Funk Part 3 — The Unassuming Principle

The Soul Train Dancers — peerless evangelists of the Unassuming Principle

My interest in funk has been deepened by confronting the difficulties of playing it.  On the surface, the challenge of funk lies in the syncopations and complexity of the grooves.  But listening more closely reveals the biggest trick of all—rendering the complexity with a performance that somehow attracts attention without calling attention to itself. 

It sounds counterintuitive, because funk is well known for its over-the-top presentation, its outright renunciation of modesty—the mugging of the singers; the sunglasses, capes and top hats; the star-shaped guitars; the spaceships.  Yet all of that requires a particular humility.  

Humility to what?

The groove.

I'm not saying funk at large is unassuming.  I'm saying its bad-assed nature is born of something that somehow never needs to call attention to itself.  To play funk, one must keep one’s cool, in the deepest sense of the word, and let the groove do the work.  

Kool and the Gang’s “Jungle Boogie” embodies this principle.  The groove elicits relaxation, coolness.  Indeed, the juxtaposition of the easygoing performance against the vocal fireworks and action-packed arrangement is what produces the larger-than-life coolness of funk bands in general.

Note that as you listen, your joints loosen.  And note how deftly that relaxation is balanced against the song's many points of emphasis.   The band implores “Get down! Get down!” but not from a place of effort and tension.  The singing, like the playing beneath it, loosens us up.

The Unassuming Principle is also embodied in funk's dance moves.  This is video from the Jackson Five’s audition for Motown.  They are covering James Brown's "I Got The Feelin'."  Michael Jackson must be eight years old here, and the expressive power of his voice is already astonishing.  The singing embodies the Unassuming Principle, and so does his dancing.   If you are as dazzled by his moves as I am, see if your bedazzlement might be located in his absence of effort.  He’s not trying to be funky; he simply is funky.  The relaxation of his entire presentation suggests "How could it be otherwise?"  

He’s not calling attention to himself, and yet all of our attention is on him.  That is the beautiful mystery of the Unassuming Principle.

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Thank you for reading.

Funk Part 2 supplement — Earth Wind & Fire’s “Shining Star”

The size of Earth Wind & Fire’s ensemble, with two guitars, multiple drummer/percussionists, multiple vocalists, and horns, demanded a careful ear for arrangement (which is why so many of their imitators fell short of Earth Wind & Fire’s greatness).

What’s interesting to note here is that the primary puzzle pieces of the verse (the drums, the bass, and the guitarist strumming a repeating pattern in the right channel) also accommodate the second guitarist, in the left channel, who improvises a one-note accompaniment.  This gives the piece more looseness, more of the spontaneous, improvised flavor of jazz.   Amazingly, ample room remains for the vocals. 

Such careful arranging is one of Earth Wind & Fire’s trademarks, and very difficult to pull off.  Credit is due not only to the players but also to the judicious ears of their producer, the great Charles Stepney.

Legendary producer Charles Stepney
Image via clarencemcdonald.com

Funk Part 2 supplement — Tito Puente's "Oye Como Va"

One of the 20th century's musical giants, Tito Puente.  Image via lpmusic.com

The Puzzle Principle holds across musical traditions, though it is especially applicable in funk because of the sharp angles that define the genre.

This classic from Tito Puente illustrates the Puzzle Piece principle at work.  Note how the arrangement builds, one part at a time, not only tantalizing the listeners but teaching them how to assemble the parts.

Note also the Teeter-Totter principle at work in the intro, where the accented riff is backed by steady handclaps, so that the syncopation has a strong-beat framework to help make it pop (and perhaps to keep the dancers moving more easily).

Funk Part 2 supplement — Betty Wright's "Clean Up Woman."

The awesome Betty Wright. Image via funky16corners.wordpress.com

This week we’ve been exploring funk music.

In Funk — Syncopation and the Teeter Totter Principal and Funk — The Teeter Totter principle in action. Cameo's "Rigor Mortis" we explored how various funk classics balance strong and weak beats to produce such danceable music.

In Funk — The Puzzle Principle we heard how funk is constructed of intricately designed (and precisely played) parts.  

Betty Wright’s “Clean Up Woman” illustrates both principles.

Note the Teeter Totter Principle in action here.  The other instruments (two guitars, bass, and horns) work the syncopation, but the drums keep a fairly straight framework around all of it.  Note how the groove come to life with the entrance of the drums.  (A more syncopated drum part might weight things too heavily on the side of the weak beats.)

And note the intricate fitting together of the parts (the Puzzle Principle).  As is often the case with funk, the song starts with the parts introduced one at a time.  One guitar, then the second guitar, then the base, and then the rest of the band.  Notice how this is not only fun, it teaches the listener how to assemble the parts in her mind and listen.

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Thank you for reading.

Funk Part 2 — The Puzzle Principle

James Brown, master of the Puzzle Principle. Image via alldylan.com.

The classic funk sound that emerged in the late 1960s featured large ensembles and intricate arrangements.  Indeed, one of the rewards of listening to this era of funk is hearing how intricately the grooves have been assembled like puzzle pieces.  The pieces themselves are the simple, repeating parts that the individual musicians play that then fit together to form a dazzling whole.   
 

image via etc.usf.edu

Musicians carve up a unit of musical time into pieces and assemble the pieces into a groove.

Image via tangramfury.com

In funk music, the shapes combine to form intricate patterns.  Note that the sharp angles and intricate design demand a steadier sense of time out of the players.  Without that, the sharp angles would become blurred and the rhythmic images would makes less sense to the listener.

All kinds of genres, including Rock & Roll, make use of repeating patterns.  In rock, the pieces are generally simpler, in part because rock does not move in the shorter subdivisions of funk and also because in rock, the emphasis is on full-chord riffs rather than single-note patterns that can move quickly but less obtrusively, as in funk.

This approach demands each player’s disciplined adherence to the prescribed part.  Without that, the groove would fill up with notes and thereby lose shape, and in funk, the shape of the groove is everything. 

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James Brown's influence will be heard in subsequent examples, so let's start with him.  “Mother Popcorn” illustrates the Puzzle Principle in action.  See if you can zero in on this or that part; you’ll hear it repeat.  This is no loose jam.  The groove's sharp angles would be lost were the players to stray from their parts.  

Furthermore, note how each part leaves a lot of open space.  The guitar, for instance, is playing single notes instead of chords, which is typical of funk.

Indeed, even when the parts are combined, ample space is left for James Brown to stretch out with his singing and punctuate the band groove with percussive shouts of his own.  This is a product of his insistent attention on the arrangement.

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Sly Stone’s “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” is driven by the interplay between the bass and guitar, the drums providing the framework that clarifies the nature of that interplay.  (This is the Teeter Totter Principle in action.)  One of my favorite details of this groove is how Larry Graham’s bass part finds a low, sustained E every other round of the pattern.  It calls pleasing attention to the architecture of the groove.

The above video captures an excavation of the groove, as the band reunites in the studio to hear the tracks in various combinations.

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Image via metmuseum.org

This sixteenth century gate from India illustrates the principle at work in classic funk music—composition out of simple, repeating patterns that combine to produce the effect.  Note how pleasing and necessary the repetition is.  The intricacy of the design demands it, for without the repetition, the effect would vanish, just as a funk groove would lose definition if the players strayed from their parts. Note also the reliance on sharply drawn lines, which are analogous to the precision demanded of funk players.

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AWB’s “School Boy Crush” is a good example of how funk grooves typically embody the Puzzle Principle and the Teeter Totter Principle in action.  The groove is constructed from individual simple, repeating patterns (the Puzzle Principle), and these patterns combine weak and strong beats in danceable proportions (the Teeter Totter Principle in action).  In fact, each part takes turns on both sides of the strong/weak-beat teeter totter. 

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A final thought.  A likely source for this approach might be the compositional insights of African drumming tradition, where the individual musicians play simple, repeating parts that interlock to stunning effect.  Here's a glimpse.

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Thank you for reading.

Funk Part 1 supplement — The Bar Kays' "Shake Your Rump to the Funk"

If you are dancing along to this funk gem, note what happens during the first ten seconds of the song.

0:00-0:02     drums accent the full-band riffs
0:03-0:05     drums play backbeat
0:06-0:08     drums accent the full-band riffs
0:09- . . .       drums play backbeat

This same sequence repeats at the 1:56 mark.

Do you notice how much easier it is to dance with the backbeat in place?  When the drums join the full-band riffs, it creates a temporary imbalance because the strong-beat framework is eclipsed by the accented syncopated notes (the second, fourth, sixth, and eighth notes in the nine-note riff pattern).

ba-PAH ba-PAH ba-PAH ba-PAH BAH

This is the teeter-totter principle in action (and an example of the fun one can create by challenging the dancers).

Note that this arrangement move relies on the drummer Mike Beard's smooth transition from the accented riff to the backbeat.

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Thank you for reading.

Funk Part 1 supplement — Cameo's "Rigor Mortis."

In the previous post, Funk—Syncopation and the Teeter Totter Principle, I discussed how funk music plays with syncopation.  The great funk artists have an ear for how to balance the emphasis of strong and weak beats.  Cameo, for example.

The introductory bars of  “Rigor Mortis” present an interesting challenge.  The vocal and instrumental melody emphasize an extended series of weak beats. 

I don't see why you won't groove, won't have this dance with me.
Rigor Mortis won't sit, just sit there and you'll see,
The music sounds to good for you to look and act this way.
Just free your mind of all your thoughts and you will surely say, “Yeah!”

(I've bolded the syllables falling on the downbeats, which are strong.  The remaining syllables fall on weak beats.)

What helps the groove pop is the fact that Larry Blackmon’s drumbeat is holding down the strong beats.  He frames the context for the syncopation.  Drummers, take note.

Hall of Fame funksters Cameo.  Image via foolishdreamermedia.wordpress.com.

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Thank you for reading.

Funk Part 1 — The Teeter Totter Principle

When we listen to music, our ears organize things rhythmically.  We instinctively place emphasis on some beats and deemphasize others.   Were we unable to make these distinctions, we would not be able to grasp rhythm.

Syncopation happens when rhythmic emphasis falls on a weak as opposed to strong beat.  Syncopation can thereby enliven a rhythm by simulating what happens in our bodies when we dance.  We might land on the strong beats, but our joints are flexing on the weak beats, so emphasis there keeps our bodies in motion.

You might think of syncopation as analogous to hot sauce: It can be added in varying amounts, with varying effects.

Funk music, aimed as it is at dancers, provides countless illustrations of what I call the teeter-totter principle, the balancing of the tradeoffs that come when we make a particular groove more or less syncopated.  

This is a classic track from the Whispers, with drumming by one of my all-time favorites, Wardell Potts Jr.

Note the handclaps that enter with the singing.  They fall on “two” and “four” of each four-count measure, aligning with the words thusly:

When times get tough, I want to . . .

Now, try clapping (or patting your knee) on “one” and “three.”

When times get tough . . .

You may notice how this switch saps the groove somewhat.  The shift to clapping on “one” and “three” changes the balance of strong-beats to weak.

Think of the groove as a teeter-totter.   At one end sit the strong beats and at the other, the weak beats.  When balanced, the riders have an easier time moving up and down.  But when we start shifting weight to one side, the work for the riders increases.  The work will appeal to some and not to others.

In “The Best of My Love” by the Emotions, the hand claps in the song come on “two” and “four” of each measure.   If you were to clap along on “one” and “three,” the groove would not suffer as much as in the case of the Whispers track.  That’s because the song's melody emphasizes weak beats:

Doesn’t take much to make me happy
And make me smile with glee
Never, never will I be discouraged
‘Cause our love’s no mystery

If you were to pat your hand on “one,” “two,” “three,” and “four” of each measure, you’d notice that Sheila Hutchinson’s vocal line hits all of the moments when your hand is raised.  The song has a tad more syncopation built into it.  Even so, this groove and the Whisper’s groove hit a sort of iconic funk/r&b sweet spot.

While it may be natural to suppose that syncopation  make a song danceable, it’s interesting to consider the tradeoffs that come with each added bit of syncopation.  

Consider the aptly titled (and oft-sampled) James Brown song, “Funky Drummer.”

Notice how this track immediately assumes a listener’s ability to make her way through a more syncopated landscape.  Listen to the Clyde Stubblefield's famous (and oft sampled) drumbeat at 5:20.  Is it danceable?  Of course!  But will everyone who can dance to the Emotions be able to dance to this?  No, because to do so requires a greater ability to feel the strong beats even when they aren’t played.  Those who can feel the strong beats, however, will feel the full ticklish power of this groove.

Tower of Power’s classic, “What Is Hip,” makes even bigger demands of the listener.  Again, this is merely an observation, not a criticism.  Audiences enjoy having demands placed on them.

If you dance along with the track, notice what is expected of you at 0:52, when the drums and bass combine to emphasize weak beats and leave dancers to imagine the strong beats in their minds. The weak-beat end of the teeter-totter is getting heavier.

Devo’s reworking of the Rolling Stones “Satisfaction,” is so weighted on the side of syncopation, a listener can easily get lost.  As a result, notice the difficulty of dancing.  (This is not to deny that some may be thrilled by the rhythmic play and Devo’s twisted and insightful reworking of the original.)

If one does get lost, it’s because one has become so overwhelmed by the syncopations as to be unable to decide which beats are strong and which are not, which results in our inability to organize things rhythmically in our mind.

The teeter-totter principle does not prescribe any particular weighting between strong and weak beats.  It simply observes that shifting the balance comes with tradeoffs.  And playing with the tradeoffs is what art is all about.

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Thank you for reading.

Bridges Part 6 — Stevie Wonder's "Creepin'"

The past few posts have been about song bridges, middle eights, possible analogs in film and fiction, and how one might add a bridge to a song, a piece of writing, a film, and so forth.

In this post, I’d like to talk about one of my all-time favorite bridges, the middle-eight section of Stevie Wonder’s song “Creepin’” from his introspective album, Fulfillingness’ First Finale.

via 1001-songs.blogspot.com

 In the earlier posts I noted some standard traits of a bridge.

• The lyrics reconsider the song’s assumptions and/or looking at things from a new perspective. 
   
• This reconsideration is accompanied by a shift to new musical terrain.  The song has to get away from where it has been in order to for the reconsideration to take place.
  
  
• As a result of this questioning and travel through new musical terrain, a song gains a deeper understanding of what it has always been.

 With these ideas in mind . . .

The song opens with its signature riff, a modal progression on the electric piano, highlighted by accompanying synth lines.  The riff establishes the somnambulant mood of the verses.

I can hear you sighin'
Sayin' you'll stay beside me
Why must it be
That you always creep...
Into my dreams?
etc.
 

Note the striking character of the musical dissonance, which is not discordant but weird, surreal.  It places us on a thickly shadowed path, where the few slivers of light that split through the branches are just enough to help us find our way, a few footsteps at a time.  The dissonance creates a sense of mystery and erotic expectation that pulls us through the darkness as we brush against its lush textures. The subtle dialogue between Minnie Riperton’s background vocal and Stevie Wonder’s lead stirs this atmosphere.

And then, at 1:22 (and again at 2:50) we come to the middle eight, and the musical landscape blossoms from modal darkness into a rush of color— the song’s newfound major key.  Having emerged from the verses, we find ourselves lifted up into light.

When I'm sleep at night baby
I feel those moments of ecstasy
 When you sleep at night baby

We are returned back to the verses with the question that haunts the song:

I wonder do I creep into your dreams
Or could it be I sleep alone in my fantasy? 

Note how necessary the bright contrast of the middle eight is to the song as a whole.  The mystery of the verses is deepened by the rush of the middle eight.  Together, these contrasting yet complementing musical moods combine convey the contrasting yet complementing emotional moods —torment and pleasure— of infatuation.

Completion by way of contrast—this is what a bridge does for a song.  

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 Thank you for reading.

Song Bridges Part 5 — Building A Bridge

(The San Francisco Bay Bridge via historyinphotos.blogspot.com)

The last few posts have been discussing the element of songwriting known as a bridge.  In “Song Bridges” and “Song Bridges Part 2 — Middle Eights,” I explored the function of the bridge, and in “Song Bridges Part 3 — Film” and “Song Bridges Part 4 — Fiction,” I suggested that analogs to this songwriting move can be found in other mediums.  Indeed, I stumbled onto that idea as I wrote my memoir.  I came to a point in one of the later chapters and thought, “It needs a bridge right here!”

 If one were to add a bridge to a song, a story, a memoir, a film, how might one go about it?

 One might begin by asking if the work in question actually needs a bridge.  I once heard Paul Westerberg say, “The best bridge is no bridge at all.”  Indeed.

Sometimes, however, one has finished a song, a story, or a script and can’t shake the feeling that the work is incomplete, though the beginning feels like the beginning and the end feels like the end.  Somehow the work did not reach the depths necessary to evoke the intended emotional response.  In that case, a bridge may be in order.  How might one add one?

• Let the work’s main idea establish itself before starting a bridge.  (A likely point for a bridge will be after the halfway point.)
   
• Let the bridge introduce material that challenges the rest of the work.
  
  — Challenge the work’s established ideas.  (If the song has been about loss, here is where it might reach for hope.  If the film has followed a protagonist's quest for a goal, here is where she might question that goal.)
  
  — Highlight that challenge by shifting to new formal landscape. (In music, change keys, or meter, or ambience, or instrumentation.  In writing or film, make a dramatic change of scene, tense, timeframe, mood, voice, and so forth.)
   
• When you are done, ask yourself if it deepens the piece? Or does it simply add material and thus add to your audience’s cognitive workload?

My band mate, Dan Wilson, (whose advice on songwriting is brilliantly captured in a vine series called “words and music in six seconds”) quoted another wise man, producer Rick Rubin, on the subject of bridges.  Rick said words to this effect: "If you want to add a bridge, it has to be the best part of the song."  (Note the resonance of this insight with Paul Westerberg's.)

I like Rick's test.  Though I can’t say the bridge is always the best section in a favorite song or movie or book, I often feel it’s the most necessary.

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 Thank you for reading.

Song Bridges Part 4 — Fiction

The past few posts have looked at bridges, a move that songwriter’s make.  “Song Bridges” introduced the main idea of a bridge and “Song Bridges Part 2 — Middle Eights” described a particular species of bridge.  In “Song Bridges Part 3 — Film,” I noted some analogs in the realm of film.  Today, I’d like to do the same with literature.

To review . . .

• A bridge comes after the halfway point in the song form, so that the main ideas can be established.
   
• It strikes a musical and lyrical contrast with what has come before it.  It challenges or tests the song’s established ideas.
   
• As a result, the song’s meaning expands.

Bridges In Literature

The connection to literature had not occurred to me until I was writing my memoir, So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star.   As I edited the draft, I told myself, “It needs a bridge.”  So I wrote a bridge (I may discuss it in some future post) and was surprised to find that bridges can work in books just as they might in songs.

Here are two instances of bridges in fiction.

Example 1 — “The Swimmer” by John Cheever

This famous short story that was later made into a film starring Burt Lancaster.  (I’ve not seen the film; I’ll be commenting only on Cheever’s original version.)

The story takes place in summertime and opens as the main character, Neddy Merrill, sips drinks poolside at the house of friends.  As he thinks about leaving, he concocts a novel plan for getting home.    

“He seemed to see, with a cartographer’s eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the country . . . / . . . he was going to swim home. / . . . The only maps and charts he had to go by were remembered or imaginary but these were clear enough.  First there were the Grahams, the Hammers, the Lears, the Howlands, and the Crosscups.  He would cross Ditmar Street to the Bunkers and come, after a short portage, to the Levys, the Welchers, and the public pool in Lancaster.  Then there were the Hallorans, the Sachses, the Biswangers, Shirley Adams, the Gilmartins, and the Clydes.  The day was lovely, and that he lived in a world so generously supplied with water seemed like a clemency, a beneficence.”
 

("The Swimmer" by John Cheever, from The Stories of John Cheever, pp. 603-604.)

So he begins his indulgent journey, dropping in on friend after friend, pouring himself drinks and swimming across pools as he makes his way.  The landscape breathes with class privilege and perhaps a bit of the cool detachment of Neddy’s social set.  Whether or not this or that couple is happy to see him walk through their bushes and dive into their pool, he seems not to care.  He’s too taken with himself and his endeavor to care.

Halfway through the story, Neddy must cross a highway to continue his swim home. 

“Had you gone for a Sunday afternoon ride that day you might have seen him, close to naked, standing on the shoulders of Route 424, waiting for a chance to cross.  You might have wondered if he was the victim of foul play, had his car broken down, or was merely a fool.  Standing barefoot in the deposits of the highway — beer cans, rags, and blowout patches — exposed to all kinds of ridicule, he seemed pitiful.”

("The Swimmer" by John Cheever, from The Stories of John Cheever, p. 607.) 

He makes his way across and his journey continues through the landscape of poolside privilege.  His arrival home is not the one imagined at the beginning of the story (and in lieu of revealing more, I’ll simply encourage you to read this and other Cheever stories).

Neddy’s crossing of the highway, in my mind, functions as a bridge might in a song.

• It comes at the halfway point in the story (so the main ideas and textures have been established).
   
• It reconsiders the ideas about Neddy established in the first half of the story.  As he drops in on friends and swims through their pools, he exudes boundless social and physical confidence.  Trying to cross the highway, he looks vulnerable and weak.
   
•  It supports this reconsideration by a change of scenery (analogous to how song bridges support lyrical questions about the rest of the song with a new musical setting).  His swims are set in elegant surroundings.  Suddenly we now see beer cans, rags, and other roadside trash.

 As the result of this bridge-like moment in the story, we return to the story with a more complete picture of Neddy, his world, and perhaps a darker sense of what awaits him.

Example 2 — A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
 

 This wonderful novel (winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award) is a series of stories about a group of friends and acquaintances who work in the music business.  The stories in the chapters accumulate into a highly diffuse narrative punctuated by leaps of time and place—from the 1980s to the 2000s, from San Francisco to LA to New York, and so forth.  The main characters are music-business professionals, though some of the stories begin when these characters are teens. 

Late in the book, the narrative is taken over by the preadolescent daughter of one of the main characters.  She documents the life of her family, including her older brother’s obsession with pauses in rock & roll songs.

Why this feels like a bridge:

• The chapter comes after the primary questions and landscape has been established.
   
• The chapter steps away from questions about adult careers and relationships and takes up questions of family life from a child’s perspective. 
   
• It turns from questions about the music business to questions about music itself.
   
• It highlights these reconsiderations of the book’s dominant questions with a departure from the book’s dominant form, for this chapter is written entirely in Powerpoint.  Again, this is an analog to a song’s shift in musical landscape during the bridge. 

(One of the Powerpoint slides from chapter 12 of Jennifer Egan's novel A Visit from the Goon Squad. via avisitfromthegoonsquad.com

As we emerge from this chapter to the world where adults tussle over careers, relationships, technology, and music, we have a deeper appreciation for what’s at stake.

Jennifer Egan listened to a lot of music as she wrote this book.  I mainly think of A Visit From the Goon Squad as being structured as an album of stories, but it’s not unreasonable to suppose that amid all of her listening, she might also have conceived of the book as one epic song with a bridge.

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 Thank you for reading.  The next post will address the Why and How of adding a bridge.

Song Bridges Part 3 — Film

The past two posts, “Song Bridges” and “Song Bridges Part 2 — Middle Eights,” have explored a songwriting move called a bridge.

To review:

• A bridge comes after the halfway point in the song, so that the main ideas can be established.
• It strikes a musical and lyrical contrast with what has come before it.  It challenges or tests the song’s established ideas.
• As a result of these shifts, the song’s meaning expands.

It’s interesting to notice how this same type of move is made in other creative forms.  I first noticed this as I was writing my memoir.  As I was editing it, I came to a point well past the halfway point and thought, “It really needs a bridge here.”  So I added a bridge, a short one in terms of its proportion to the rest of the book, but its placement and contrast with what came before and after it qualified it as a bridge.

Since then, I’ve spotted this same move in other works.  Today, I’d like to point out some examples in film.  Tomorrow, I’ll mention some examples from literature.

Film Bridges Example 1 — The Matrix

The awesome Gloria Foster as the Oracle, via matrix.wikia.com

The scene where Neo (Keanu Reeves) encounters the Oracle (Gloria Foster) functions as a sort of bridge.

• It happens after the halfway point, so the main idea — Neo is The One — has been established.
   
• This scene throws doubt on that main idea.

Oracle: But... you already know what I'm going to tell you.
Neo: I'm not The One.
Oracle: Sorry, kid. You got the gift, but it looks like you're waiting for something.
Neo: What?
Oracle: Your next life, maybe. Who knows? That's the way these things go.

• This challenge to the main idea is highlighted by formal contrasts (analogous to the musical changes that accompany the lyrical reconsiderations found song bridges).  Rather than fast-paced scenes of acrobatic street battles (or simulated battles) between youngish characters, we now enter a slow-moving domestic scene, where young children wait to visit with an old wise woman, who sips coffee in her kitchen.

Coming out of this scene, the dimensions and scope of the movie have expanded.  Indeed, without this scene, Neo’s subsequent discoveries about himself would feel empty.

Film Bridges, Example 2, The Godfather

Al Pacino as Michael Corleone via godfather.wikia.com

Michael Coreleone’s sojourn in Sicily functions as something of a bridge.

• It occurs just past the halfway mark of the film; the main ideas have had time to establish themselves.
   
• The bridge challenges some of those ideas. 

Up to this point, Michael has played the part of a kid brother whose reputation as someone uninvolved in the mob world was the very thing that enabled him to carry out the surprise assassination of a rival mob boss and a policeman.  He carries out the assassination nervously, and his family has taken every precaution to compensate for his inexperience.  Now in Sicily, we see him carry himself as an alpha-dog.

Whereas in the earlier scenes, Michael appears to be trapped by his family’s history, the sequence in Sicily breathes with a sense of his freedom to shape his future, including choosing a new partner, Appolonia instead of Kay.

Up until this point, Michael has distinguished himself by acting rationally.  The descriptions of the mob world he gives to Kay during the wedding sequence, the assassination plot he cooks up based on his appreciation of his perceived weaknesses—these reveal someone who is able to set aside or, if necessary, overcome emotion.  In Sicily, however, he is thunderstruck by the sight of Appolonia.  The passionate Michael, the one capable of falling madly in love, comes to life.

• These contrasts with the main ideas are highlighted by formal contrasts, a dramatic switch of locale and atmosphere — from urban scenes of the new world, metropolitan New York City, to pastoral scenes of the old world, rural Sicily.

As a result of these contrasts and the death of Appolonia and his baby, when Michael returns to New York, his cold and calculated side reemerges with greater force behind it.  The dimensions of his character, and thus the film, have expanded because of the bridge.

Among other things, these examples suggest that filmmakers rely on intuitions that are deeply musical.

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Thank you for reading.  In the next post, I’ll mention a couple of examples of bridges in literature.

Song Bridges Part 2 — Middle Eights

The previous post, "Song Bridges," explored a move that songwriters make.

• A bridge questions the song’s assumptions and/or discovers a new way of looking at things. 
   
• It accompanies this questioning by traveling through new musical terrain.  It has to get away from where it has been in order to gain perspective.
   
• As a result of this questioning and travel through new musical terrain, a song gains a deeper understanding of what it has always been.
   
• Because a bridge reconsiders things, it has to wait for the main ideas to be established.

One interesting variant of a bridge is a middle eight, a move common in old standards, Beatles songs, early R & B, and elsewhere.

The Setting for a Middle Eight

Generally speaking, songs with middle eights lack the repeating choruses found in modern pops songs.  They are more likely to have one-line refrains that fold into the verses.  Sometimes the one-line refrain comes at the end of the verse, such as in Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick out of You,” and sometimes it comes at the beginning, such as in “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

The basic pattern for a song of this structure is verse, verse, middle eight, verse.  The term middle eight refers to the fact that the individual sections are often eight bars in length.

What does the middle eight do?  Like a bridge, a middle eight changes point of view, musically and lyrically. 

Let’s first consider the musical shift.

Here, John Coltrane plays the song melody on his saxophone (the first 1:55 of the track), the pianist does some soloing, and then saxophone returns to play the second half of the melody (2:53-end). 

Let’s focus on the first round of melody (0:00 – 1:55).  It can be thought of as four phrases — A, A, B, A.  Since there are three A phrases, I’ll refer to them individually as A1, A2, and A3.

A1 — (0:00 – 0:28)
A2 — (0:29 — 0:57)
B — (0:58 — 1:26)
A3 — (1:27 — 1:55)

Notice that each phrase of the melody serves a slightly different purpose.

A1 states the main idea.
A2 repeats the main idea, further establishing it.
B enters new musical terrain, from where it reconsiders things.  
A3 restates the main idea, which now is heard differently in light of B.

The B section is the middle eight. Notice here is how the middle eight steps outside of the previously established musical landscape.  (Trained musicians might observe that the song changes key here, a common trait of middle eights.)  Because it steps away from and perhaps speaks back to the melody that came before, this B section sets the ground for hearing A3, the final statement of A, with slightly different ears.  We’ve learned something about A by way of B.  The meaning of A feels somehow expanded.

Note the structural similarity with the songs we looked at in the previous post.  The middle eight has to let the main idea get established before shifting terrain to reconsider it.

Now let’s add the lyrical dimension.

The form here is a similar: verse, verse, middle eight, verse (followed by middle eight, verse, etc.).  

The verses all end with the one-line refrain “My old man, keeping away my blues.”

The middle eights (“But when he’s gone . . .”), do two things:

1. They shift to new musical terrain.  The verses (in a major key) are emotionally brighter, whereas the middle eights (in a minor key) shift to a darker, more interior musical mood.
    
2. They challenge the main lyrical idea.  The verses detail the singers affection for ‘my old man’ and the joy he brings her.  The middle eights, by contrast, describe the desperation she feels in his absence.

The meaning of the subsequent verses is thus deepened.  After the singer has looked at the dark side of her love (the loneliness and lack of control she feels when he’s gone) in the middle eights, her declarations of affection mean more to us as listeners.  The middle eights add important dimension.  Without them, the detailing of affection might feel shallow.

On the surface, A A B A may look like this.  

But beneath the surface,  the B section invites us to reconsider what we have heard before, so we regard the final A section, A3, a bit differently than we did A1 and A2.

 Images via everythingbutthedress.com, wikipedia.com, and americangothicparodies.com.

Usually, a middle eight comes around twice or more in a song.
 

Recall that the basic form for a song with a middle eight is AABA, where the A sections are the verses and B is the middle eight.  When middle eights are used,  components of the song form are generally shorter.  (Recall, for instance, that these songs generally don’t have standalone choruses.  Instead they use verses that include a refrain, which thus does the work of a chorus—hammering home the song’s big idea.) As a result, in songs with middle eights, the AABA form extends—AABABAABA for example.  So we typically hear the middle eight twice or more.

Compare that with the form of a typical modern pop song that uses full-blown choruses:

Verse Chorus Verse Chorus Chorus Bridge Verse Chorus Chorus

If you think of each verse / chorus combination as an A section and the bridge as the B section, this form can be simplified to AABA.  The length of the sections makes it unlikely that the bridge would reoccur, though it can happen.

What this means is that songs with middle eights work their magic through repetition of lighter elements.  Perhaps the move away from this model may have something to do with how our addiction to big pop choruses has driven things.

If you want to listen to more songs with middle eights, the long list includes . . .

A slew of Beatles songs including “We Can Work It Out.”
The verses end with the refrain “We can work it out.” 
The middle eights begin “Life is very short . . . ”

All kinds of Motown hits, including “Shop Around”
The verses end with the refrain “My mama told me ‘You better shop around.’”
The middle eights begin with “’Try to get yourself a bargain son . . .’”

A number of Reggae songs, including Jimmy Cliff’s “Many Rivers to Cross”
The verses all begin with the refrain “Many rivers to cross . . .”
The middle eight (which happens only once) begins with “And this loneliness won’t leave me alone . . .”

Stevie Wonder songs, including “You Are the Sunshine of My Life”
The verses all begin with the refrain “You are the sunshine of my life”
The first middle eight begins with “I feel like this is the beginning . . . ”
The second middle eight begins with “You must have known that I was lonely.”

Everly Brothers hits, including “Crying in the Rain”
The verses all end with the refrain “I’ll do my crying in the rain.”
The middle eight begins with “Raindrops falling from heaven . . .”

“Crying in the Rain” is one of the many hits written by Carole King and Gerry Goffen that use middle eights.  Another example would be “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow.”
The verses all end with the refrain “Will you still love me tomorrow?”
The middle eights begin with “Tonight, with words unspoken . . .”

Minnie Riperton’s “Lovin’ You”
The verses all begin and end with with the refrain “Lovin you.”
She adds a vocal interlude at the end of each set of verses “La la la la . . .”
The middle eights begin with “No one else can make me feel the colors that you bring. . .”

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Thank you for reading. In the next two posts, I will give some examples of how analogs to song bridges appear in film and literature.

Song Bridges

Bridge is a musical term that refers to a particular section of a song.  The term is used variously.  Today, when musicians speak of a bridge, they are likely referring to a section later in a song, where a dramatic shift in mood occasions a reconsideration or development of the song’s established ideas.  

I want to focus on this usage because it illuminates an important technique employed not only by musicians but also by artists working in other forms. In order to get to that conversation (a few posts from now), I want to nail down the idea of how a bridge works in music.

via westernwoodstructure.com

A Crisis

You can think of a bridge as a song’s midlife crisis, the point at which the song says “I need to think things over, and try new things.” The song must pass through that crisis to find its deepest meaning.

 Imagine a person going through a midlife crisis.

•  She questions what she’s done with her life, her career choices, her values, her relationships. 
   
•  Her questioning might demand that she find a change of scenery so she can think things through—a trek through the desert and mountains.  (Okay, just go read Wild by Cheryl Strayed.)  The change in scene helps her process the questions she is asking herself. 
   
•  When she returns from journey, she finds that she is not another person, but perhaps has a deeper understanding of who she has always been.

 A bridge does something similar.

• It questions the song’s assumptions and/or discovers a new way of looking at things. 
   
• It accompanies this questioning by traveling through new musical terrain.  It has to get away from where it has been in order to gain perspective.  Think of standing on an actual bridge and taking in the view.  That's the idea.
  
  
• As a result of this questioning and travel through new musical terrain, a song gains a deeper understanding of what it has always been.

And just as we don’t think of a midlife crisis happening at age fifteen, a bridge must wait for the main ideas and musical landscape to be established.  Only then can a song go away and have its midlife crisis.
 

Example 1, "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)

The bridge here begins at 2:03.  Notice how the song shifts from sass to something heavier.  You can hear this in the musical setting and also in the lyrics:

Don't treat me to these things of the world
I'm not that kind of girl
Your love is what I prefer, what I deserve

Note how this dual shift (musical and lyrical) expands the meaning of the refrain “If you wanted it you should’ve put a ring on it” when the song returns to the chorus.  Up until the bridge, the refrain has suggested “Too bad for you.”  After the bridge, however, it means “too bad for us.  I wanted you too, but you blew it and now we both have to pay.”

 In this sense, the bridge expands the song’s sense of itself.

Example 2, "Beautiful Day"

The bridge here begins at the 2:15 mark.  Again, notice the dual dimensions of this shift—musical and lyrical.

Musically, the drums disappear and clouds of synthesizers rise over the mix.  The bridge leaves behind the familiar melodic motif of the verses and choruses and establishes something new, over a new chord progression.

Lyrically, the images are seen from a new angle.  The scenes in the verses are local and happen at street level:

The heart is a bloom, shoots up through stony ground
But there's no room, no space to rent in this town
You're out of luck and the reason that you had to care,
The traffic is stuck and you're not moving anywhere.

The bridge lyrics, however, are global and suggest a perspective higher up, a helicopter or perhaps a satellite.

See the world in green and blue
See China right in front of you
See the canyons broken by cloud
See the tuna fleets clearing the sea out
See the bedouin fires at night
See the oil fields at first light
See the bird with a leaf in her mouth
After the flood all the colours came out

Note also the references to images of destruction, the ransacking of the oceans and plundering of the earth.  Time is running out.

 As the song returns to the final choruses, the stakes have thus been raised and “It’s a beautiful day, don’t let it slip away” takes on greater urgency.

Example 3 — "A Day in the Life"

“A Day in the Life” is a good illustration of the fact that bridges are often written because a songwriter says, “it needs something here.”  The rest of the song had been written, but the Beatles felt it needed more.  When they recorded the song, they left a gap for the bridge, which they created after the fact and edited into the body of the song.  The story is related in various places, including Mark Lewisohn’s The Beatles Recording Sessions (pages 96-97).

After a long transition from the main body of the song, the bridge begins at around 2:15.  Again, you can note two shifts, musical and lyrical.

Musically, the song shifts to new terrain—a new key (E major), a new rhythmic feel (double-time), and a different audio environment (the mix now sounds as if we are in a small room as opposed to the vast expanse suggested in the body of the song).  Also, we’ve got a new singer, Paul instead of John.

The lyrical shift moves us from someone caught in reflection —“I read the news today oh boy” — to someone caught in the rat race — “Found my coat and grabbed my hat / Made the bus in seconds flat.”  And whereas the verses evoke the sense of camera slowly panning across distant happenings, the bridge suggests a handheld camera rushing through scenes at close range.

Again, these contrasts, musical and lyrical, return us to the final verse with a deepened sense of the song’s dimensions and meaning.  After the breathless folly depicted in the bridge, the voice addressing us in the final verse feels wiser.

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Thank you for reading and listening.  The next post will explore a particular type of bridge known as a middle eight.

Musical Time Part 5 — Texture

This week I’ve been writing about musical time and how it is shaped.

In “Hearing Musical Time”, I discussed how a drummer’s shaping of time imbues the whole ensemble with a particular personality.  In “Hearing Musical Time Part 2 — Three Springsteen Drummers,” I compared the different sides of Bruce Springsteen brought out by drummers Vini Lopez, Boom Carter, and Max Weinberg.

In this post, I’d like to try something similar with two drummers who played with John Coltrane—Elvin Jones and Roy Haynes.  We’ll have the advantage of being able to compare them playing the exact same song, “My Favorite Things.”  In earlier posts, I’ve focused more on differences in the shape of time and suggested that evenly-kept time resembles a round wheel and uneven time-keeping resembles a more misshapen wheel.  We’ve heard how the variety of shapes creates interesting possibilities.

Here, I’d like to focus more on the texture of a drummer's timekeeping.  On these two recordings, Elvin Jones and Roy Haynes create radically different textures that make a bit impact on the ensemble.

Before listening, we should note that many of the differences between these two recordings stem from the fact that the first is studio recording and the second is a live performance (and live performances are inevitably more upbeat).  Also, each drummer is paired with a different bass player, Jones with Steve Davis and Haynes with Jimmy Garrison.  These are significant variables, not to be overlooked.

Example 1 — Elvin Jones

The awesome Elvin Jones via elvinjones.net

The round subtleness of Elvin Jones’s swing is iconic.  As you listen, pay attention, however, to the delicate dance of his sticks on the ride cymbal and snare drum.  This delicacy allows Coltrane’s saxophone to claim the foreground.

The drumming starts to open slightly around the 2:00 mark, more so after the 8:00 mark.  But as the swing deepens and the sticks and pedals dance more, the texture remains nuanced, especially because the constancy of the ride cymbal.  The texture is wonderfully silken time, and because it doesn’t snag our ears, the drumming allows the listeners ample cognitive space to absorb the solos by Coltrane and pianist McCoy Tyner.

Compare that with . . . 

Example 2 — Roy Haynes

This second recording was a live recording and made almost three years after the first.  It’s also faster.  These facts may largely account for the aggressiveness of this second performance.

Nevertheless, where Elvin Jones’s timekeeping in the first recording is distinguished by the silken dance of the sticks on the ride cymbal and snare, Roy Haynes splashes the time around his entire drum kit.  He disrupts, leaves holes, creates enjambments, and sends the groove tumbling over itself.  The time keeps moving at tempo, but each turn of the wheel emphasizes a different moment within the bar.

In fact, forget the wheel; it’s as if the time keeps breaking over itself like a wave.  The rough and tumble texture of the time gives Coltrane something to fight against.  It feels as if we are watching him surf to shore, crashing through the water, swallowed by a wave and then miraculously resurfacing, swallowed again and then reemerging.

A final thought about this second recording.  Like Elvin Jones, Haynes is a master of shaping time.  Those who thrill at the busyness of his splashes around the drums without noticing the superb shape of his swing are missing something essential.  Consider how difficult it is to do all of this splashing and yet drive the groove so strongly.  As is often the case with drummers, his mastery is hidden in plain sight.

The unstoppable Roy Haynes, via drummagazine.com

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Thank you for reading.

Musical Time Part 4 — Practice

This is the fourth post in a series on musical time and is a revised version of a piece I wrote for the English magazine Drummer.  

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Whenever I walk down a hall lined with drum practice rooms, I find that what most drummers are practicing are fills and complex patterns that test their limb independence.  Hardly any of them are practicing their feel, their sense of time.  At the soda machine at the end of the hall, you may hear some of these same drummers gather to complain about how their fancy moves around the drums are unappreciated by their band mates.

Hmmm.

The following explores but one small piece of the larger question, "How might one deepen one's sense of musical time?"  I think the methods are applicable to any instrument, but as I am a drummer, I'll focus my attention there.

A quick review—Hearing the Shape and Surface of Time

 In the first post in this series, "Hearing Musical Time," I suggested how a drummer’s feel conveys a sense of musical time, its shape and texture. I proposed that you can think of feel as a spinning wheel, where the beats of the bar are points along the edge of that wheel. A drum machine, therefore, generates a feel that is perfectly round, since it positions the beats in the bar with exact evenness. We humans, however, instinctively lay some beats back and push others forward thereby distorting the shape from a perfect circle into something else, something “imperfect” but more expressive than the drum machine.  (This is not to dismiss drum machines and sequencers, which have great uses.) 

A rounder wheel shape (where the beats are more evenly spaced) provides a smoother ride, a less round shape might have more bounce, and a jagged shape might feel frenetic. Each shape has its advantages and drawbacks. In addition, surface elements such as accents, the volume balance within the kit, and the sound characteristics of the drums and cymbals can sharpen or blur the sense of the wheel shape. Together, the shape and surface of a drummer’s feel make a decisive impact on the musical mood.

Study recordings of great drum feels

The definition of “great feel” is subjective; the drumming on any song that makes you feel good in a deeply physical way can be said to have a great feel. To my ears, almost every classic hit from the canon of pop music has a great drum feel of one sort or another. If a track makes you feel good and the drumbeat is easy to play, you’ve found something worth studying.

As you listen, pay attention to the shape and texture of the feel and how they affect the mood of the track. (You can consult part one to recall how we did this with three examples.) Where does the time lay back and where does it push?  What are the particular sounds coming from the kit and how are they produced?  The more you reflect upon these questions, the more you’ll be aware of them in your own playing. If at first the answers seem elusive, don’t worry. Your hearing will develop over time. For now, try to form a mental picture of what you’re hearing and to appreciate the decisive effect that the drum feel makes on everything else, from the bass playing to the vocal performance.

Begin by studying simple beats

By studying simple beats, ones that don’t test your limb independence or speed, you can devote your attention to more elusive aspects of feel.  I wouldn't start with Clyde Stubblefield’s mind-blowing groove on “Funky Drummer.” Find something simpler so you can focus your attention on the subtleties of even the most basic grooves. 

You could easily spend a month studying the simplest kind of drum beat—“one” and “three” on the kick, “two” and “four” on the snare, and eighth notes on a closed high hat. This is the basic beat on any number of songs, including AC/DC’s “Back in Black,” Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down,” and Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.” The drummers on these tracks play the same beat but create three vastly different moods. The difference is in the feel, the way they shape the time and give it texture through the particular sounds they draw out of their drum kits.

Drummers obsessed with speed and complex patterns will find that this tries their patience. Alas, those same drummers are often the ones most in need of improving their feel.

With this in mind, here are some practice techniques I've used.

Play along with recordings of great feels

First, a cautionary note: Practice with earplugs, especially when practicing while listening to music through headphones. Cranking the volume on your headphones in order to overcome the volume of the drums will permanently damage your hearing! If you use headphones, find some that offer maximum isolation and keep the volume at a safe level, knowing that headphones are deceptively loud. (Even when the volume level feels safe, you can still damage your hearing, and the risk of damage increases the longer you listen.) All drummers are at risk for permanent hearing loss , so protect your ears and have regular hearing tests.

Back to the subject at hand, playing along with a recording of a great feel is immensely instructive. Play through it over and over. You may notice that your limbs begin to move in new ways. Pay attention to that! Adopt whatever postures and motions that help you to mimic the drumming on the recording.

If you have the technology to create loops, you’ll have an additional advantage because isolating a few choice measures of a great feel enables you to really get inside it. For those without the necessary technology, many hip-hop records have already done the looping for you. The Low End Theory by A Tribe Called Quest is a favorite practice album of mine, with a variety of amazing feels.

When playing along with a recorded feel, give yourself over to it.  Relax; the feel won’t come to you by way of exertion.  After playing along for a while, you’ll begin to feel as if your body is a gyroscope that vibrates with the same feel as the record. What you’re aiming for is the illusion that you are the drummer on the recording. Attaining that illusion requires you not only to synchronize your hands and feet with the playing on the recording (thereby adopting the shape of the feel), it also requires you to pay attention to the accents, the volume balance within the kit, and the sounds of the drums themselves (thus adopting the texture, too). As you move on to another track, you’ll find you need to make changes, sometimes radical changes, even when the drumbeats and tempos of the two feels are nearly identical.

Record yourself and listen back

Use a smartphone or dictaphone to record yourself. You don’t need high fidelity, merely something that allows you to evaluate what you’re doing. Press record, and play a minute or so of whatever feel you’re working on.

Now listen back. The difference between what you thought you were playing and what the tape reveals is sobering, often depressing. Nevertheless, recording yourself and listening back offers you a perspective you wouldn’t otherwise have: the ability to hear your drumming as others do. Take heart; recording and listening to yourself can yield fast results. 

What about practicing with a metronome?

Yes, practicing with a metronome is an important part of developing one's sense of time, but let's understand the difference between playing with a metronome and playing with recordings of great feels.  A metronome tells us where our playing is vis-a-vis perfectly even time.  "Where am I pushing and where am I pulling?  Am I rushing the transition to the chorus?"  It's important to know the answers to such questions, so yes, practice with a metronome to cultivate this awareness.

What practicing with recordings of great feels does, however, is to develop our appreciation for how time might be stretched, even in the tiniest amounts.  What does it sound like and how does a particular shaping of time affect the other musicians and the listeners?  These questions require the study of exemplary feels, and practicing with recordings of those feels inscribes the insights more deeply into our playing.

Clark Terry, via clarkterry.com

What Clark Terry said

"Won't playing along with recordings of great drum feels turn me into a copycat?"  Quite the opposite. 

Jazz great Clark Terry advised that the way one finds one's voice is to “imitate, assimilate, and innovate.”   That’s the idea here.  By imitating as precisely as possible great drum feels, you begin to assimilate the insights of the great drummers who play them.  Then you might discover that, for instance, the secret to John Bonham's fills is found in the swagger of his backbeat.  Attention to feel will make all aspects of your playing more musical, and the insights you glean from studying the feels on great recordings can become the basis for finding your own voice on the drums.

Expanding the Conversation

Players of any instrument would do well to study how their heroes shape musical time and to play or sing along to recordings made by those artists.  Imagine, for instance, what a singer might learn by teaching herself to match the phrasing of Roberta Flack's devastating performance on "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face."

And, for example, a drummer can learn a lot about drumming by listening to Carole King's stellar piano groove.  (I certainly did!)  The possibilities are endless but are only available to us when we acknowledge our need to study musical time and those who have mastered it.

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Thank you for reading.

Musical Time Part 3 — Beyond the Drums

This is the third post in a series on hearing musical time.  In "Hearing Musical Time" and "Musical Time Part 2 — Three of Bruce's Drummers," we investigated the particular shape and texture a drummer lends to a piece of music.  

Drummers, of course, are not the only shapers of musical time.  Though the drummer's role is decisive, the entire ensemble takes part.  As you listen to a Motown track, you can hear James Jamerson's bass lines bending the shape of Benny Benjamin's backbeat. Indeed, the push and pull of the bass and drums enlivens things.  

And of course, we have thus far limited ourselves to the shape of small units, musical measures played at tempo.  Today, I offer examples of musical time unfolding over the course of an entire piece of unaccompanied music.

Joni Mitchell's guitar and vocal phrasing on "Tin Angel" contract and expand musical time.  This is an essential element of her insight.  Notice her little pauses, which might be thought of as analogous to adding a blank line or white space to a poem.  The slowed endings and beginnings of each verse help us organize the song in our mind, and the sensitivity with which these expansions and contractions are executed express the very content of the song.

Arthur Rubinstein's performances of Chopin's Nocturnes offer breathtaking examples of how musical time can be shaped.  Notice how each phrase spills out, slowly, faster, and then slowing again, giving the sense of someone moving down a path and stopping to investigate this or that before moving on.  The subtle contractions and expansions of time are what keep a listener's mind zooming in on the details and then telescoping out to take in the big picture.  His dynamics, how softly or loudly he plays, are a part of this, but notice how his interpretive insight relies on his wonderful sense of musical time.

Ella Fitzgerald's singing is beloved for many reasons—her tone, full of heart but with a touch of rasp around it; her inflection of the lyrical meaning; her sense of humor.  But her expressiveness is also apparent in her nuanced mastery of time, her intuition for where to hold back a word and by how much.  Here she is accompanied, deftly, by musicians who are letting her drive the song and then pull it back.  They provide just enough framework for her expansions and contractions of the phrases to push and pull against the ensemble.   And these small distortions of the time are what bring the words to life with devastating effect.

Master of musical time Ella Fitzgerald. Image via allaboutjazz.com.

The true masters of any instrument, singers most of all, are those who have a deep grasp of musical time.  Perhaps that's because they've learned how to practice it, something we will explore in the next post.

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Thank you for reading.

Musical Time Part 2 — Three of Bruce's Drummers

This is the second post in a series about hearing musical time.  In “Hearing Musical Time,” we explored the ways in which drummers shape and texture musical time.  I used the image of a wheel.  Perfectly even time, such as produced by a drum machine, might be pictured as a perfectly round wheel.  Human drummers, however, tend to push some beats forward and lay others back, which shapes the wheel differently.  The sounds of the drum set give texture to that shape, sharpening or blurring its effect on the music.

When we speak of a drummer’s feel, we are speaking of these elements.  In this post, I’d like to compare three drummers for Bruce Springsteen—Vini Lopez, Boom Carter, and Max Weinberg.  These drummers present an interesting case study because each played with Bruce during a relatively short stretch of his career, from 1973-1975, and each made profound difference on Bruce's sound.

Example 1 — Vini Lopez on "Rosalita"

Vini Lopez was the first E-Street Band drummer.  His nickname, “Mad Dog,” is an apt description of his drumming.  His wheel is anything but round.

In the first seconds of this track, you can hear how uneven the time is. The band can barely get out of the introduction together and takes about 15 seconds to settle into a groove.  He punctuates his time with lots of kick-drum beats and snare drum diddles, all of which call attention to the misshapen wheel. 

But lest anyone think this detracts from the song, Vini’s manic sense of time and the pushing and pulling it produces is essential to the track’s youthful energy!  Because of Vini, the band fishtails as it takes each turn, swerves across the median and then over to the shoulder of the road.  You can almost hear the sirens behind them.

As with any musical choice, one can’t speak in terms of right and wrong, only in terms of tradeoffs.  In terms of even versus uneven time . . . 

Notice that Vini’s time lines up perfectly with Bruce’s album title, The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle.  When Vini left the band, Bruce’s sound became more assured; it never sounded as wild and innocent as when Vini was behind the kit.

Example 2 — Boom Carter on "Born to Run"

“Born to Run” sounds bigger than any other song on the album of the same name, and the decisive element may be Boom Carter’s drumming.  Of the three drummers in this comparison, his time is the most even, the roundest.

Because the drum feel is rounder, we actually pay less attention to the drums and more attention to Bruce.  (Whereas, were it shaped otherwise, our ears would be drawn to the idiosyncrasies of the feel and thus the rest of the band.)  More than any other song on the album, perhaps in his entire recorded output, “Born to Run” presents an iconic Bruce.  On “Rosalita” Bruce sounds like a comer; on “Born to Run,” he comes across as star, a rebel heartthrob.  The roundness of the Boom Carter’s drum feel lets the song roll out before him like a wide-open and smoothly-paved road, and Bruce knows just what to do with it.  This is a Bruce with higher production values.  He is not so innocent anymore.

Example 3 — Max Weinberg on "Jungleland"

The drums enter at 1:50, and now we’re hearing Max Weinberg.  Max’s time is not as round as Boom Carter’s and not as wildly misshapened as Vini’s.  But Max’s feel does not lie at the midway point between those two.  He’s off to the side.  His drumming exudes a certain muscularity, a sense of sweat and effort that wonderfully evokes the struggles heard in the lyrics.  The flavor of Max’s drumming has a lot to do with Bruce’s subsequent musical identity.

Compare the clunky tension of “Jungleland” with the relative smoothness of “Born to Run,” and consider what each song might have lost had the drummers been switched.  Max’s rendering of “Born to Run” might have lacked the easy roll and widescreen hugeness that Boom brought to the song, and Boom’s rendering of “Jungleland” might have lacked the drama that Max gives it.

Finally, remember that each drummer is working with and against Bruce’s own sense of time, which is not so round.  Indeed, his singing and guitar playing, like Max’s drumming, evoke the effort-filled lives depicted in his songs.   Listen to his solo performance of “Atlantic City” and see if you don’t agree.  In the very feel of his strumming and singing, you can hear the uphill battle facing the song’s protagonist.

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Thank you for reading.  The next post will consider examples of non-drummers shaping time.

Hearing Musical Time

This week, I want to explore musical time with particular focus on what musicians call feel.

The following is a revised version of a piece I wrote for the English magazine Drummer.  As this concerns listening more than playing, non-drummers may find it of interest.

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When non-musicians ask me who my favorite drummers are, they are surprised to hear me list names such as Earl Young, James Gadson, and Al Jackson, of whom they've never heard, or Charlie Watts and Ringo Starr, familiar names but not regarded by these friends as maestros.  None of these drummers are known for their flash.  None of them are Buddy Rich, the name some of these friends may have been expecting me to list first.   My favorite drummers hide their mastery in plain sight.

When playing with other musicians, most of what drummers do is to play a repeating beat that shapes musical time for the ensemble and gives that time texture.  On the surface, it's a simple task, and yet the difference between the average drummer’s backbeat and that of, say, Charlie Watts, is vast.  The problem is, it's hard to talk about (which may be one reason why conversations about the best drummers quickly zero in on those with the fastest hands, a more easily grasped concept).

We need to learn how to listen to and talk about feel, which is therefore the very foundation of musical technique, especially for drummers. Drummers who develop their feel not only improve their drumming, they free the musicians around them to better express their ideas.  The right feel brings those ideas to life; the wrong feel obstructs them, which is why bands go through so many drummers.

Here is a short introduction to how I hear and think about feel.

I.  Hearing the Shape of Time

Understanding feel requires deep listening to recordings of great drumming. This listening will be most useful if you first create some mental images to help you hold on to what you hear.

Let’s start with the idea that musical time can be thought to have shape, a wheel that turns at a rate of once per measure. Thus, the beats of the bar represent points along the edge of the wheel.

Here’s where it gets interesting. A car wheel is a perfect circle, but the wheel of musical feel is not. Though drum machines and computers can shape musical time as a perfect circle (the beats spaced with exact evenness), we humans, thankfully, are not so mechanical. We space the beats unevenly, laying some beats back and pushing others forward.  If you lay back slightly on “two” and “four,” you create the sense of an ovalar wheel, one that labors to get to "two" and "four" but settles more easily into "one" and "three."  As you lay the offbeats further back, you elongate that oval. If you were to skitter about with less regularity, you'd create something more misshaped (which can be cool, too).

You needn’t have a precise grasp of this image to get the gist, which is this: Just as a car with oval wheels would move along with a certain kind of bounce, music gains a certain lilt, bounce, or shakiness depending on how the drummer shapes the wheel of musical time, again according to the spacing of the beats in the bar. Whether nearly circular, elongated, or chaotically jagged, each shape has its virtues. Sometimes a jagged wheel is best!  Though the shaping of this wheel is done unconsciously, how the drummer shapes the wheel has a decisive impact on what musical ideas the other musicians express and the mood attained by the listeners.  As you listen to the following examples, see if you can hear how the playing of simple drumbeats establishes the musical mood.

Three Examples

Let’s briefly compare the feels on three tracks: Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together,” the Rolling Stones’ “Tumbling Dice,” and the Beatles’ “With a Little Help from My Friends.” How do these three great drummers—Al Jackson, Charlie Watts, and Ringo Starr— bring these songs to life?

To my ear, Al Jackson’s feel has the roundest shape of the three, closest to being circular because his beats are most evenly spaced. He lays back subtly on “two” and “four,” thus stretching the wheel just a tad and giving the feel a nice pocket. The intimacy of Al Green’s vocal performance on “Let’s Stay Together” benefits from the near-roundness of Al Jackson’s feel, because the rounder the shape of time, the more expressive leeway is given to the singer. (As the wheel shape strays from roundness, the mood becomes more specific, more idiosyncratic.)  The nuance of Al Green’s vocal delivery is thus made possible by the near-roundness of Al Jackson’s time.  (Such vocal subtlety would not be possible if, for instance, a punk drummer rendered the same beat with a clunky feel.)  Still, to the extent that the shape of Jackson’s time varies slightly from perfect roundness, it points the vocal in a particular direction—something softer and relaxed.

On “Tumbling Dice,” Charlie Watts's time is less even, the most elongated shape of these three examples. The slightly more uneven feel creates a mood that is more raucous, one that invites the whole band to dig in.

Consider that the near perfect roundness of Al Jackson’s time on “Let’s Stay Together” would not produce this same effect.  The groove of “Tumbling Dice” has a bit more bite.  Part of that is how the drums are hit (see the next section on Surface) but part of this stems from the shape of the time.  Charlie Watts keeps time with an appropriately drunken herky-jerkiness that perfectly suits what the Stones have to say to the world.

The shape of Ringo’s wheel lies somewhere between the previous two examples.  Again, every difference in wheel shape reflects a tradeoff. Because his time is not so perfectly rounded as that of a session drummer like Al Jackson, Ringo’s feel takes on a more specific personality but leaves more room for interpretation than Charlie Watts does.  (Note that Lennon and McCartney are more nuanced vocalists than Jagger and Richards.  That’s not a value judgment.  Either approach is valid, but it’s worth noting the connection between vocal delivery and drumming.)  By not being so elongated as Charlie’s, Ringo’s sense of time feels more relaxed, less herky-jerky. 

And to complete the comparisons, a rounder sense of time such as Al Jackson’s might be more iconic, but it would remove the distinctive warp of Ringo's time that informs the track.  That warp helps make the Beatles convincingly psychedelic.

Of course, these are all rather crude approximations.  The shapes illustrated above are oversimplifications, but perhaps you get the point.  A drummer's sense of time makes a decisive impact on the music.  Each sense of time comes with tradeoffs, and as you apply the image of a wheel to other listening, you might hear these and other tradeoffs at work.

 II. Hearing the Surface of Time

In addition to its shape, you can think about the surface of the wheel. Just as a car rides differently on rubber tires than it would on wheels of stone, the surface of the wheel of feel has an analogous impact. Thus, as you listen, you should pay attention to such things as accents, the volume balance within the kit, and sound characteristics of the drums and cymbals. These surface elements interact with the shape of the wheel and inflect the feel accordingly.

A crucial element of Al Jackson’s feel on “Let’s Stay Together” is the doubling of the snare drum backbeats with the tom-tom. By giving emphasis to the backbeats, which are  laid back ever so delicately, the addition of the tom calls attention to the subtle stretch of the wheel shape and give the feel slightly more bounce than the snare alone might. The tom’s lower pitch also lends the feel a certain heaviness, perfect for a song about love in crisis.

The “chick-chick” of Charlie Watts’s hi-hat calls attention to the elongated shape of his feel. Imagine the same beat played with the “ding-ding” of a ride cymbal instead. Because the longer decay of a ride cymbal connects the eighth notes together, a ride cymbal would smooth the surface of the wheel and somewhat cloak its distorted shape. As it stands, the faster decay of the hi-hat leaves that shape exposed.

As for Ringo, he is an underappreciated master of touch. The resonance of his loose, chorus rimshots, for example, is crucial to the dreaminess of his feel. Were he to dig in with louder, hacking rim shots, the feel would leave behind its breeziness and take on snarl. To reproduce Ringo’s feel, one would need to reproduce his touch.

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Thank you for reading.  The next post will explore these ideas further, comparing the feels of three drummers who played with the same artist.