broadly, relating to genre— a set of stylistic features and ways of writing, playing, and arranging that define a genre.

It's good to try to lose those amateur definitions— they just lead to fuzzy thinking about all the wrong things. 

Jazz glossary

Here's something useful, from A Passion For Jazz: an online glossary of jazz terms. It's not perfect. The entry for the word jive, for example:

Jive: the jargon of hipsters.

Jive is a widely used term among jazz musicians, and it has no positive connotation today. It's basically synonymous with bullshit, usually having to do with bullshit playing. Mostly used as a noun, not so much as a verb any more.

And there's this:

Hipster (or Hepster): One who is Hip (or Hep.)

Just no, on that one. Not just no: hipster is a dead term in the jazz world, except as it's used in the broader populace to describe young people living in Brooklyn or Portland. Hip is definitely used a lot, hep is strictly comedy, like if you're portraying a really clueless undercover cop or guidance councilor.

Disappointed that there is no entry for the adjective happening.

So the slang entries are kind of jive, but it's worth checking out for any actual musical terms you've heard, but don't know.

Tempoze

“Phaw, please, it's tempi, not temPOS.” 

In which the blogger once again addresses the voices in his head berating him for minor breaches of correctness in the application of musical terminology. 

You may have noticed that, writing on the blog, I just add an s when pluralizing certain musical terms, like tempo and ostinato— I say tempos and ostinatos. Speaking proper Italian, and using conservatory terminology, the correct plurals are of course tempi and ostinati. But I'm a drummer, and I'm writing this in America, and to people like me, that sounds a little snooty. Like, outside of the classical music world, we don't say flautist, or pianist with the emphasis on the first syllable, if we can help it. Throwing those into everyday musical conversation sounds a little affected, and puts others in the awkward position of having to decide whether to follow your lead in sounding kind of pompous. It's a little rude, even if correct. You can usually slide tempos in there without the same ripple of discomfort.

In using musical terms, we're not actually lapsing into Italian. The word tempo actually has become a slightly exotic English synonym for speed; and in English, when you want to make two or more of something, you slap an s on the end of it. Since at least the Battle of Hastings we've been freely slapping s-s on the end of foreign nouns and calling them English; it's only Americans' feelings of cultural inferiority that cause us to be defensive about that. It's the same thing that motivates us to miserably, cluelessly sit through operas presented in a foreign language, and read subtitles on films, while Europeans are happily listening to Don Giovanni translated into Flemish, The Godfather dubbed into French, and the quintessentially German Inspector Derrick dubbed into everything:

At one point in the history of music, the major practitioners all spoke Italian, and they weren't trying to be fancy about the words they chose for their terminology. They were using mostly straightforward, even terse, descriptive words in the native language of most of the expert musicians— or at least a language in which most of them would be fluent, the way computer people worldwide are with English today. Today, musicians come from everywhere, and few of us speak Italian, and to us those words sound a little mysterious and high-flown. But really, when you see a piu forte on the page— and you know you're in the serious repertoire when you see a piu; they don't put those in for just anybody— all it means is more loud. Fortississimo (indicated by an fff) basically means louderer. It's not a real Italian word. If we think for a moment about where the fff marking comes from, it may as well be LLL for loud loud loud. That's the kind of primitive-ass use of language we are actually dealing with, here.

And with the word drummer— which a lot of American youngsters struggle with when they are first getting serious, calling themselves “percussionists” instead— the European example again is instructive. Mainly: the sexy, dynamic-sounding French batteur is even more primitive than our word drummer— it means hitter. Not even a reference to an instrument— it could just as well describe someone working in a slaughterhouse. Talk about a step backwards in our self-conception as artists. 

Anyhow, when we say tempos, or ostinatos, or whatever, we're not speaking pidgin Italian, we're correctly using an adopted English word according to English rules. I'll admit that, being musical jargon, these words are in a little bit of a gray area— most non-musicians kind of know what tempo means, but they rarely have reason to pluralize it; and ostinato isn't used at all outside of music— so the normal rules that also make le week-end a correct French word, may have to be used with caution. You do want to be careful how many liberties you take with technically-correct terminology— you can easily sound like you don't know what you're talking about.

And for the record, I do insist on watching foreign films with subtitles, and put Todd Bishop: batteur on posters whenever I have the opportunity. And I never, ever, say timpanis. 

Drumming/jazz glossary roundup

Here I have briefly reviewed a selection of drumming and related glossaries from around the web. Writing definitions requires a special type of mind and writing skill, and is a pretty tedious, thankless task, so there aren't many of them, and the quality is mixed. I've listed them in roughly descending order of value for drummers. If any of my readers know of others, please post a link in the comments!

I did turn up a number of nice world music glossaries, which will get a post of their own soon.


Drummer Café - music and drumming terms
Very good, though not comprehensive, and could a little bit of a polish with an editor. Original, practical rather than scholarly definitions. Deals with common advanced drumming terms, which users are most likely to need help understanding, not so much with basic things.

Sample entries:

half-time feel Playing any groove twice as slow as the regular feel, while the measures of music continue as normal. To achieve this, in 4/4 time for example, the back-beat would play on beat 3, rather than the normal fashion ... playing on beats 2 and 4. 

This terms is used in relation to the pulse of the music, which, 99% of the time, is the quarter-note.

ostinato A musical phrase repeated over and over during a composition. 

An ostinato on the drums would be a rhythmic pattern played over and over again. One approach might be to play a single pattern over and over again with the feet, while the hands solo over the top. Another example might be to establish a groove on the drumkit, while one limb improvises around the drums. When an ostinato is used within a solo, it typically takes on the role of accompaniment ... allowing the performer to play over the top of this regularly, reoccurring pattern. 

Ostinato drumming is nothing new; listen to Max Roach solo drum compositions. Terry Bozzio gained a lot of notoriety using ostinatos in his solo performances because of the massive set-ups he uses. There are countless drummers who use ostinato patterns in their playing. If we take the actual definition of the term ostinato ... we quickly realize that drummers, especially those from the Jazz genre, have been using ostinatos for over seven decades.