TT 463: Take a Swing at It
phrasing in jazz music
When teaching at NEC, I often ask the students, “Do you believe in your eighth note?”
There are a lot of different ways to play swing eighth notes, and none of the major practitioners have just one way of doing it all the time.
Amateurs tend to play with “too much” swing, meaning play a perfect triplet. Almost no professional plays with a perfect triplet, it is usually straighter, although anything is possible in the hands of a master.
Yesterday I hit on the idea of writing out varied ways to phrase the first line of Charlie Parker’s “Ornithology” in a computer notation program. The progression is from big lope to no lope.
A is dotted. People rarely do this except for special effect, although many great drummers play something like this with brushes at slower tempos.
B is a perfect triplet, beloved by amateurs.
C seems familiar, a lot of people sort of do it this way. (5 in the time of a beat: 3 for the long note, 2 for the short note)
D is almost straight, I think of Dexter Gordon or Sonny Clark. (7 in the time of a beat: 4 for long, 3 for short)
E is the way many people play eighths in straight eighth grooves such as bossa or funk: there’s still a little lope in the line even though base rhythm is not swing. Early music specialists can also play Bach in such a manner. (9 in the time of a beat: 5 for long, 4 for short)
F is straight, and is rarely heard in serious jazz.
To state the obvious: The great swingers in jazz history never thought about this kind of eccentric and artificial notation.
Indeed, I’d strongly discourage anyone from carefully practicing these rhythms as notated above. One’s own lines should feel like singing or speaking; they should feel like folk music; they should not sound like a computer program.
This page is merely a thought experiment, and perhaps a way to provoke students into considering their personal feel. Choices do need to be made.
(Accents and articulation might be even more important than the lope.)
Well done....I remember a clinic with Ed Shaughnessy many years ago. In a manner, he demonstrated a bit of what you wrote about. He summed it up saying "Never underestimate the power of 8th notes. "
You don't mention tempo, but it was a big eye-opener for me when I figured out (after a clinic with the great Claudio Roditi, who was chastising us to play Brazilian 8th notes EVEN) that if you're practicing a line (with a metronome for example) that you hope to eventually play fast, it's imperative NOT to swing it when you're practicing it slowly, because by the time you get it up to tempo it will be a jumbled mess. I started practicing them rhythmically even, and letting the swing come from the (usually upbeat) accents and articulation, and everything got easier. (It is weird to me how even with students who've listened to jazz for years, if I ask them to play a line they'll still start with that cartoonish triplety swing feel, like they've been brainwashed by that little shorthand in the upper left corner of junior high big band charts.)