Playing in time: Introduction
Created | Updated Oct 21, 2010
I am trying to organize my thoughts about playing in time. I can't allow this to take over my life, but I would like to be somewhat consistent in keeping record of it. If you come to this entry, understand that it is a work of discovery and a work in progress.
My own rules of the road:
- I will expect a lot of editing of entries, so that I can add what might be useful information to anyone else facing the same challenges.
- Square brackets indicate places I know need work. I will come back to these, honest.
- I will make more rules as I go along.
Preamble:
First, an explanation and an apology. Jazz is an almost embarrassing word. It is used to describe many kinds of music, and, frankly, its use feels a little pretentious. I'm using the word to describe mostly improvisational music, although there is some absolutely beautiful writing that is part of it. I may talk about the interplay between writing and improvisation, especially in recently recorded music (last 20 years). I will not be discussing free-jazz here, because it's not what I'm working on. So, this is about improvisation over preexisting song forms that can be original, but often are not.
Time in Jazz:
The fundamental elements of, at least, western music (based on the twelve tone scale) are melody, harmony, and time. I'm going briefly to touch on the first two because I anticipate the need for their vocabulary. There are several other very nice entries about the use of scales and chords in music, generally1. They are useful because they discuss some of the musical vocabulary available. Together, they discuss some of the scales we use (whether wittingly or not) for melodies and how they fit with certain chords (harmony). I'm going to replace both the word chords and the phrase chord progression with the word changes, because that's how most jazz musicians think about them. The distinction is useful because the word changes implies harmonic motion, rather than a succession of static harmonies. Great improvisation moves seamlessly "over the bar line," meaning that the line that you play should reflect both where you're going and where you've been. So the changes are really propel the music, both revealing a moving harmonic landscape and collaborating with the melodic improvisation.
My discussion and quest has to do with how the vocabulary sits in time, and how a player develops control over this. While I may talk a bit about various time signatures, these are not the crux of my interest and any specific time signature is not what makes this music (great Jazz) so compelling. The time I'm trying to discuss is how we choose to play within any time signature. There are at least two crucial aspects of these choices. First, there is something called the feel you are trying to achieve. Something written in 4/4 can have a rock or a swing or a latin feel, among others. I'm guessing that most readers will understand intuitively what a rock feel is, and would recognize a latin feel. Nevertheless, I will recommend some examples for listening:
| Feel | Tune | Artist | Album |
| Rock | Eighty-One | Miles Davis | ESP |
| Latin | Bimini | Jim Hall Tom Harrell | These Rooms |
Swing is really unique to jazz, and so I will spend a little time below discussing it. Once the choice of feel is made, the second, and more subtle choice is where you place this feel relative to the bar line. If you listen carefully, great musicians don't play right on the beat. Rather, they play behind it, or, less often, a little ahead. When they do this they are neither rushing (increasing the tempo), nor dragging. They are purposely phase shifted. I suffer from a nearly persistent tendency actually to rush. This is not unusual, but compelling playing is all about controlling this tendency.
