Metronome Lesson

This is pretty amazing to watch.

When the metronomes cannot connect to each other, they get out of synch. As soon as they can connect, or 'hear' each other they get in synch pretty much immediately. It's like a lesson in microcosm showing how musicians will always play together if they listen to each other, but can't if they're in their own world. I've noticed this phenomena sometimes when working with classical musicians. They'll be great players and can read anything, but when playing a piece together they sometimes just read their own part and don't try to hear where they are in relation to the ground pulse and in relation to where everybody else is. As a result they get out of sync pretty easily. Not all the time of course, but it's a phenomenon I've noticed before - reading the part in isolation and not relating it to everyone else's part. In symphony orchestras of course this is endemic - but that's a whole other story!

Enjoy............

Rhythm-A-Ning - 2

Here's a 2nd video taken at the recent IRSA meeting at Newpark, in case you might like to have a look

Rhythm-A-Ning

In 2007 a casual lunch gave rise to something that culminated recently in twenty seven great musicians from all around the world coming together to informally play music and explore the world of rhythm in jazz and beyond.

The lunch occurred at the 2007 IASJ meeting in Siena and involved myself, my brother Conor and the Brazilian saxophonist and composer Marcelo Coelho. We’d just attended workshops given by each other on very different aspects of rhythm and over lunch we remarked on a) how many different developments there had been in the area of rhythm in jazz and improvised music over the past twenty years, and b) how little people working in this field knew about what other people were doing, and how they went about what they were doing.




From that conversation came the idea of the International Rhythmic Studies Association, an organisation formed to help put people working in the area of rhythm in touch with each other. We agreed that the first thing we’d need to do was have a venue for a meeting where people could meet, play and exchange ideas – Marcelo volunteered the Conservatorio Souza Lima, the school where he teaches in Sao Paulo, as a venue and since it had long been an ambition of mine to go to Brazil I readily agreed!

So we had our first meeting in 2008 in Sao Paulo and though it was small in number, it allowed us to put a shape on the meeting that would make it most affective for the participants. While we weren’t quite sure what we wanted at the beginning of the meeting, we were very sure about what we didn’t want. We didn’t want this to be any kind of workshop situation, with teachers and students. We wanted it to be a meeting place for high level practitioners, a place where peers could share information, try things out for themselves and see what others were up to. And so we settled on the best format for the meeting – in the mornings the musicians would get together in informal groups and try different things out – each musician would bring things they were working on and could introduce ideas and concepts to the other members of the group. In the afternoons there would be a more formal presentation of ideas and techniques to the entire membership of the meeting. This idea worked very well and allowed for the maximum exposure to the maximum amount of rhythmic information over a three-day period. In addition being in Sao Paulo allowed us access to some of the greatest rhythmic music in the world and this undoubtedly added to the stimulus of the meeting.




In 2009 we repeated the idea in Sao Paulo again and decided that if the meeting was to grow, we would have to have it in Europe at least once – Brazil is a wonderful country and one of the great rhythm countries, but it is expensive to get to from Europe and since there was so much intensive and wide-ranging rhythmic activity going on in Europe it was important to make the meeting more accessible to European musicians. So this year we did just that and took the meeting to Dublin, to my school – Newpark Music Centre. And as we had hoped, putting the meeting in Europe made it more accessible to more people and we had the biggest meeting yet this past week – 27 people from 13 different countries. But despite the greatly increased interest in attending the meeting, we decided that we would never let the meeting become larger than 30 people since to do so would be to endanger the flexibility of the musicians to be able to work together and get the most out of their encounters. We turned down several applicants on the grounds of numbers and/or suitability – the criteria for attending the meeting is that the participant should be someone with a prior interest in the rhythmic aspects of the music, preferably with a track record of activity in this area.



We followed the same format as before – informal playing sessions in the mornings and presentations of new ideas and concepts in the afternoons. It takes the musicians a minute to get used to the morning sessions since it’s so unique – there are no rules, no pre-agreed ensembles to go into, no group leaders. So it can be difficult at first to figure out what to do, but people quickly begin to revel in the freedom of this format – freedom to get together with lots of different people or with just one or two people and just work on whatever you feel like working on. These sessions featured such things as Brazilian music in odd metres, metric modulation, frame drumming, South Indian rhythmic techniques, odd metre standards and clave, and try-outs of new rhythmic compositions. By moving around, each musician got to try out a wide variety of music over the three days.

The formal presentations included such subjects as South Indian rhythmic techniques, Odd Metre Clave, rhythmic techniques used in contemporary composed piano music (such as Ligeti, Nancarrow and John Adams), multi-layered metric modulation, composing using the rhythmic line technique, the evolution of Afro-Brazilian rhythms and an overview of recent developments in rhythmic music in Brussels, Paris and London.



Given the explosion in the rhythmic variety of jazz in the past twenty years I think this kind of sharing of ideas is very timely – not that we need to regulate the world of rhythm, but with such a vast Terra Incognita out there an organisation like IRSA can help map the outermost regions at least.

Next year we’ll be returning to Sao Paulo again where no doubt we’ll have another great three days. Here’s the first part of a video documentary on the meeting which gives a flavour of what the meeting was like and what it was all about

Rhythm People

Time was in jazz when 3/4 seemed exotic.......... It’s not that long ago since jazz musicians didn’t play in 3/4 at all, or rarely. Charlie Parker never played (or at least never recorded) in 3/4 for example. Now, to quote my compatriot W.B. Yeats, ‘All is changed, changed utterly – a terrible beauty is born’.

I think when the jazz history that covers the last twenty years is written, two things will loom large – possibly larger than anything else, at least as far as the evolution of the music is concerned – the vast expansion of the rhythmic language of jazz and the invasion of ‘world music’ (for want of a better phrase – though if you think about it, aren’t all other musics part of this world.......?) techniques into jazz. The two developments are of course linked, since so many rhythmic techniques from outside of jazz – from Balkan music, African music, Indian music, Arabic music etc. - have been seized upon by contemporary improvising musicians hungry for new ways to play old things.

The developments in the rhythmic language of jazz – and by that I mean the expansion of rhythmic techniques available to and used by jazz musicians – have been enormous over the past twenty years. I remember demonstrating the playing of ‘All the Things You Are’ in 7/4 in the early 90s at various jazz schools and getting reactions that ranged from surprise to complete incredulity. Now such things are commonplace – no longer exotic, 7/4 is indeed the new 3/4, at least among young musicians – it’s that ‘other’ time signature you go to when you need a break from 4/4. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, something that’s considered pretty mainstream these days – in addition to that you have a plethora of techniques used by various musicians ranging from the additive rhythms of the Balkans, to metric modulation techniques (derived from Indian music, or the Miles 60s rhythm section, or even the work of composers such as Elliot Carter), to playing in odd metres. And of course many musicians use many different aspects of these things in various combinations, exploring a bewildering array of rhythmic approaches and techniques.

There are various reactions among musicians to all this new activity ranging from enthusiasm and excitement, to fear and dismissal. Where musicians are positioned in this reaction range usually depends on their age and experience. For younger musicians this new rhythmic landscape is what they’ve come to expect, to older musicians it’s often a scary place to be, depriving them of the rhythmic underpinning that they’ve based their entire musical lives on. But like it or loathe it, the genie is out of the bottle as far as this development is concerned – complex rhythms and much wider variety or rhythmic techniques are here to stay.


(Rudresh Mahanthappa)

Though the spread of these new rhythmic ideas encompasses the entire world of jazz I think it’s definitely caught hold in Europe more than in the US. Not that there aren’t groups and musicians exploring the new rhythmic possibilities in the US – Rudresh Mahanthappa, Vijay Iyer, Fieldwork etc. - all of these have utilised the new language to great musical effect. And of course Steve Coleman, one of the major architects of the new language, is an American. But in general as far as I can see most American musicians hold on to the more traditional rhythmic values in their music – and quite understandably since they are living in the land of the original source material and that language is bound to have a stronger hold there than in Europe where a different rhythmic tradition (or traditions) has held sway in the indigenous music of the various countries or evolved in recent years.

I think another reason why the new rhythmic language has captured the imagination of European musicians so much is because the gigantic impact of World Music on western European music over the past 15 years or so. Many World Music acts have had incredible commercial success in Europe over recent years and Europe also has very big immigrant populations from India, the Middle East, and North and Sub-Saharan Africa. Of course America has huge immigrant populations too, but somehow I don’t think the music of these populations (with the possible exception of the Latino populations) has entered the popular consciousness, and by extension the jazz consciousness the way it has in Europe

I remember going to the IASJ annual meeting a couple of years ago, a meeting where most of the students were from Europe, and remarking on how during the final concerts only one swing piece was played in 6 different concerts by the student ensembles. In the same year I went to the IAJE in NY and virtually all the student ensembles I heard were very much from the spang-spang-a-lang school of rhythmic approach. It seemed to me indicative of the different rhythmic priorities of high level young musicians from different continents.


(Karim Ziad)

Europe is awash with groups and musicians who are using a bewildering array of rhythmic approaches, and combining all kinds of influences. For example the French drummer Franck Vaillant has incorporated Korean music into a kind of M-Base influenced outlook to great effect, Stéphane Payen has done a similar thing with Senegalese music, AKA Moon have quite a rock sensibility, Karim Ziad uses the music of his native Algeria, Nils Wogram often uses typically Balkan additive rhythms, while Kartet are definitely influenced by contemporary classical compositions in their music. These are just a few of the multitude of approaches and concepts being used in Europe at the moment and of course there’s much interesting rhythmic work being done in the US and Brazil, Australia and Canada etc. etc. The new rhythmic language – or languages are here to stay.

A couple of years ago myself and my brother Conor had a chat with the Brazilian composer and saxophonist Marcelo Coelho at a cafe in Siena in which we talked about the fact that there’s so much different rhythmic work being done all over the world yet most people doing this work are often not aware of what others working in the same musical field are doing. From that conversation emerged the idea of forming a kind of association that would allow practitioners to be in touch with each other and enable them to share ideas and concepts. This grew into the International Rhythmic Studies Association (IRSA) and we had our first meeting in Sao Paulo in Brazil in 2008. Though we started small it was a great success in terms of setting out to put people with rhythmic ideas in touch with each other. We followed that up with the 2nd meeting in 2009 in the same place, and this year for the first time the meeting will move across the Atlantic to Dublin, where we’ll hold the 3rd IRSA meeting in July.

This is proving to be the best attended meeting yet with nearly 30 participants from 12 different countries. The structure of these meetings is very simple – in the mornings the players get together and play, there is no set format, people bring ideas and everyone gets to try them out. In the afternoons formal lectures are presented and this year, to give you an idea of the range of interests out there, topics covered in the lectures will include:

Odd Metre Clave
Afro-Brazilian Rhythms
Layered Subdivision
Compositional Process based on the Rhythmic Line Approach and Ron Miller´s jazz modal harmony
Global Tala
Paris, Bruxelles, London – the Rhythmic Triangle
Rhythmic Contemporary Piano Music
Irish Traditional Music

These topics give some idea of the breadth of interest in all things rhythmic that’s out there at the moment. For some it’s a brave new world, for others a barren landscape – but now that it’s been discovered there’s no going back. For young musicians it’s an exciting prospect to be able to explore these areas, but of course it’s also yet ANOTHER thing a young musician is supposed to be able to deal with in their professional life – starting off as a young jazz musician these days is not for the musically faint-hearted..............

As an example of the type of thing being explored by musicians from both sides of the Atlantic, here’s a clip of a trio I’m inolved with – MSG – with Rudresh Mahanthappa and the Dutch drummer Chander Sardjoe, playing Rudresh’s ‘Enhanced Performance’. For those curious about the rhythmic structure, it’s built on two leasures of 5 followed by a measure of 9, and this is then gradually speeded up through metric modulation, using the 8th note triplet as a subdivision – so there! For the rest of you – hope you enjoy it regardless of the structure.

Whatever Happened to Odd Metre Swing?

When I got into trying to develop my rhythmic language and technique, almost 20 years ago now, I became really interested in three areas that I saw as being natural extensions of what I was already doing – i.e. things that would and could be organically developed from my grounding in the jazz tradition: subdivision, metric modulation, and odd metre playing. Of these three techniques, some work had been done already in jazz – Tristano had done some fascinating things with regrouping of triplets as far back as the late 40s, and metric modulation had been shown to be a wonderful, if difficult, technique that could be used to create seemingly contradictory statements of where the beat was, sometimes simultaneously. The third element – odd metre playing, was by far the least explored, especially in the swing idiom.

The first guy to extensively use odd metres in jazz was probably Brubeck, he certainly was the first guy to bring it to the attention of the public and players. Brubeck studied composition in Paris with Darius Milhaud, so I’d imagine the odd metre stuff came from there – there’s no real precedent for it in jazz before that as far as I know. Then there was Don Ellis’ work in the 60’s – his big band stuff used lots of odd metres, some really unusual ones. He was a pioneer in that, but I feel, (also with Brubeck), that what was interesting was the fact that they were interested in doing it at all, not so much what they did musically – because I don’t think that much of the actual music that was produced was very interesting as music in itself. But there is an interesting Andrew Hill recording from the 60’s - ‘Judgement’ - with Elvin on it in which they play a piece in 7 called Siete Ocho and Elvin gets a good swinging groove going, although the band gets a bit shaky from time to time. Actually it’s amazing how Elvin attacks the groove, and really makes it swing, especially considering it was quite probably the first time he’d ever had to play in 7, and certainly the first time he recorded it.

But the real breakthrough with odd metres came with the fusion (or Jazz/Rock as it was known then) guys in the early 70’s – Billy Cobham with the Mahavishnu in particular – that’s an interesting one. He was an out-and-out jazz drummer (with Horace Silver among others) and then suddenly became this odd metre virtuoso. Personally I think he got a lot of that stuff from McLaughlin’s knowledge of Indian music – (though Cobham would probably rather die than admit that!), a lot of what he does is very like the way mridangam players from South India play.






After the fusion guys we’re into the 80’s with Steve Coleman and Dave Holland etc. (the Dave Holland Quintet Albums Seeds of Time
and Razor's Edge are both classics in regard to rhythmic exploration), and the real breakthroughs with odd metres – the expanding rhythmic universe, (along with the Downtown scene in the 90s) starts there.

When I got into the whole rhythmic thing in the early 90s I was particularly interested in making what I already did in a jazz context work in the new rhythmic areas I was exploring. Since a lot of the music I was playing at the time was in the swing idiom I felt it to be a natural outgrowth of that to try and play odd metres in the swing idiom. And so along with my brother Conor and Mike Nielsen on guitar I got into trying to find ways to make odd metres swing – or to find ways in which one could swing when playing in an odd metre. We spent about two years on this – it was challenging, the swing feel was developed over 4/4, and that four in the bar feel is hard to achieve when you’re playing in 11! But we made real progress in it and I think we became very convincing when playing things like walking bass lines and the typical jazz cymbal beat in various different metres. The trio at that time played exclusively standards, but re-arranged everything rhythmically and harmonically. In 1993 we did an unreleased recording of standards unofficially titled ‘Fucked Up Classics’ in which every single piece was in an odd metre. It never got issued for various reasons but you can download it for free here

At that time I was convinced that what we were doing was the tip of the iceberg as far as rhythm was concerned and that it would only be a matter of time before others followed suit and we were about to witness an explosion in new rhythmic techniques. To some extent that did happen, but I have to say that almost nobody has convincingly dealt with the swing idiom in odd metres. The metric modulation thing has exploded and been heavily explored, but that’s not the case with odd metre swing. When I say swing here I’m not talking about a vague swing feel, but a real dirt under the fingernails, spang-spang-a-lang, walking ride cymbal + walking bass style swing. For sure standards are sometimes played in odd metres – Brad Mehldau has done some interesting work in this area (including a stunning live recording of All the Things) but even when you hear Mehldau’s group playing in an odd metre it doesn’t really swing as much as when they’re playing in 4/4. We really worked on that, to make sure that the swing didn’t diminish due to whatever metre we were in. Hasn’t really been done since in my opinion – not in anything I’ve heard anyway.

Maybe the reason it hasn’t been done is because it’s HARD! You have to not only figure out how to manipulate the rhythms to allow the swing feeling to flow, but you also have to make sure your melodic lines match up with the changes moving at the same rate of the metre you’ve chosen. It’s a voice-leading tightrope – a trial by fire of your rhythmic and harmonic technique. It’s much easier to cop-out by just playing over one chord and picking a straight 8 based rhythm – a cop-out that has resulted in far too much boring and quasi-faked playing over the past 10 years.

It’s not that long ago since jazz musicians couldn’t play in 3/4, and almost never did - how many 3/4 pieces did Bird record? None. But eventually jazz musicians figured out how to do it and to make it really swing. For an example of this evolution listen to Max Roach’s very stiff playing on Rollins’ Valse Hot and Elvin Jones’ loose and flowing playing on any Coltrane tune in 3/4. Within 5 years 3/4 swing had gone from stiff and unnatural to convincingly swinging. But now more than 20 years since the first explosion of interest in non-standard rhythmic techniques, odd metre swing is not that much further down the road.

If anyone reading this knows of any really convincing odd metre swing recordings please let me know, I’d be really interested in hearing it. I really enjoy playing swing in 11, 5, 7, 9 and 15 – it provides a wonderful vehicle for creativity and freshness. But there’s plenty of room for much more of this – it just needs the desire to do it and people who are prepared to put in the work. Any takers?

Talking Dog Syndrome

As someone who’s been involved in the exploration of rhythm over the past 20 years, I’m aware that great strides have been made in the development of new rhythmic techniques and their inclusion in jazz and improvised music. Yet listening recently to some music which clearly has adopted some of the newer rhythmic techniques and advances in perception of the use of rhythm, I’ve been struck by, in terms of how they approach their music, how different the aims of the musicians seems to be from what my aims were in exploring new rhythmic techniques, and in how different their aim seems to be from one of the main developmental and historical streams of jazz music.

This stream is the one in which the structural elements of the pieces are obscured by the way the performers play over and with these elements. This tradition goes back a long way in jazz, for example in how the beautiful legato phrasing of Lester Young arcs over the harmony and the bar lines of the very traditional structures which were the vehicles for his solos. His lines create round curves over the sharp angles over the four and eight bar forms. Charlie Parker and the bebop pioneers took this even further — Parker’s use of substitution and chromaticism obscured the conventional harmonic patterns and song forms on which the bebop melodies were based. The drummers in these groups (Max Roach in particular), added further to the legerdemain by superimposing polyrhythms over the four-square structures.

In the 1960s this approach to improvising on form took a quantum leap forward, particularly in the music of Coltrane’s Quartet and the various Miles quintets of the period. Coltrane’s “Chasing the Trane” is a classic example, where Coltrane constantly moves away from and back towards the blues form, while Elvin adds to the stretching of the structure by his use of rhythmic counterpoint and the avoidance of an explicit ‘one’ for chorus after chorus.

But the zenith of this abstraction of form can be heard on Miles’ “Live At The Plugged Nickel” where the band take some of the hoariest chestnuts in the jazz repertoire to the outer limits of structure, testing their pliability to the utmost. Despite the very abstract approach taken to these pieces, the forms are respected at all times, the musicians using these now invisible landmarks as guides for the most extended of excursions.

I’ve always been attracted to this way of playing, it’s always seemed to me to be on a very high level both technically and creatively. To be able to twist and bend the boundaries of the form without ever losing it demands the highest musicianship allied to an extraordinary sense of form. The people who have the ability to do this have always seemed to me to be improvising artists of the first rank. Jim Hall describes this way of thinking as similar to a game of tennis — you can hit the ball from any direction and at any speed, and you must be able to think on your feet because you don’t know which direction the ball is going to come at you from. But you must at all times be aware of the structure of the tennis court and you must always get the ball back into the apposite square. I think this is a very good analogy for improvising within form while using your creativity to obscure that form.

Part of the weaponry in the arsenal of the kinds of musicians who take on the challenge of being creative within form is undoubtedly one of rhythmic sophistication. You can hear this in Lester Young and Charlie Parker, in Lee Konitz (check out “Motion”!), in Jim Hall, in Wayne Shorter, in Herbie Hancock, in Jack DeJohnette etc etc Rhythm was a major piece of technical equipment that facilitated the loosening of the bonds of form, so one would imagine that with the new rhythmic techniques that have come into jazz in the past 20 years — odd meter playing, metric modulation, multiple polyrhythms etc — that this approach to playing outside yet within the form would have reached another level. That doesn’t seem to have happened.

Instead, it seems to me that often a new explicit statement of the form seems to have appeared. Rather than having the form be something that is invisible — a guiding structure that only the musicians are aware of — the new orthodoxy seems to be to create music that is not only rhythmically complex but is explicitly so — wearing its mathematical heart on its sleeve so to speak. Pieces are played with mathematical precision, and having achieved the technical wherewithal to deal with these new complex rhythms a lot of musicians seem to be happy to leave it at that. They seem to be proud to be able to play five over three, for example, as if the act of achieving an accurate representation of this is an end in itself. The fives and the threes are rigidly marked off and flagged, as if the musicians want to display the nuts and bolts of their achievement to an admiring crowd. It’s a reversal of the other tradition i mentioned — rather than have the form act as a kind of internalised guiding principle, the form of the piece in this more recent approach is used as a kind of exoskeleton that is worn proudly by the musicians as they negotiate the treacherous twists and turns of their rhythmic high wire act.

However to me there’s an element of the “talking dog” syndrome about this — where it isn’t so much what the dog said as the fact that it could talk at all that was amazing. Sometimes this music has that feeling to my ears, it’s as if the achievement of the accurate reproduction of complex rhythm is seen as an end in itself rather than the springboard to discover something new and creative. Of course to be able to stretch and bend already complex structures such as metric modulation and odd metres is a huge challenge, but then again the stretching of form has always been difficult and is not for the creatively faint-hearted. So to have the technique to undertake complex rhythmic negotiations but not to wish to take this any further than a basic laying out of these rhythms seems to me that the very least artistically questionable.



I don’t wish to get into a naming names scenario — I think there is quite enough name-calling on YouTube as it is! However I can take an example from outside of the jazz and improvised music tradition as a kind of a Uber example of what I’m talking about. The band Meshuggah are famed for their use of complex rhythm in their music. Meshuggah are not a jazz group or in the jazz tradition in any way - I think the genre to which they belong (or founded possibly) is known as “Math Metal” - though no doubt some Comic Book Guy pedant can set me straight on that if I got it wrong. Anyway, what they do is often admired by jazz musicians who themselves are into complex rhythmic music. But not by me — I admire their musicianship and metric sophistication, but I find that once you strip away the accurate performance of their involved riffs, you’re not really left with anything. On a subjective level I can’t take the “Cookie Monster” vocals, (which in fairness are probably not meant to appeal to someone such as me), but on an objective level I find their music to be no more than a demonstration of an ability to play instruments technically well, play in time and count numbers. Meshuggah are very much to my mind a classic example of ’Boy’s Music’ and unfortunately I find quite a lot of that ‘boys music’ mentality in some of the more contemporary uses of complex rhythm in improvised music. Accuracy and “correctness” are everything — to perform some complex rhythmic feat correctly seems in and of itself to be enough.

But it needn’t be this way. I’m not writing this post from the standpoint that some jazz musicians take, where they believe that complex rhythms and new rhythmic techniques have no place in jazz and are just a way of showing off. I’m an advocate of rhythmic exploration and the development of new improvising strategies through rhythmic means. But I do believe the ultimate goal of such exploration should be the creation of music that sounds organic and natural, and is expressive and not afraid to be lyrical if the music calls for that. And I don’t believe that the mere demonstration of rhythmic technique is of any value in itself.



Fortunately there are many examples are just how great the wedding of complex rhythm with a creative mind can be. For anyone interested in such things, I would point you in the direction of such music as Drew Gress’ ‘’Seven Black Butterflies’’ band, where his writing for the quintet and the blending of the rhythm section with the soloists is seamlessly achieved, despite the complexity of the rhythmic underpinning of the music. Or to Kenny Werner’s beautiful ’In Tune’, a lyrical piano trio piece whose melodicism disguises the constantly shifting meters underneath. I myself have been very conscious of trying to use the new rhythmic language for a more organic sounding result, most recently with my group Métier on pieces such as ’Cascade’, a very complex piece which I nevertheless tried to imbue with lyrical qualities.

I know the genie is out of the bottle as far as rhythm in jazz is concerned – it’s never going back to the pre-odd metre/metric modulation/multiple polyrhythm days – which is neither a good or a bad thing in itself. What IS important is that we use the opportunity given to us by this new information to tell new stories and explore new ways to tell old stories. But in the telling of these stories if we’re going to have a talking dog as a narrator, let’s not just be happy that he can talk at all, let’s give him a few decent lines as well...............

Time No Changes - Three Masters

I've just been watching, (or maybe 'wallowing in' would be a better description), a video on Youtube taken from a concert by Jack DeJohnette's "Parallel Realities" band, from 1988 (I think). This particular section features a piano solo by Herbie Hancock with Dave Holland and DeJohnette, playing a fast swing "Time No Changes" piano solo -- the piece is Dave's "Shadow Dance". This clip demonstrates a mastery of this way of playing that is quite extraordinary.

Of course Time No Changes is something that's been around for a long time, and Herbie Hancock, along with Ron Carter and Tony Williams, was in the Miles Davis band that introduced it to the wider jazz world. And Dave and Jack were also pioneers of this kind of playing in the subsequent Davis band. So all three have been doing this for a long time, and it shows!

One of the things I think that's really interesting about this clip is its demonstration of the fact that this way of playing is not so common any more. There are very few young bands who use this concept -- swinging yet open, creating a sense of structure even though there is none -- in their music. And even where there is usage of Time No Changes, the feel is very different to the one demonstrated here by these three masters.

I think the key to how good this feels is primarily centred around the time feel of Holland and DeJohnette. Jack's cymbal time is incredibly "springy" -- this time feel on the cymbal seems directly connected to the Tony Williams feel of the 1960s. What's interesting about Jack is that he combines the springy directness of Tony's playing, with the loose limbed polyrhythmic approach of Elvin Jones. The time feel is coming from Tony, but the conceptual approach is closer to Elvin. So while the cymbal time bounces the quarter note along, there is a much broader feel to the overall time due to Jack's avoidance of an obvious "one", and the multilayered polyrhythms he overlays on top of the time feel.

Dave's feel is perfectly suited to playing with Jack -- he also has a very springy quarter note feel, with many embellishments in the line. This matches Jack's cymbal feel perfectly, and Dave's ability to create a sense of tonality in what is essentially a chromatic piece adds to the ability of the pair to create a spontaneous form that is both elusive yet seemingly evident.

As a rhythm section player myself I can attest that this is incredibly difficult to do -- the feeling of forward momentum that Dave and Jackie achieve is extraordinary, particularly when you consider that form and structure are being created spontaneously. And the way they play together not only functions as a great timekeeping device and swing engine, but is almost a parallel solo to what's going on on top. It's what could be described as a "walking solo" -- both players achieve such a concentration of energy that it moves beyond a simple accompaniment role and enters into the realms of a joint solo statement in and of itself.

The key to its uniqueness is in its looseness. There is never any doubt where the beat is, and it feels like there is no doubt where the one is, yet the time feel is in fluid motion throughout -- 'ones' appear and disappear, tonalities emerge and become submerged. I think Jack and Dave are unparalleled in their ability to deliver this extraordinary balancing act between complete freedom and suggestion of structure.

If I try to think of a younger bass and drum team who play Time No Changes, Jeff 'Tain' Watts springs to mind, in combination with several bassists. There is no doubt that Watts is a contemporary drum master, but his time feel and approach to the beat is more cut and dried than Jack's -- the polyrhythms and modulations he uses are more structured than that of his predecessor. When you align this more structured approach with the simpler quarter note approach of the bassists coming out of the Marsalis School, (for want of a better description of these players) you get a very different feel to that created by Jack and Dave. It's swinging and burning - of that there is no doubt - but it doesn't have the fluidity and extraordinary ability to morph the time feel and sense of structure while maintaining a powerful forward motion. To my mind what Jack and Dave do is equally as powerful and swinging as anything produced by the post-Marsalis rhythm section approach, but is infinitely more subtle.

And then there's Herbie -- it's impossible to think of anybody more perfectly suited to playing over Jack and Dave's rhythmic magic carpet than Herbie. His ability to create ambiguous harmonic landscapes that seemed to be both inside and yet defy conventional tonality, adds the perfect final touch to the rhythmic legerdemaine of the bass and drums. He too creates structure as he goes, drawing the listener into an implied tonality only to confound expectations with the next chord or the next melodic line. And all of this contained within the forward motion delivered by one of the most swinging right hands ever heard in jazz piano.

At one point in the solo the trio creates so much power and forward motion you can hear audience members yelling and screaming. When you can get an audience yelling and screaming while you're playing completely chromatic music with no predetermined structure then you're really on to something! Check it out - you can see it Here



(And for example of Elvin's influence on Jack, listen to the opening solo by Jack in the first part of the tune -- you can see it Here)

The Art and Science of Time

Again this is an older post which I originally published on my website. But it's still current and I'm placing it here in case anyone hasn't seen it before and is interested in reading it. It outlines my thoughts on the whole area of rhythmic technique and the development of good secure time.

In the course of the essay I blithely mention the fact that I'll be putting together my next book/DVD (which deals with this subject), on rhythm 'over the next 6 to 8 months', but I'm ruefully looking at the date that I wrote that - September 2007! I haven't got that book together as yet, though I have started to catalogue the myriad exercises which will be in it. I have promised myself to make a concerted effort over the summer to finally get this together and get it out there, and I will - no really, I will! Promise! In the meantime, I hope you find something useful in the essay and I have a few things up on Youtube that relate to this HERE, HERE, and HERE

As always any and all comments and feedback are welcome.

The Art and Science of Time II

Over the course of the next 6 to 8 months I'll be putting together my next book and DVD on rhythm, which will be entitled 'The Art and Science of Time". Unlike 'Creative Rhythmic Concepts for Jazz Improvisation' which dealt with the specific use of extended rhythmic techniques in the jazz idiom, this one will focus on more basic rhythmic elements - specifically how to develop good musical time and how to be in control of all the rhythmic elements in one's music. The essay that follows takes the form of an introduction to some of the ideas that will be demonstrated at length in the book/DVD.


The Simplicity of Rhythm

I've been dealing with extended rhythmic techniques, as a player, writer and teacher, for more than fifteen years now, and over that period a lot of issues relating to rhythm, time, pulse, metre etc. have both clarified and simplified for me. One of the initial attractions for me in expanding my rhythmic vocabulary was a love of what I saw as complexity - complex polyrhythms, odd metre modulation - all was grist to my mill in the search for the new and the interesting. I took in information gleaned from Indian, African, Arabic, and Balkan music and it all enriched my rhythmic vocabulary.

However over a period of time I began to notice similarities in how one could approach understanding the rhythmic aspects of such very different musics as those from Indian classical music and Balkan Folk music. I began to see that rather than rhythm being a complex issue it was in fact a very simple issue that could be understood in two simple ways - a) what I call the 'division of the space' and b) the concept of rhythmic relationships.

Now when I say rhythm is simple, I do not necessarily mean easy - those are two different things. But the understanding of the elements of rhythm, and what we have to do in order to have a good rhythmic technique, is simple in my opinion. Whenever rhythmic activity is going on - from the most basic to the most complex - it can be explained and understood in relation to the aforementioned rhythmic elements - the division of the space, and/or by the rhythmic relationships created by the rhythmic activity of the music. I would describe these two elements as follows:

Division of the Space

Whenever a pulse is conjured into being we automatically have a division of space. The simple, one after another, beats of the pulse are dividing space into evenly measured units. By space in this instance I mean a space in time. The passage of time is itself an abstract concept that is measured by us using mechanical devices such as clocks - and we do the same thing in music by the use of machines - computers or metronomes for example. By creating a pulse, or making that pulse tangible by whatever means (either by explicitly playing it, having a metronome playing it, or implying it by the way we play the rhythmic phrases of our music) we are dividing the space.

A musical space can be any duration or length - it could be a measure, a beat, 8 beats, or even 8 measures. It could be described as the space of time between an event, and the regular recurrence of that event. So, for example an 'event' might be the tick of a metronome, and the recurrence would be the next tick. So if we, (to explain in this in a conventional notational manner - though I'm not always a big fan of this), call those ticking metronome events 'quarter notes', then a 'space' occurs between those two quarter notes. How we divide that space will define our rhythmic perception of the music we're playing. So if we understand our metronome as being in quarter notes, and we play 8th notes, then we'll be dividing each unit of the space into two equal parts, if we play 16ths we'll divide the space into four equal parts, 8th note triplets three parts etc.

All rhythmic activity in a single melodic or rhythmic line can be explained according to this principle. When thought of like this, subdivisions which are conventionally thought of as being 'complex' (such as 5's , 7's, or 9's) can be seen to be no more complex than a division of the space in 3 or 4. If we play what are called 'quintuplets', or 'septuplets' (a more appropriate term for large numbers of offspring than for rhythm in my opinion!) the space is still being divided, just into groupings other than the conventional 4 or 3. The process is the same. Now, possibly one may not be able to play quintuplets or septuplets accurately, but this is probably because of a lack of familiarity with how a division of 5 or 7 sounds, rather than because this subdivision is any more complex than a subdivision of 4 or 3. When more than one rhythmic line is being played at the same time, and the space is being divided in two or more different ways simultaneously, then we have to deal with the other principle I mentioned - the concept of rhythmic relationships.

Concept of Rhythmic Relationships

Whenever more than one rhythm is being played at a time, a rhythmic relationship is called into being. To take a very simple example, if we imagine a metronome playing quarter notes, and we play eighth notes along with it, then a rhythmic relationship exists between the metronome and what we're playing, in this case a relationship in a ratio of 2:1. If a third rhythm were to be added, say in 8th note triplets, then we'd have another relationship happening at the same time - the resultant relationship could be expressed as 3:2:1. But these ratios are not so important, what is important to understand, as a performing musician, and especially as a performing improvising musician, is that we need to be able to perceive simultaneous rhythmic relationships in order to keep our place in the music - both in relation to the pulse and in relation to what the other musicians are playing. We need be able to react to whatever we hear and still be aware of the pulse and the relationship of ourselves, and the other musicians, to it.

In any group that's playing anything other than simultaneous quarter notes, (or whose members are all playing exactly the same rhythm), then a rhythmic relationship system is in play. The rhythmic relationship may be fixed, as in most rock and classical music, or fluid and changing such as in jazz or Indian Classical music, and the relationships in play could be as simple as those contained in a Sousa March, or as complex as in drum music from West Africa. But in all of these, from the most simple to the most complex, a system of rhythmic relationships is in play and we must be in control of this aspect of music if we are to play effectively in any situation.

So we can see that pretty much everything in rhythm can be understood as being one or other, or (more likely) a combination of these two things - the division of the space, and which rhythmic relationships are in place. An analysis of the rhythmic elements of the Rite of Spring can be as easily accommodated by this form of analysis as can the aforementioned Sousa March. In order to have a good sense of time, the musician needs to be able to do both of these things well - divide the space in whatever way is desired and be able to hear where he or she is in relation to the other rhythmic activity that's going on simultaneously.

The Art and Science of Time

Musicians speak a lot about a person's 'time' and their 'time feel', but what does this mean, and what constitutes good time? In my opinion a person can be said to have good time when they are able to place their notes consistently in relation to the pulse, and are in complete control of that placement. I think the word 'consistently' is very important here - having the ability to place your notes in a consistent relationship to the pulse is the foundation of good time and indispensable if one is to have a good time feel. A person whose time is not good does not have this consistency, they rush some phrases and drag others to compensate, they are aware of the notes in terms of pitch but only have a hazy awareness of how those notes should sit into the pulse. I have heard many players like this over the years, often playing the instrument at a technically high level - at least in terms of digital dexterity - but lacking control of the time elements that are so vital not only to professional performance of music, but to its emotional effect.

Rhythm and Time as an Emotional Device

People often speak about emotion in music, but usually they are referring to the use of the melodic or harmonic elements of music - one rarely hears people speak of rhythm as being emotional. Yet it is one of the most fundamental aspects of music and one that affects us immediately. If a band starts playing a good solid groove at a gig, the audience will automatically start moving their bodies - tapping their feet, bobbing their heads etc. This body movement, akin to dance, is a direct emotional response to the music. Nobody at a concert thinks to themselves 'I like this music, I must move my head in time to it'! No, the movement represents the automatic physical response to the emotional stimulus - the enjoyment of the music - being generated by the way the band are playing the groove. The greater the musician, or band's ability to generate good rhythmic feeling the more the audience responds.

There are numerous examples of musicians whose command of time feel and ability to generate great rhythmic energy through note placement played a huge part in their popularity and connection with audiences - Louis Armstrong, Errol Garner, Wes Montgomery, Cannonball Adderly, Ella Fitzgerald - these were all famous for their time feel as well as for other qualities. But it's not just in jazz that we can see this effect on audiences - Bootsy Collins the legendary funk bassist made a career out of his ability to energise an entire band, and by extension the audience, by the power of often simple basslines. His time feel was so good and his mastery of time so complete that he has been one of the most in-demand and famous bassists in popular music history. And the example of Bootsy Collins or Errol Garner is no coincidence or unique occurrence - a person who has a strong time feel will inevitably affect a listener's response to the music, a person with a poor or ragged time feel will have much less impact on the listeners, no matter how apt the notes they play may be in terms of pitch and harmonic correctness.

So if rhythm is an emotional device in music and has such an effect on audiences it's obvious that we need to be in complete control of our rhythmic technique, as least as much as we are in control of our harmonic and melodic techniques. To be in control of your rhythmic technique means being able to control the exact placement of the notes in the space that I spoke about earlier. And to be able to do this consistently. The importance of being in consistent control of the rhythmic aspects of your playing cannot be overstated.

Most musicians of even the most basic level would not be happy if they could not produce a specific pitch if requested to do so - if the music requires the player to play a C, then even the most basic player would be considered incompetent if they could not do so. Let's imagine that they were only able to hit the note in the vicinity of C for example - sometimes on C, sometimes close to a Db, sometimes closer to a B - well if this were the case and if they didn't decide to go off and practice in order to fix this inconsistency themselves, they would certainly be advised to do so in no uncertain terms by their colleagues! Yet how many players get away with this same inaccuracy in relation to the rhythmic elements of their playing? How many players when playing 8th notes play them inconsistently, how many rush certain phrases, how many are constantly adjusting their phrasing in order to compensate for inconsistency in pulse relationship? Far too many in my opinion, and, considering how important this area is, far too little attention is given to proper and thorough rhythmic training. Often the extent of that training begins and ends with the mantra 'work with a metronome'!

I think one of the problems that teachers have with teaching rhythm is that they often don't really know how do it, and so they skate over it and place their trust in the generally competent ability to play in time that most musicians have. Harmony or instrumental technique is much easier to teach than rhythm, since in these two subjects the teacher can give the student a set of explicit tasks with clearly identifiable and 'correct' solutions and outcomes - 'if you are given this chord you can play these scales over it', or 'if you do this fingering then this scale will be much easier to play' etc. etc. Rhythm - since it involves a control of note placement in an invisible space, and relating to a pulse which is supposed to be internalized - is much more abstract, at least as a teaching subject. Quite often the teacher, if faced with a student with rhythmic problems such as rushing, has no tangible suggestions to make other than pointing out the rushing to the student (who's usually aware of it anyway) and the aforementioned suggestion to work with a metronome. Yet people often need help with rhythmic issues and unless rhythmic issues are addressed they become a permanent block to the musician's development.

Rhythmic Spatial Awareness and the Phenomenon of Rushing

By far the most common rhythmic problem that people have is that of rushing, and in working with many students with this problem I've thought a lot about why this is so widespread and what the causes of it are. I've come to the conclusion that people who rush (and people with other rhythmic problems) are suffering from a lack of what I call 'rhythmic spatial awareness'

There is no doubt in my mind that there are people who are naturally rhythmically talented and who have what's referred to as 'good time', and these people have an innate sense of what I think of as being rhythmic spatial awareness. They have a sense of how pulse inhabits space and the space around those pulses, and the result is that they don't rush, because they seem to have a heightened awareness of the where the pulse is in relation to wherever they are. I believe this to be innate with some people – nature not nurture – you can see it in even the youngest children singing a nursery rhyme – some children rush all the spaces between the notes (especially at the end of a line), while other children's placement of the notes in the space create the sense of the underlying pulse, even when these children are singing on their own.

I think this kind of talent can be compared to great athletes in games like soccer, or tennis, or basketball – the really great players seem to have more time to execute their manoeuvres than lesser players, the game seems to move slower for them – sometimes when watching them you get the sense they're moving slower than anyone else. This is a kind of talent that can't be manufactured and I think this ability is very similar to the rhythmic spatial awareness I'm talking about - the people with this rhythmic spatial awareness, like their counterparts in sport, seem to also have more time (in the chronological sense) to create their phrases. Their playing, even at speed, is characterized by a sense of relaxed clarity.

I think people who don't have this innate ability are more inclined to rush since they seem to have difficulty perceiving that space around the beats. But I think in most people the tendency to rush is caused first and foremost by anxiety, by a restless mind – a combination of self-consciousness in their playing and a fear of sounding bad, with the result that they rush their phrases in order to 'get it over with' in a way. And also in performance, as people play, they often become more excited in a self-absorbed kind of way as the piece goes on, becoming more focused on what they're doing and less and less able to have an overview of where they, and where others are in the music and in particular in relation to the pulse.

In my opinion I would say those factors – nervousness, inability to be both subjective and objective while playing – have more to do with causing the rushing phenomenon than anything else. Of course we are human beings and not machines and some rushing is to be expected when a group of 4 or 5 people are improvising together in a piece that can last 10 or more minutes. In fast tunes in particular one can budget for a certain increase in tempo over the course of the piece, in fact it can be argued that this adds to the excitement of the piece. Indeed in some musical traditions - such as Balkan folk music, or Gnawan music from the Maghreb - a sense of speeding up is a stylistic feature of the music. But I'm not talking about this when I'm talking about rushing as being a problem - I'm referring to the situation where phrases are garbled because they are rushed and/or where, due to rushing, the soloist and the rhythm section are out of sync to the point where the groove is adversely affected. In a worst case scenario the rushing can reach a point where a musician becomes almost unable to play with due to their inability to be in the right place after just a few measures have been played.

'Dragging' can also be a problem though this is less common in my experience and tends to be a direct result of technical problems, where for example the tempo is just too fast for the player, or where problems of physical coordination make the player slow down. So is there a solution for the chronic rusher or for someone with other rhythmic problems? Yes, become what I call a 'rhythmic being'

Becoming a Rhythmic Being

Quite often, because of the way we learn music -through an instrument - we give the instrument we play a prominence in the creation of the music that it doesn't deserve. What I mean by this is that we have a subconscious sense that the music is somehow produced, at least partially, by the instrument. Of course the reality is that the instrument is an inanimate object that is mute until we pick it up and do something - pluck, press, blow, strike, etc. - to it. We are producing the music, the instrument is the conduit - it is our physical action (those actions themselves generated by our creative musical mind), that produces the music, not the instrument. The instrument makes sounds, we organise those sounds and make music with that organised sound. Once we understand and recognize this we can also see that any rhythmic problems we may have will not be solved on the instrument. Since it is the body that is playing the instrument, we must be rhythmic within our own bodies, then we can put that rhythmic physicality onto the instrument and at the service of the music.

Our bodies need to be physically rhythmic in order for us to be rhythmically strong on our instruments and in our music, and there is a huge amount of practical work we can do in order to achieve this. This involves lots of singing and clapping! Basically what we're trying to do is make ourselves coordinated physically and rhythmically and to make ourselves relaxed rhythmically and physically aware of where the pulse is at all times. If you can't coordinate yourself physically, if you can't clap in time, if you can't sing in time then you certainly won't be able to play in time. Conversely if you can sing and clap with a good time feel then (given an appropriate level of instrumental technique), you will certainly play with a good time feeling. Of if you can sing one rhythm (or melody) and clap a different rhythm, and physically experience how these rhythms relate to one another then, in a real time playing situation, you will be much better at hearing how what you're playing relates rhythmically to what another person is playing.

There are many exercises one can do to improve one's sense of pulse and feel that space that I talked about earlier, and many exercises one can do to work on rhythmic relationship vocabulary. In my teaching of this subject I have literally dozens of exercises that I use to help students with different facets of rhythmic technique, and after working on these exercises for a while it's extraordinary what the students achieve. After a while and with consistent work, almost anything seems possible - from playing consistently well in time, to knowing where one is in relation to the pulse even when using phrases that cross the beat asymmetrically, to having three completely different rhythms going on simultaneously. The beauty of these exercises is that you don't need your instrument to do them so they can be done anywhere - the only equipment ever needed (and that only sometimes) is a metronome which can be slipped into the pocket. After a while, with consistent practice, anyone can improve their time and get in touch with, and be in control of this most elemental of musical forces - the power of rhythm. All great jazz musicians are or were truly rhythmic beings, by doing rhythmic exercises that involve singing and clapping, we can become rhythmic beings also.

As I mentioned earlier I will be producing a book/DVD on this subject over the next while, but before that I will post a few of these exercises online, so if you're interested in this area please keep an eye out for them.

Where's the One!!??

This is another slightly older essay, but I think the issues raised in it are still very valid.


Where’s the 1!?

I think it's true to say that one of the biggest changes in jazz improvisation over the past 20 years has been the adoption by jazz musicians of what might be called extended rhythmic techniques – odd metre playing, the use of metric modulation, etc. The growth in what's called 'World Music' has undoubtedly had a big influence on this new development, with players taking advantage of the easy access the internet has delivered to the curious musician, allowing them to check out Balkan Music, Indian music, Arabic music etc. and to take on board the wide range of rhythmic styles, grooves, and approaches that these musics provide. The result if this is a plethora of new rhythmic styles and techniques. Jazz musicians, especially younger ones, have enthusiastically adopted this new vocabulary, particularly in the area of original composition, and a huge variety of pieces have been written involving odd metres, metric modulation and the like. In such an environment one would imagine that this new information must surely enrich the music and bring a new element to it. But while I think this is true to some extent, I also believe there is a serious problem with how this new rhythmic information is approached by soloists in particular.

In recent years, as a bassist, I've been in many situations where new music has been brought to the group by composers, involving various rhythmic devices such as those mentioned earlier. In many cases, especially where the music is brought in by horn players, we – the rhythm section – are presented with new and difficult rhythmic problems which we're expected to solve almost immediately, and without any assistance from the composer on possible ways to approach this new information. We can be presented with new difficult rhythmic music and not only do we have to play it correctly, we have to make it groove and come alive as well.

Now you might argue that this is the job of a rhythm section and if you can't stand the heat then stay out of the kitchen. But in a more conventional situation when new music is brought in there is usually a rhythmic precedent for the music – i.e. swing feel, or funk, or Brazilian, or loose straight 8's or something, and all usually in a metre of ¾ or 4/4. These are known quantities, the members of the rhythm section can apply their originality and creativity to something that has rhythmic precedent, and something which they've had a chance to develop over several years. In this new rhythmic landscape, this is not always the case.

As a bassist or drummer these days, you can be presented with a piece in 15/8 and asked to play with a Brazilian feel, or be given something with constantly changing metres and asked to do it with a reggae groove. I once saw an instruction on a piece of music that said – 'think Iranian Surf Music'!! This new rhythmic environment is very challenging for bassists and drummers in particular, and challenge is something that I believe should always be involved in an evolving music such as jazz. And of course as someone whose been heavily involved in the exploration of rhythmic possibilities for over 15 years, I'm very enthusiastic about this new rhythmic language. However the problem here as I see it is that this new rhythmic music being presented to the rhythm section by the non-rhythm section composers is often written by people who can't play it themselves, and who depend entirely on the rhythm section to make the composition musical. This not only puts an unfair stress on the rhythm section and an inordinate amount of responsibility on the bass and drums, but the musical results suffer also, since the soloists often have an inordinate dependence on the rhythm section in order to keep in the right place in the metre and form.

A typical scenario in one of these situations is that a melody instrument player brings in a new piece in an unusual meter, probably with some subdivisions specified within the meter. The horn players have the melody written out, and the rhythm section has little instruction on how to create a groove. Everyone goes to work – the horn players on playing the melody correctly, the rhythm section on trying to play both the metre correctly and finding a way to make the rhythm breathe and live. Once everyone has got the melody statement to a point where it's considered satisfactory, they move on to the solos – and this is where the real problems start in my opinion.

So often the solo form will be over one or two chords, and the soloists will just play their usual 4/4 or 3/4 stuff over the top of the rhythm with no regard for the fact that the piece is not in 4/4 or 3/4, The rhythm section are valiantly labouring to keep the metre and the form, AND make the rhythm sound good for the whole piece, while the soloists responsibility to respect the metre seems to begin and end with the melody.

There are two results arising from this. Firstly you have a situation where the horn players and the rhythm section are not playing together and there's almost no interaction. Since the soloists don't know where the '1' is and are depending on the rhythm section to provide it, they float over the top of the rhythm section playing in a world of their own, incapable of responding to information provided by the rhythm section. And since the soloists are playing almost random rhythms over this new metre, the rhythm section in turn are denied information to feed off from the soloists.

In any normal 4/4 situation in jazz of the last 50 years the interaction between rhythm section and soloist has been crucial to the development of the music as a truly collective art form. Think of any of Miles' rhythms sections, or Coltrane's classic quartet, or Bill Evans's trios – all depended on this interchange between soloist and rhythm section. But with this new situation this kind of interchange is all but eliminated. The rhythm section play together, the soloists floating on top and approximating the metre. Very often, when in this situation, I've felt like I was playing on an Aebersold Playalong recording! There being so little interaction between soloist and rhythm section we might as well have been playing in different rooms. It's almost like a throwback to the bad old fusion days of the 70s, where jazz soloists trotted out lick after lick over a pounding rock rhythm section with neither soloist or rhythm section having the slightest effect on, or interest in, what the others were playing.

The second result of this problem is that the music is BORING!! After a while it all sounds the same. Presumably the idea of playing in 7,11,15, 23 or whatever, is to introduce variety and newness into the music. But due to the constraints placed on the music by the protagonists' lack of competence in these new metres we get the opposite result. You nearly always get the same thing –

1) Complex melody

2) A series of solos over one or two basic chords with soloists floating over the top of the metre and with no interaction between rhythm section and soloists

3) Complex melody

It's dull, dull, dull! In my opinion it's pointless bringing in a piece of music that you essentially can't play. You'd be much better off sticking with 4/4 or 3/4 and playing some creative music with your colleagues than bringing in some token tune in one of these new metres where your ability to respect the measure length is restricted to the playing of the melody. Would any competent horn player, or anyone for that matter, bring in a piece based on changes they found impossible to negotiate? I don't think so. So why do it with rhythm? I would go as far as to say that bringing in a piece of music in which you completely depend on the rhythm section to make you sound competent, let alone creative, is actually dishonest. You're depending on the hard work of others in learning how to deal with this new rhythmic language to absolve you from having to do the same. No good and lasting music is ever produced in such circumstances.

I would suggest that if we're to truly explore the wealth of new musical landscapes made available to us by this new rhythmic information then we have to do the hard work necessary to be comfortable in these metres and rhythmic forms. If you like the idea of doing a tune in 15/8 then you should learn to play in 15/8 – not play your stock 4/4 stuff with ragged corrections every few bars as the rhythm section play the REAL downbeat! You should be able to play phrases that respect this metre, and the real proof of that is to use changes in the music you write in these metres and new rhythms. Get a drum machine, or sequencer, programme the rhythm in question into it, and play along with it over and over until you know where '1' is – every time. Then apply changes to the metre and use the voice leading you've learned over years of practice in that discipline.

Treat rhythm with the same respect you treated harmony and melody and make the same demands on yourself in your use of it. Don't write dull tunes with one or two chords as cover for the fact that you can't voice-lead in the new metre – learn how to voice-lead in that metre – but at home and in the practice room – not on the gig using the crutch of the rhythm section and at the expense of the music and audience. Don't bring any tunes to the rehearsal room where you demand of others something you can't do yourself. Don't try and skip the 'hard yards' - do the work, find the '1' and then rather than paying lip service to this new rhythmic vocabulary, perhaps we can hear some good, creative and new music. No more faking please!!

PS. As an example of how beautiful complex rhythms and great chords can sound when played by people who really know what they're doing have a listen to Kenny Werner's trio piece 'In Tune on the great CD 'Press Enter' (Sunnyside).

As another example of changes in odd metres with respect for voice leading you can also listen to some standards played in odd metres here This was recorded as long ago as 1993 by myself, Mike Nielsen on guitar and Conor Guilfoyle on drums. There are three pieces here - 'Night and Day played in an 11/4 swing feel, 'Love for Sale' played in an 11/8 Afro-Cuban feel and 'Summertime' played in 21/14. Notice the absence of one-chord solo forms!

Peer Group

There’s something about playing with your contemporaries that feels different to any other playing situation……… Recently the Guilfoyle/Nielsen trio – with Mike Nielsen on guitar, and my brother Conor on drums, has got back together for the first time in five years - as a trio at least, though we’ve played together as part of a rhythm section with Dave Liebman a couple of years back. But though it’s been five years since we played as a trio, we have a LONG history together. We first played as a rhythm section in 1985, as part of a group called ‘Four in One’ (with firstly Richie Buckley on saxophone, then Mike McMullen) and that group played together till about 1989. During this period we started to play as a trio for the first time, doing some gigs at the Focus Theatre – a venue which in retrospect I realise was, for Irish jazz musicians of my generation, like Minton’s was for the bebop guys in the ‘40s! Over the next fifteen years we played together on innumerable occasions, either as a trio or as a rhythm section.

As we played together two distinct strands of our work developed – our role as a trio with an intense interest in developing new rhythmic techniques, and our role as a rhythm section accompanying visiting musicians. In this latter role we played with many great musicians – Dave Liebman, Joe Lovano, Sonny Fortune, Kenny Wheeler, Richie Beirach, Kenny Werner, Larry Coryell, Conrad Herwig, Julian Arguelles, Pat LaBarbara, Steve Coleman and Simon Nabatov, and we recorded with Liebman (twice) and LaBarbara. Apart from this work with international musicians we also played with many Irish musicians in many different groupings and formats.

At the same time as we were operating as a rhythm section, we had an independent life as a trio. At the end of the ‘80s we developed an intense interest in the creative possibilities of rhythm, and luckily enough we were underemployed enough to have the time to work on these possibilities! At that time none of us was as busy as we later became, and subsequently were able to put the time at our disposal into what amounted to about two years of intense rehearsal. About three mornings a week we would go to the music school where we worked, lock ourselves into the padded cell that was the drum teaching room, and play for hours. Over this period we developed our rhythmic techniques and interest in such things as metric modulation and playing in odd metres.

We had a particular interest in playing standards in odd metres, something that was very rare at that time, though it’s still not common today. And through working on these things we developed a reputation internationally as being the ‘weird rhythm guys’, which did us no harm at all! We ended up being the first Irish musicians to be invited to teach at Berklee College of Music for example and also taught in Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Austria and India among other places. As a result of this period of work and interest in rhythm I wrote my rhythm book which featured the trio in the accompanying CD, and is now over ten years old (if you’re interested in reading more about the development of this book I posted a blog about it here).

In 1992 we managed to get a residency in The Oak - a pub in Temple Bar. A residency is a really hard thing to get these days, but it was a little easier then, and this particular one, which (incredibly) we managed to hold on to for about a year, was really helpful to us in being able to develop this odd metre standard concept, since we could try out the material every Friday night. This prepared us for going into the studio to record – which we did in Paul Ashe Browne’s studio in Annamoe in Wicklow in March 1993 – the peaceful rural setting making a suitable contrast to the rhythmic mayhem that was going on in the studio!

This recording of rearranged, (both harmonically and rhythmically), standards, which we fondly christened ‘Fucked-Up Classics Volume One’, was for all of us a landmark recording since we felt it represented a document of the work in this area that we’d done up to this point, and which we also felt was a good representation of that - the residency in the Oak having helped hone the music to a very high level. But, with the recording made, we couldn’t get it out. Few companies were interested in releasing an album of odd metre standards by relative unknowns and none of us was in a financial position to pay for the manufacture and release of the recording ourselves. So it languished in the studio for several years and then – disaster – the studio changed address and the DAT original master disappeared in the move...........

So all that remained of ‘Fucked Up Classics’ were some cassette copies that we had in our possession and it’s never been released. But last year Conor suggested that we should transfer the music to CD, and though it wouldn’t be of commercial level sound quality, get the music out there at least. So this we did through Conor’s website where you can download the music for free What we found interesting is that though the record companies wouldn’t give us the time of day when we originally sent the recording out to them, usually saying that the music was ‘too esoteric’, the CD has been downloaded over 600 times in the few short months since it’s been up there. And we feel good about that – it’s nice to get some kind positive reaction, even many years later, to something you put so much work into.

After this period we started to write original material and do freer music than previously and so the odd metre standard era (even though we usually included a couple in every performance) passed on for us. And even the trio passed on, in that, in the typical way of these things, we all developed our own careers and interests, became busier individually and began developing new projects independently of the trio. Although we would get together occasionally as a trio, and more often as a rhythm section, the days of the three times a week rehearsals and residency gigs were gone. And it was only as recently as last March, when Mike and I met for the first time in over a year at a Lionel Loueke concert, that we started talking again about taking the trio out of the mothballs and back on the road so to speak. We realised with shock that it had actually been five years since we’d played a gig as a trio, and decided then and there that something should be done about that!

And so we have – we’re playing a trio gig in the legendary JJ Smyth’s on Sunday June 7th, AND we decided to revive ‘Fucked Up Classics’ and give it its first outing in over 15 years.

And so we started rehearsing, and it’s been really great to play again! As I remarked at the beginning of this post, there’s something about playing with contemporaries that is unique. When you play with musicians of your own age and background, there’s a shared experience there, an unspoken understanding of certain concepts and philosophies that you just don’t get working with younger musicians or musicians from different backgrounds. This understanding is based on years of listening to the same music, or working on the same material – it’s almost like a form of musical cultural identity, a shared recognition of certain basic truths that are held by everybody in the group. Before you play a note there are certain things that you just KNOW, that require no discussion or preamble. It makes for a particular type of playing experience that can’t be reproduced in any other context – it’s the understanding within a peer group that has a history of shared experiences.

And when in the case of this trio you add the, literally, years of playing together, travelling together, playing with all of these great musicians together and how those experiences shaped us and affected us, and when you also add the collective passion for rhythm that kept us in the drum room for years and allowed us to work towards a shared concept of how to play collectively – it intensifies this aforementioned sense of unspoken understanding. In the rehearsals, despite the fact that we haven’t played for five years as a trio, there has been almost no discussion of musical concepts – we just know what we want to do without talking about it. In fact we’ve spent more time laughing about past incidences and experiences and talking about this musician that we played with, or that gig we did than we have talking about the music itself. Because there’s no need to talk about the music – all we need to do with that is play it. And play it we will, with perhaps even more enthusiasm than before (if that’s possible!), since we’re so happy to be back playing again. And also playing with more maturity, since the things we’ve been doing and learning and working on individually can now be fed into the collective playing of the trio. We believe that we play this music better now than we did then, and I think we’re all looking forward to this gig as a chance to both revisit old musical haunts and discover some new ones at the same time.

The 8th Note Hegemony

Recently I watched a clip on Youtube of the great contemporary jazz guitarist Adam Rogers playing ‘Have you met Miss Jones’. He was playing it as part of a masterclass and demonstrating how he uses superimposition of scales as an improvisational device. It is of course, as one would expect of Rogers, brilliantly played and executed, with a flawless technique, and real clarity of sound. However, I couldn’t help noticing something that I’ve noticed in the playing of a lot of contemporary jazz musicians – particularly those playing in the realm of the swing idiom these days – a preponderance of 8th notes and very little rhythmic variety.

It seems that the the evolution of the harmonic language of jazz has gone hand in hand with the simplification of the rhythmic language of its soloists. So much jazz soloing in recent years seems to be based on 8th notes, and 8th notes that are played in a series rather than broken up in any kind of interesting way or with any variety. Take the Rogers solo as an example – now I know I may be a little unfair to choose this as an example of his playing, because he was giving a masterclass and was demonstrating harmonic movement. No doubt he’d play a little differently if he’d been with a rhythm section. But the solo is over four minutes long and I think it’s fair to assume that the way he’s playing here is one he’s comfortable with and used to doing. And just because one is demonstrating harmonic stuff doesn’t mean that one can’t use rhythm in a creative way as well.

So, back to the solo – as I listened to it I was struck by how 8th note-driven the whole solo was and how based on divisions of two it was. Even where there were no 8th notes in couples, nearly everything else was based on divisions of two – quarter notes, half notes etc. And then I noticed that the person who had filmed the solo had also transcribed it and had given a link to the transcription, and reading this transcription (assuming it’s accurate – it seems to be, though I haven’t checked note for note), bore out the suspicion I had regarding the rhythmic uniformity of the solo. In the whole eight choruses - eight pages of transcription, over four minutes of playing – Rogers only uses a subdivision of anything other than two, four times – and this is a subdivision of three – i.e. triplets. In other words, triplets are only used four times in the whole solo. All of this sophisticated harmonic language is supported by a pretty basic rhythmic language. Technically it’s brilliant, harmonically it’s brilliant, rhythmically it’s dull.

You can check it out for yourself – You can see the performance here

And the transcription here

And I think this is pretty typical of a lot of soloing these days in this idiom. There seems to be little or no importance attached to rhythmic variety, it’s all 8th note, 8th note, 8th note. Why? It seems extraordinary to me that there is still little attention paid to the importance of rhythm in music. Jazz schools are particularly guilty of this and seem to place a huge emphasis on harmonic considerations and almost none on rhythm. Maybe this is because harmony lends itself better to academic forms of teaching than rhythm does – rhythm is a more abstract concept to teach and therefore is avoided. There is an avalanche of harmony books and technique books for jazz, but very very little on rhythm, which maybe explains why teachers are reluctant to tackle it (teachers love textbooks!), and why contemporary players seem to place so little importance on rhythm in their improvising.

And it’s particularly puzzling as to why this might be given there are so many great examples of sophisticated rhythmic invention by great jazz soloists in the history of the music. Armstrong, Parker, Miles, Coltrane, Rollins, Jim Hall, Joe Henderson, Herbie Hancock etc. etc. A quick look on Youtube revealed two fantastic examples almost immediately – one from forty four years ago, the other from three years ago – both playing in the swing idiom over standard from.

The first example is an extraordinary solo from Sonny Rollins from 1965, playing ‘Oleo’ with NHOP and Alan Dawson. This is Rollins at the height of his powers, and his famous rhythmic virtuosity is clearly to the fore during this whole performance.

The other is taken from a concert from Bill Frisell in 2006 where he plays Konitz’s ‘Subconcious-lee’ which is based on ‘What is This Thing Called Love’ - and again the sheer variety of rhythmic approaches he takes is wonderful.

Both of these solos are not only harmonically sophisticated but also rhythmically interesting. Both use swinging 8th notes, but not to the exclusion of all else. Both marry a complex rhythmic language to a highly developed harmonic language, which makes for a deeper, fuller and above all, more INTERESTING experience for the listener. Let’s please have less of the machine gun 8th notes and more rhythmic intrigue – it’d be better for everybody!