Steve Coleman on Rhythm - Part 1

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I’ve known Steve Coleman for a long time – I first met him in 1986 when I was lucky enough to study with him at the Banff Centre. Since then I’ve met him many times and we’ve hung out and discussed music (and other things) on many occasions, and we’ve played at a few informal sessions and I recorded an (unreleased), track with him a while back. All my dealings with him have shown me, time and time again, that he is a unique and very influential figure in contemporary jazz (although he may argue with the description of what he does as being ‘contemporary jazz’), someone with an extraordinary originality in all aspects of what he does. And this originality is driven by intense research and thinking – Steve is constantly on a quest for knowledge, and the results of this quest has provided all kinds of food for thought for the curious musician.

Steve is innovative in all areas of music, but in my opinion his rhythmic concept is particularly noteworthy. I don’t think anyone has really gone into rhythm in the depth that he has, or thought about it in the way that he does. So I took the opportunity of a visit by Steve to our school in Dublin, to interview him on the specific subject of rhythm and the results are here.

Steve is discursive but not digressive  - he has a way of elaborating on every statement he makes that makes the job of the transcriber (me!) a labour-intensive one, but he never loses sight of the point he’s making. The length of our conversation meant that it took me a long time to transcribe it, and for one reason and another, it’s taken a while to get it up here too, but I think the results are fascinating, and it gives a real insight into how Steve thinks about rhythm, and what the influences were that helped to shape the way he thinks about rhythm.

This is Part 1 – Part 2 will follow soon

Early Rhythmic Experiences

RG: I remember in Banff  in 1986 when I first talked to you about rhythm and all of that, it was clear you had a very different way of looking at pretty much everything relating to rhythm in terms of the conventional ways that I’d been exposed to at that point. Your conceptual take on rhythm was very different. I know it’s probably something that’s an amalgam of different things, but were there particular things, or can you identify particular points where there were things that made a very big impact on the way you thought about rhythm, and pulse and the whole rhythmic world?

SC: Yeah, the first thing I can remember is just what I grew up on – this happened before I was a musician or anything. We were listening to these recordings of music on the radio, and it was all R ‘n’ B-type stuff – James Brown and all this kind of stuff. And I remember us beating out the stuff on the top of people’s cars and people would actually come out and chase us away, being kids, because we’d be denting the cars and things like that, but we would actually beat out the drum parts on the cars. And it wasn’t something that somebody was telling us to do, it wasn’t because we were musicians – we just heard this stuff, we heard all this rhythm and we would just try and imitate the rhythms.

So that was the first sense that I remember of specifically listening to rhythms. Not rhythms as in songs but just rhythm by itself and trying to imitate it in some kind of way. So we would be like – {Sings funk kind of rhythm} – and fucking up these people’s cars! (Laughs) Or whatever we could do – we’d be going around the neighbourhood doing this and singing and maybe one guy would be dancing or whatever – it wasn’t me! (laughs). And that was the first concept I remember.

Then when I got into music, I didn’t relate the two things immediately because when I started playing in band in school, they had us reading off the charts – and we were reading you know – {sings the opening to the overture of Mozart’s ‘Marriage of Figaro} – and I didn’t immediately relate that to – {Sings funk rhythm} – the two things didn’t click at first.

But then when guys found out you played saxophone and everything, they’d say ‘We have this band, and we play for dances and stuff like that, do you want to play?’, you know, and the logical thing was to say yes. There were no charts in that situation, there was nothing about charts, it was ‘OK, we’re playing this song that’s on this record’, it wasn’t an original, ‘and you’ve got to take off the horn part’. So we’d learn it by ear – I didn’t know at the time that this was transcribing or anything, we would just take off the horn part, literally. So we would learn the parts by ear, and, you know, just figure it out, there was no education thing or whatever. And as you got better this grew and we had these bands and we’d get hired out for fashion shows and dances and different things like that, but it was always the music of what was popular on the radio.

Then, we were aware that some people could improvise, we called it ‘riffin’ at the time – we would say:

‘Did you hear about this cat in the school? Yeah, well he can riff’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, he took a solo, he didn’t play what was written on the paper – he just did his own thing!”

But this was just among students, I wasn’t aware that there was this whole world, right outside of where we were, of professionals that were doing that.

So there was that, and of course if you were going to do that, there’s what you were going to play, rhythmically and that kind of stuff. And what happened was that people were right away critical of the way you played things – rhythmically of the way you played them. I remember that being a big thing, people would say ‘that’s just not hip’, or ‘that’s corny’, you know. I mean the feel of something, they were critical right away about that.

OK, I’m saying all this to say that as we got better and better in these bands, a little later on I started to get into improvisation and I also joined bands where we started to write our own stuff, you know, we started to create our own stuff. Then these two streams – the improvisation stream and figuring out these rhythms and stuff – started to come together just a little bit, because I first of all started to write my own music, I had to write the rhythms and stuff. Even the rhythm section, I had to tell them what to play, and this included the drummer – what kind of beat that you want and all this kind of stuff.

So you start to become more conscious of this and also the criticism – of stuff that was hip and not hip. It started to dawn on you what that meant – what does it mean when something’s hip, what does it mean when it’s not hip? What is this groove thing, this feel thing, some people had a better feel than others – you started to put together what all that meant.

This was all when I was still pretty young. Then when I got among the professionals all that increased. Everything that we’d been trying to figure out, all increased because these guys all had it together. If your sound wasn’t together they would just tell you that you need to get your sound together. If your feel was, you know – if your shit’s not swinging, or it’s not grooving for whatever situation you were in – because there was a lot of different situations you could play in. You could play with professional R ‘n’ B type cats, or there was a lot of blues happening in Chicago, you could play with professional blues musicians, or you could play with cats like Von (Freeman).

(Von Freeman)

There were at least three distinct scenes – Chicago was very segregated then, it was all among black musicians. There were three separate scenes that were all kind of related in some way. At least in terms of the feel thing a lot of them were related. The Blues scene and the R ‘n’ B scene were closer to each other, than with what Von and them were doing. Because you really had to know a lot to do what Von and them did. You had to know harmony and shit like this, so this wasn’t a scene that you could just jump into. I mean if they’re playing 'Days of Wine and Roses', you just can’t come in there and just play pentatonic scales – you had to know something.

So their scene had to be combined with the sophisticated pitch shit they were doing, and the other scenes didn’t. In those scenes you could get away with playing blues licks and pentatonic things and stuff like that. So I did that first, but when I started following Sonny Stitt and these guys around, their shit was way more sophisticated pitch-wise. But the rhythmic thing, they still talked about it in the same way. So I said to myself ‘OK the pitch shit is more sophisticated but they’re still on this rhythm thing’. And the first thing I noticed is that when I played with Von and we’d play ‘Billie’s Bounce’, or anything, how different it felt. I mean I’m playing with him, but I feel like ‘Man, this guy – the weight of what he’s playing, and the feel – just the way it feels and everything, it’s so much different to what I’m doing. I mean I’m playing the same notes, but it’s not even close!’, you know.

And so I started trying to analyze this whole micro-beat thing I was talking about the other day, {in a conversation we’d had the previous day - RG} like why does it feel like that when he’s playing and not when I’m playing? What is it that I’m missing here? What’s happening?

So I started to try to analyze this, not in a way like – I don’t know if you ever saw Vijay Iyer’s essay online where he does this whole computerised kind of thing, in terms of like ‘we measured the beat and it’s 15% behind’ kind of thing – well it wasn’t that you know, it was just trying to figure out what was happening with what these cats were doing. And then I started listening to the drummers and everything.

So that was one kind of shock, was that whole period of figuring that out, and also realizing this stuff had nothing to do with reading music. It had nothing to do with what cats were doing when they read music. This was something completely outside that and it couldn’t even be notated. Even when I started transcribing, I would transcribe something and I would just write ‘lay back’, or ‘pull back’, or whatever, because there was no other way of notating it. But pull back where? How much? None of that was there – there was no information, I just knew what it meant when I saw that sort of like a ‘stickit’ thing {a stickit is a note you write to yourself} once I saw that it reminded me that that had to be done.

And so I realized that their beat was more like this……….it was like this variable amoeba-like thing, but it wasn’t just amoeba anywhere there was a certain concept to how to do it and it just took listening and all that. So that was my first shock with the rhythmic thing and it included the R’n’B thing and stuff like that.

Thad and Mel

My second big shock was when I played with Thad (Jones) and Mel (Lewis). Thad had this thing, I mean he took the laid back thing to another level. He had this thing where when I first joined the band, he would give a downbeat, and I would come in where he gave the downbeat, and I would always be early. Every single time I would be early – because there was this built-in delay that was just part of what they did, and I had never played in a big band like that. I mean everything I’d played before that when the cat gave the downbeat, that was the downbeat! But it was like a built-in delay, he would literally..{demonstrates by physically giving down downbeat and singing the note a second later}.. and I would be like “what the fuck!?” (Laughs) I mean I’d be WAY early, so the cats would tell me ‘you know, that’s the way it is, you got to get with the program!” (Laughs). So after a while you learned it – so I learned it from him, I’d think “Damn, he has the same shit that Elvin has, only with a big band!’ It was like this late fucking beat! I couldn’t believe it, and also at that time Dexter Gordon just started coming back to the States and HE was late as hell too. So I’m like “are these guys just lazy or is it part of their thing?’

So I started noticing there was this almost extreme laid back thing that was happening with some guys, so that was the second kind of shock I got.

Doug Hammond

The third shock was probably………. Well Sam Rivers’ thing was hip to me rhythmically and everything, but the third shock was Doug Hammond, and that was a big one.

RG: What was unique about him?

SC: Well, this cello player Muneer Abdul Fattah asked me did I want to do this gig with some dancers – he had this small group playing with these dancers, and I said sure – it was up in Harlem – and I asked him ‘who’s the drummer?’ and he said, ‘it’s this cat named Doug, you don’t know him’, and I said ‘OK, fine’. Now Doug’s even older than Muneer, and Muneer had this vision that he was going to bring me and Doug together, neither one of us were aware of this. So we played this gig and we played Muneer’s music, which is fine, and we get to this point in the rehearsal and Doug said ‘Well Steve,  we’re going to play a piece of mine now, and you don’t know this piece so you can go and get a coke or whatever’.

So I said fine, and I was on my way out the door and they started playing this piece called ‘Perspicuity’ and I stopped right at the door as soon as I heard it, I stopped and turned around – I never went outside – I turned around and listened to what they were playing. So he starts off playing the chant:

To listen, click here

There’s this kind of inbuilt counterpoint happening within it, and it had this really nice groove, but it was spacious  - it wasn’t, (sings typical fast Balkan groove), it wasn’t that kind of thing, it had this space kind of thing happening. And then the melody came in and it fit with the rhythm in a certain way (sings excerpt of the melody while clapping rhythm), it fit a certain way rhythmically, it was almost like he thought of it being rhythm as well as being pitches. This fucked me up. I mean it’s a simple tune really, but it messed me up, and then in the improvisation there were no chords and all this kind of stuff, and I was like ‘Man, what IS that!?’, after he finished playing, and he said ‘that’s a tune of mine called ‘Perspicuity’,  I didn’t care about the name or anything like that, but I said ‘Um, do you have more music like that?’ and the guy said ‘Yes, I’ve got boxes of it’, and I said ‘You’ve just found an alto player if you want one’ (laughs), ‘because I’ve got to understand what that is’. He was glad that somebody liked his music so he said ‘Sure’.

In my mind, I’d been doing something with forms and stuff like that, and I’d been doing all this stuff with melody, the symmetry thing  - it was already developed, I was doing all this stuff, feeling around and everything. But I felt like ‘something’s missing’ – you know I always felt that, but I couldn’t put it into words. I always felt like ‘You know, all this shit I’ve been doing but something ain’t right’. When I heard his music, I thought to myself, ‘THAT’S what’s missing’ (laughs). It just hit me – it was something about the balance of what he did.

You see the cats I liked, it turned out to be the same cats he liked – I really liked Max Roach - I really liked Max Roach and I really liked all the stuff I talked about in that Charlie Parker Dozens article..........

{an extensive essay on Charlie Parker written by Steve - you can see it here - RG} 

I heard that stuff early on, his relationship to Bird etc. Even though they were improvising I heard that it was composition – it was like a fixed fucking thing to me, but it was just that they were improvising. But it sounded so fixed, it was like Max could anticipate what Bird was doing and Bird could anticipate what Max was doing and they were creating this composition together. Doug’s music had that in it, but it was developed in a way, like it was updated or something like this. I wasn’t aware of this until later, until Doug told me of the connection to Ed Blackwell and all these kind of cats – I wasn’t aware of that, I was taking the shit straight from Max to Doug. And it had a funky kind of thing, I always felt that Max , even though he was playing swing, that the shit was funky – that it had this funk kind of feel to it. Which is what attracted me to that because it reminded me of the stuff I heard in my childhood when we were beating on the cars and everything. Max had that kind of thing, but it was with this – the swing thing – happening.

And so I really dug it (Hammond’s concept), and then he had these other tunes that all had this chant concept – he called them chants, that’s why I call it that. They all had this drum chant thing, that he had gotten from several sources – from Africa, from Max Roach and plus, he had listened to………..the three drummers he listened to a lot, that he always talked about were Big Sid Catlett, Chick Webb and Cozy Cole. All cats whom I hadn’t listened to a lot up to that point. He talked about these pre-Max Roach type drummers, and most cats when they talk about pre-Max Roach drummers, they talk about Jo Jones - Papa Jo Jones. But they don’t go back – but Doug would talk about Baby Dodds and all these cats from the past.  And he would always say, ‘the young cats today, all they do is play cymbals, they don’t play the DRUMS enough – you’re a drummer - a drummer, not a cymbal-er!’ (Laughs). He would go into this thing – ‘Cymbals came from China!’ – he would go into this whole thing about drums versus cymbals, how Tony Williams was fucking all these cats up – he would go into this whole spiel.

And so eventually he would influence me and I would go back and listen to these cats – and I would say ‘Chick Webb? Cozy Cole? Big Sid? What kinds of names are these? Cozy!? Who names a kid Cozy!?’ (Laughs). But I was piqued by the names and all this kind of stuff and just listened to them, and listened to Jo Jones, and I realized these cats did have some stuff, and I heard some of the stuff that Max was getting some of his stuff from. There was this funky thing in what they were doing and he was getting that.

Ed Blackwell

And then Doug said that the modern cat he was listening to was Ed Blackwell.  Because Blackwell took that shit, plus went to Africa and lived in Africa for a while and took that stuff and basically adapted it for the drums. And then brought that into Ornette’s thing, plus this New Orleans thing that he had, that Second Line shit. And he brought that into Ornette’s thing, and it gave Ornette’s thing – to me – it gave it foundation, it gave it form. Because Ed Blackwell was a real form kind of cat, he had natural form in what he was doing - plus that chant stuff, when you do those rhythms and everything it’s sort of an automatic form. To me he brought that to the group, so the group – at least the early group – didn’t have that wavy kind of thing that somebody like Rashied has – it had grooves and stuff, even though there was all this crazy Ornette shit on top. Later on I met Ed Blackwell, and he would sit down with me and Smitty, (the drummer Marvin Smitty Smith), and show us some of this stuff and he would be swinging and all of a sudden he would go into this -  (sings rhythm) - these chants and stuff and then he would break back into swing, and he would go back and forth and stuff like that. And he was real influenced by Max but he added this African thing. And so Doug said that messed him up. And so then Doug kind of did an updated version of that, plus he was a real composer, so he could actually write the stuff and everything.

The First Rehearsal

But the big shock was the first rehearsal, because I came into the first rehearsal, and Doug said ‘OK bring some music if you’ve got some music’ and I brought some music and passed it out – there was only a few people there – I passed it out and I gave everybody a part but Doug. And he said ‘Where’s my part?’ and I said’ Well you know, there’s no drum part, what do you mean where’s your part? There’s no drum part’, so I started to describe what I wanted – ‘well you know it’s kind of like…..’ and he said ‘Stop!’ – he was really like a hard cat. ‘Stop – I want my part’, and I said ‘There IS no part!’, and he said ‘Write one!’ and I said, “Write one!? I’ve never written for drums in my life, I don’t know how to write a drum part!’, and he said, ‘Learn’ – he was looking at me all crazy (laughs), and so I was like ‘I don’t even know where to start’, and he said ‘I’ll teach you’ (Laughs). And so he showed me ‘This is a drum key, this is where .. etc”, he showed me, ‘OK you got this? Now I want my drum part’ (laughs). I thought ‘Man, this guy is crazy!’ (Laughs). And he was saying ‘Learn how to write drum parts, don’t give me some of this I want a little Max, a little DeJohnette  - I don’t care about these cats, write my drum part!’ I said, ‘what do you mean, write your drum part’, and he said, ‘Write an example of how you hear it should go, and give it to me’. So I said OK, so I started doing that. And I really dug the results!

And I realized that that’s what he’s doing - that I hear is the thing that’s missing – the glove that’s missing on the hands of my music. What he’s doing is that he’s treating the rhythm like everything else. It’s like it’s a melody and he’s looking specifically at detailed rhythmic information, which to me – at the end of the 70s, going into the 80s – was a revelation. Everybody was doing this ‘Just give me a little beat like this or like this, some Latin shit – yeah but more simple’ (Laughs) You know, everybody was doing that, but his shit was -  ‘I want the same shit that you give everybody else. Other people are going to improvise too, but they have a starting point – I want a starting point. I want to know what’s in your mind. And I don’t want to know about styles – I don’t give a fuck about styles. Don’t tell me about Elvin or Max or something – I don’t want to know about that. What do you have in your mind in terms of this particular piece of music? And then when we move on to the next piece tell what else you have in your mind.” So first of all it was a novel thing – a drummer begging to read something was like a weird thing, because they’re like…………

RG: Well they have a funny thing, because I write drum music, sometimes very specifically too – my brother’s a drummer and I used to play his drums a lot at home so I’ve got a sense of the instrument. So occasionally – quite often – I actually will write something. And I notice a funny thing about drummers – they have a little ghetto that they both hate and yet don’t want to get out of. In the sense that they really get pissed off – and rightly so – when they’re the only one not getting a part. Or someone says ‘here’s the saxophone part’.

SC: Yeah, right

RG: On the other hand if you hand them all the stuff written out, they go ‘what the fuck is this!?” (Both laugh). So it’s a funny psychology that one, you know, because some drummers don’t like you to be specific yet they get pissed off if you’re vague.

SC: Well he was weird because I mean he was a composer, he was a prolific composer. He really literally had boxes of music – he had more music than I had, he was older than me too, but still. And I suppose, from writing so much, he was into it.  And sometimes I gave him stuff that was hard, and he’d say ‘Man this shit is hard!’, but he still wanted it – he still did it.

I remember I wrote ‘Snake Pit Strut’ – these are the early tunes – ‘Murdxas’ and which is really just sax drum written backwards. And those were the first tunes, there on that first album of his that I did – you have that right, Spaces?

RG: Yes, I have it somewhere

SC: So, both of those tunes – but especially ‘Murdxas’  - turned out so well that I basically never stopped doing that. I just got deeper and deeper and deeper into what it was and all this kind of stuff. And right away I noticed that OK, I can just sing this drum phrase, and I don’t have to pay any attention to how long it is, or you know……….it’s just that if it feels right to me, balance-wise, then I’ll just write it down and that’s it. What I used to do is I used to just sing the stuff into a tape recorder or something like that, or if I didn’t have a tape recorder, repeat it enough till I remembered it. Or play it with my hands and feet or whatever, and then just write it down.

It was sort of like a story that Benny Golson told me about ‘Stablemates’. He said he wrote out this tune and it wasn’t 8/8/8/8, it got to a certain point and he said shit, it didn’t work out. And so he went to try to fix it but then he thought – well why should I fix it? If it feels right, then that’s what I intended and that’s what it is.

I was like that with these drum chants, I would write it out, and whatever it came out to be. I was just worried about the feel and all that kind of stuff, but whatever it came out to be I would just leave it – the first time, I would never fix it, I would leave it. So after a while things got – from other’s people’s perspective – odder and odder. Because I began to feel these things and I began to feel, I guess, odder and odder stuff. But I would let it go, I would never come back and say that needs some extra 8^th notes, or that needs an extra beat or whatever. Because I wasn’t thinking of it in terms of 8^th notes or anything when I was feeling it – it was just what it was.

I mean still to this day a lot of things come by feel for me. What I mean by that is that even though I’m working now with these esoteric concepts and things like that, when it comes to the actual information – because that stuff doesn’t determine what the actual information is, if you say ‘I’m going to do something with ‘Venus and Mars’ – musically that could be anything. Musically that could be anything, if you’re John Adams it’s going to be that language, if you’re Henry Threadgill it’s going to be that language. It’s going to be whoever you are. People ask (me) about that but they don’t realize that that doesn’t determine the information, your experience as a musician is what’s really determining the information. I mean if you’re T.A.S. Mani then it can’t possibly come out like John Adams, I mean it just can’t! Your experience is different. So that has a bigger influence over what it’s going to sound like – your experience – than any idea you get that’s outside of music or whatever.

If Beethoven had the same ideas as me it couldn’t possibly come out the same. And people don’t realize how much your experience dictates what you do and who you are and everything. Now for you it could add more variety and lead you in different directions that you might not have investigated, but it’s still going to be some Ronan shit, on some level it’s still going to basically be you, it’s not all of a sudden going to turn into Charlie Haden, it’s just not going to happen. If it does it might do it for like a split second – you might write a beat and a half of something that somebody would say reminds them of somebody, but all this other shit still reminds me of him. Because you have a certain personality and the way that you put shit together it comes out like you.

So when I heard all this stuff that everybody was doing – Max Roach and Bird and everything – my personality was interpreting that in a certain way. So when people go to the jazz.com thing, they say ‘oh yeah, we never thought about that’ – but that’s because you’re not me! That’s what I’M hearing you know – I’m not making any claim that Charlie Parker was hearing like that or that Max Roach was hearing like that. This is what I get from this music when I hear it. It could have nothing to do with what they…….. but what I discovered -  I was lucky enough to know some of these old cats – what I discovered was that they had a way of thinking that, although it was different than mine, in some kind of way it came close to the way I was thinking in their language.

I told Von Freeman one time, I said, ‘you know, me and you we probably think really differently about this music’ and he said ‘Oh I don’t know about that’ – he said that immediately – ‘I don’t know about that. I mean you probably have your way of, your language of interpreting and everything, and I have my language, but I don’t think  - I’ve been listening to you for years – I don’t think it’s all that different’. And I was surprised to hear that from him, because here’s a cat that’s like born in 1922, you know what I mean. I know if Barry Harris or somebody heard the shit he’d be like ‘what the fuck!?’ (laughs). But he was like……’I don’t know…….’ When we did that gig (with Von Freeman), we did Moose the Mooch, but we did it over this tune 'Change the Guard' that we always do. So it was like, you know, bent. So me and Jonathan (Finlayson) were playing it and it was like – {Sings Moose the Mooche in the 7 beat cycle of Change the Guard} – it had that half beat peg-leg shit in it. And so Von was sitting there listening to it, he wasn’t playing he was just listening. This was like the first……. It was during the rehearsal, and I haven’t done many rehearsals with him. So after we finished he said ‘You know, I think I’m finally starting to understand what you’re trying to do’. 

And I know what it was that made it click for him was the fact that he knew part of what we were doing – he knew Moose the Mooche. He knew the way it normally went, and then he heard this corrupted-ass version of it, and he was like, ‘these cats are fucking with the rhythm!’ (Laughs). It became obvious. But when you hear original stuff, you don’t hear that because….

RG: You don’t have the point of reference.

SC: There’s nothing that you know – exactly. So he was sitting there listening, and he was listening really carefully and then we started improvising on it. Rhythm Changes – he knew it was Rhythm Changes, he knew all that, but then he heard what was different stood out more in relief, against what he already  knew. I mean he knew this shit better than we did – I mean he REALLY knew this stuff. So he’s hearing this stuff and he’s like ‘these cats are basically changing the balance of this shit – they’re fucking with the balance’. And so he told me ‘I’m starting to get it’, and I told him, ‘well yeah, what you heard on Moose the Mooche we’re doing that with our original stuff too – it’s essentially the same idea’ 

And he even played on some of the stuff, and that was crazy to hear for me. Because it was a whole different – he had a whole different………… it was like bending the shit. But he could hear it you know. And I never thought I’d have anybody that age playing on my shit. People don’t…… I mean it’s not like Lester Young and them started playing Charlie Parker’s music. I mean they played together with Jazz at the Philharmonic, but it was older stuff.  They didn’t start playing {sings fast bebop-type line} – it just didn’t happen. Louis Armstrong and them, when Dizzy played with Louis Armstrong they played ‘Sunny Side of the Street’ or something like that, but he didn’t really play Dizzy’s music – he didn’t play ‘Things to Come’  or something like that. That never happens. And Dizzy had played with Trane – I mean Trane had played with Dizzy, when Trane was younger. But once Trane got going with his real thing in the 60s, it’s not like Dizzy came in and played that. That’s not how it goes – the older cats never play the newer cats stuff, it just doesn’t go that way. If you want to play with the older cats you gotta play their shit. And out of respect that’s what you should do, you shouldn’t give some old cat some new shit you’re working on and say ‘see if you can do this man’ – give that to Sonny Rollins – you would never do that.

We were very careful when Von did that gig – what he played on and everything, but there was one thing he said he wanted to play on. As a matter of fact he didn’t say it, he just started playing, and I was like ‘oh this is going to be interesting……..’, just to hear it and stuff like that. Those were the things that I took  -  all those specific things that those cats were doing

Art Tatum

Another thing that was shocking that I didn’t mention was Art Tatum. I have a special kind of relationship to Art Tatum, I shouldn’t say relationship because I didn’t know him. He died the same year I was born. But, he did this tune called ‘Aunt Hagar’s Blues’, and there’s this one section that he does on it that has this – I call it ‘Peg Leg’ rhythms, because it reminds me of a pirate with one leg shorter than the other, when he’s doing this, you know. Because this tune I did called ‘Snake Pit Strut’  is based off that. 

{Sings Tatum rhythm followed by Snake Pit Strut rhythm to show similarity - you can listen to it here}

And it has this sort of Peg Leg thing. Cause if you just beat the beat like this {clicks fingers on regular pulse}, then of course the beat would turn around on itself – so it had this long beat/short beat thing. So I started experimenting with that stuff then – some of that came from Art Tatum. This is in Bulgarian music and a lot of other stuff too, but the thing is they fill up all the beats. Art Tatum was doing it in a funky, more like an African kind of way where all the beats weren’t filled up. He was picking his spots where he played and everything.

So I said OK, how do you make it funky like that, make it groove like that, where you’re picking your spots, (because they’re not just picking any spots of course, they’re picking the spots that make it sound a certain way), and still do this other thing. That was my thing - not do the {sings ‘Blue Rondo’-type rhythm}, because I would hear this Bulgarian Music {sings typical Bulgarian folk melody} – and every space would be filled with turns –{continues singing Bulgarian style piece} – and that’s cool and I dig that and everything, I mean that’s because of their language and culture and all this kind of stuff. But when Max would be doing this  - {sings very syncopated drum phrases} and the tempo would be like this {really fast}, and it would be really spaced out where the beats are or the Bata stuff – {Sings typically a Babalu Aye Bata bata rhythm while simultaneously clapping the clave} – that’s really hard because there’s a lot of space and the shit’s placed in a certain way, but it‘s funky. And so to me that’s what Bird and Max and Tatum and all those cats were doing and I was like – OK how do you do THAT, but change the balance? But still keep that – exactly what they have, still keep that thing.

Part 2 will follow soon  - in the meantime, here's a clip from a concert in France in 1999, that gives an idea of the flavour of Steve's rhythmic approach, as well as featuring great playing by him and the other band members

Working with James Joyce

This Saturday, (March 2nd - details below), I'll be premiering a new piece based on the writing of James Joyce. In doing it I'm very fortunate to have three of France's finest jazz musicians - Dominique Pifarely (violin), Stéphane Payen (alto), and Christophe Lavergne (drums), and the great Irish saxophonist Michael Buckley, playing with me. The mix of irish and French musicians isn't accidental, since the piece is called 'Counterparts - Joyce in Paris and Dublin', and is based around work he did when living in those two cities.

Music was very important to Joyce and his works are filled with descriptions of music, songs and singers. He himself was reputedly a fine singer, and he even competed in the Feis Ceol, (a venerable Irish amateur music competition, which is over a hundred years old and still going), entering the competition as a tenor. Joyce’s language is also very musical both in terms of rhythm and alliteration. The cities of Dublin and Paris are similarly very important to Joyce’s work – born and raised in Dublin but spending over twenty years of his adult life in Paris, both cities played crucial roles in his life and work.

The first impetus for writing the piece was my rereading of ‘Dubliners’, and being made aware again of Joyce’s musicality. The idea of Dublin and Paris came from my passing ‘Shakespeare and Company’  - the famous Parisian bookshop which had such an association with Joyce – on a recent trip to Paris. Since I’ve also had a close association with several French musicians in recent years, it was a short jump from the reading of Dubliners and thinking about Joyce’s life in the artistic hotbed that was Paris of the 1920s, to coming up with the idea of writing a piece for French and Irish musicians, based on writing undertaken by Joyce in both cities.

We also rehearsed the music in Paris and in Ireland  - before Christmas Michael and I went to Paris and rehearsed with Dominique, Stéphane and Christophe, and now we're at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, a beautiful artist's retreat here in Ireland, working on the piece and putting the finishing touches to the shape of it.

‘Counterparts’ is partly written and partly improvised, and uses audio taken from street sounds recorded in markets in Dublin and Paris - it's always fun and a different kind of challenge to work with audio. The piece also uses text from various works both as a generator for the music, and in spoken word format as an integral part of the piece. Sometimes I’ve used direct material from the music in Joyce’s work, including ‘Say Goodbye To Girlish Days’, Joyce’s only known musical composition. In other parts of the piece I’ve used ideas from the works he wrote in Paris or in Dublin as generators of musical ideas. 

In Counterparts I’ve tried to create a unique environment for improvising musicians to explore the work of Joyce through musical means, and through that to reveal to the listener the sheer musicality of Joyce’s prose.

For  anyone in Dublin this Saturday March 2nd is interested in seeing the finished result of this work, you can come to the National Concert Hall at 1.05pm where the piece will be premiered as part of the New Music Dublin festival. Full details here

And here is a video clip of some of the rehearsals from Paris last year.

Anatomy of Perfection - Monk's 'Jackie-ing'

I first heard 'Jackie-ing'  almost forty years ago when my father brought home a compilation double LP of Monk's Riverside recordings. At that time I had no technical knowledge or experience of music - I wasn't to become a player until much later and knew nothing about structure, form, jazz history or anything that would have given me an insight into Monk's music. Yet I was attracted to this music immediately. There was just something about it - a vibe, wittiness, swing, or more accurately, the combination of these elements - that spoke to me with an immediacy I don't think I'd experienced with my father's other jazz recordings. 'Jackie-ing' was a stand-out for me, even then. I listened to it so many times, loving it on an intuitive level, and I've been listening to it ever since. Like all perfect music, it never gets old, and this really is perfect music. Flawless.

Almost forty years later I began to think about what elements were involved in this track that made it so great, and when i began to investigate it in an analytical way, the music revealed even more facets which were always there, but were not so obvious. Like investigating any great music, (such as Bach or Bartok), an analysis of Jackie-ing reveals some of the reasons why it's so great, but still remains mysterious.

The recording was made in 1959, and featured Monk's long-time saxophonist Charlie Rouse, (who had only recently joined Monk at the time of this recording), the brilliant Thad Jones on the rarely heard cornet, who puts in an extraordinary performance on the whole album, and the stellar bass and drum team of Sam Jones and Art Taylor. It's an interesting recording in that it's one pf the few times that Monk recorded with the classic bebop line-up of trumpet (or cornet in this case), saxophone, piano, bass and drums.

This piece is classic Monk and in a way encompasses all the virtues that make him so unique - the slightly awry humour, the seemingly naive tune that catches you unawares, the incredible swing, the sonority and rhythmic complexity of the comping, and above all the primacy of the melody in determining the whole piece.

The Melody

The melody is an extraordinary affair - an almost banal tune that creates an anything but banal atmosphere. A seemingly simple 16 bar form, with a unison call/response melody that is largely made up of quarter notes, but which, through the use of displacement, catches the listener unawares, making you feel that you've somehow missed something. I remember when I was a kid, listening to this for the first time, thinking that perhaps the LP had skipped! This effect is achieved through the simple but brilliantly effective displacement of the main phrase of the theme. In measure 12, Monk starts the final phrase of the theme two beats earlier than you would expect, throwing everything out of kilter and effectively displacing the entire final theme phrase. This makes the theme finish two measures earlier than you would expect, leaving the drums to fill in the space at the end of the form that you instinctively feel shouldn't be there.





This displacement dominates the whole piece, as it infects the soloing throughout. It keeps the listener slightly confused all the time, because while the horns refer to this unexpected melodic twist in their solos, the bass and drums place the changes in the more traditional sixteen bar form. So everything feels like it's not quite lining up.

Monk also creates this dual world of off-kilter simplicity by the way he comps the melody, bringing the full range of his control of dissonance and understanding of piano sonority to bear on the melody. The placement of these clangorous chords is very strategic, and when you listen to the melody a few times you realise that there's nothing random or accidental about them. In measure four of the first head, Monk placed a very dissonant E natural in octaves alongside the humdrum F of the melody. This jarring effect is repeated at the same point in the second time through the head, but this time Monk uses an E and an Ab, (an octave and a major third above the E) to create the dissonance against the F. He does this in exactly the same way in the in-head and the out-head - clearly this order of dissonant chords was something that was planned in advance and is part of the composition rather than being something that was improvised on the spot.

The harmony of the tune is also  quite mysterious. Mostly centering around Bb major (with a very prominent sharp 4th), with a few excursions to the territory of V chord, it strongly features the notes E and A, and yet Monk adds this mysterious Ab in his comping which one imagine would suggest a Bb7 chord (but which never appears). Again we are in the world of duality - a simple diatonic type Bb melody but with the major 7th and tritone clamouring for attention and an errant Ab buzzing around the theme.

Bass and Drums

 (Sam Jones)


A huge amount of credit for the success of this track must go to Sam Jones and AT, whose contributions are judged to perfection. The connection between Jones' quarter note and AT's ride cymbal is sublime - both of them play forcefully yet neither of them are dogmatic. The beat is is clearly agreed between them, and they create what can best be described as a loping swing feel that  both clears the ground yet is rooted to it. Jones note choices are always interesting, he never does the expected, yet he clearly outlines the changes. AT keeps the ride cymbal going throughout, there are no real fills, but the snare and bass drum keep up an insistent, percolating rhythmic counter-melody throughout. His wonderful 8-bar intro is a perfect example of what he does throughout the track - swings hard but with a melodic intelligence informing everything he does

Charlie Rouse

Rouse was never my favourite Monk tenor player. I always felt he stayed too long with Monk and all those live albums show someone who knows the music very well yet never really pushes it in the way that Coltrane and Rollins did. I also love Johnny Griffin on the live 5 Spot recordings. Griffin's playing with Monk is often maligned, but I think his playing on those recordings is inspired, the sheer amount of ideas he has and the technical ability he has to carry them out, is staggering. The usual criticism is that he plays too many notes, but if you're going to level that at Griffin you have to level the same charge at Trane!

But I'm getting off topic here - in this recording Rouse is absolutely at the top of his game, his tenure with Monk is just beginning and no doubt he was less jaded than he must have become in later years, playing the same tunes over and over again. His solo on 'Jackie-ing' is marvellous, starting off by brilliantly juggling the theme in different ways, paraphrasing it and using it, rather than the chords, to create his solo. Listen to the first chorus and Rouse's effortless reworking of the theme.





He goes on reworking it until he gradually moves away from it, at least in the sense of clear paraphrasing. By the end he's making more references to the underlying harmony and finishes with a wonderful phrase that doesn't feel like the kind of phrase or place, (the first bar of the form), where you would finish a solo. But despite the unorthodox last phrase, Thad picks it up in the 4th bar and uses it to launch his own solo - reminding me of an improvisational relay race where the baton is handed over effortlessly. Here's that moment:

Thad Jones

Thad Jones was hugely underrated. He was revered as a big band writer, but his abilities were pretty much all-encompassing and he was one of the most original trumpeters ever to play in jazz. Immediately identifiable, he was quirky yet swinging, completely in the tradition yet totally surprising. His note choices and use of thematic material to advance his solos showed how compositionally he thought, and in this regard he's up there with other thematic improvisers such as Sonny Rollins and Jim Hall. And, like Rollins,  this made him an idea foil for Monk and his music. Never one to just run the changes, his ability to fully investigate the simplest motif and set off in pursuit of an idea, while never losing sight of where he was in the overall scheme of things, was unique among trumpeters and had few peers on any instrument.

Here he is simply brilliant. I never tire of his solo on this tune, it's remarkable for its sense of internal structure, respect for the atmosphere of the music, great swing and sometimes startling note choices. While not quoting the melody as closely as Rouse does, his solo still reflects the theme by the way he uses sometimes banal-seeming phrases which through brilliant rhythmic and timbral manipulation become startling. I always feel with his solo here, that though it faithfully follows the harmonic scheme of the piece, that if you took the solo out of the context of the tune, it would create its own internal logic, independent of the melody or chords of the tune from whence it came.

What's interesting harmonically is how he'll often skip notes in the scale and by doing so suggest a slightly Asian pentatonic quality to the line. The descending line he plays in this next clip, at face value conventional in the extreme, suggests a pentatonic scale consisting of Bb, D, E, G and A. This contradicts the conventionality of the phrase itself - more duality. And at the beginning of the next chorus he suggests a C major pentatonic, but heavily disguised by an up-rushing rhythmic shape that seems anxious to escape the confines of his cornet.





Monk himself helps Jones achieve this duality by virtue of his comping. One the things that I love about this track is that Monk comps throughout. These big slabs of bright dissonance appear throughout the piece in an amazing variety of rhythmic places. He is clearly engaged from start to finish and the way he ensures the primacy of the melody through comping that only obliquely refers to it, is an object lesson in both accompaniment and compositional thought through improvisation. And check out the way Monk picks up Thad's last phrase and uses its shape to start his solo - which puts him in a 3-beat cycle which is superimposed over the four of the bass and drums - something he resolves effortlessly........





Another feature of this track, and something that is common on a lot of Monk recordings, is that the solos don't follow the usual bebop dynamic curve, where each soloists starts quietly and then builds to a crescendo before handing over to the next guy. Here the dynamic remains the same throughout and the soloists could finish at any time. In fact this whole track is very far away from the bebop tradition where harmony rather than melody is the main instigator of improvisation. Here, the melody and the comping boss the whole piece and the soloists' prime concern is with melodic manipulation coming directly from the theme.

Here is the whole piece - a masterpiece in which you couldn't add a note, or subtract a note to or from anyone in the band without diminishing the overall piece.

There are very few perfect pieces in recorded jazz, but this definitely one of them

Contemporary Music

Whenever I see those ‘best CDs of 2012’ lists that appear around this time of the year, it always reminds me of how much current music I don’t check out and how behind the curve I often am when it comes to the music that’s hot off the presses – or whatever the Mp3 equivalent of a press is.

There are a couple of reasons for my not being totally up to date – I think as you get older, your desire to hear every single new note coming out of the jazz scene becomes less strong. I’m still interested in new things, but not to the point of obsessively checking the jazz media to see what’s coming out, and who’s doing what. I used to be like that. Even in the pre-internet days when information was harder to come by, I was still absolutely up to date with what was going on.

I made it my business to know everything about everyone. I was hungry for the new – new influences, new techniques, new compositions, new genres. New was good. Now, although I’m still interested in new things, I’m also very interested in deepening my listening to music that I know, trying to glean more from that, explore its depths more. And I’m also interested in trying to deepen my own music, but not necessarily by constantly adding new things to it. Some of that is a byproduct of age – reflection is more a function of one's later years than one's callow youth.

Another reason I’m not so obsessed with checking out everything new is that I find myself a bit underwhelmed by a lot of the new music that seems to get the critics’ juices flowing these days. I find that a lot of the music that’s raved about – particularly music coming out of NY – is either complexity for complexity’s sake, or virtuoso mainstream music – music that idolizes soloists, (this is particularly true of the current crop of guitarists), for the speed they can play at, but ignores the fact that their music is essentially doing the same thing, (soloist with rhythm section, and solo following solo), as has been done for the past 60 years.

But every now and then I go on a trawl of recent music to see what I can find, and last week I hit pay dirt – three great recordings, all recently recorded, all quite different and yet all showing both personality and originality – particularly in composition.

All three recordings are connected in some way – all three feature alto saxophone and piano, two of the recordings share the same pianist, and two of them share the same altoist. 

Dave Binney

I should start with the oldest CD - Dave Binney's 'Third Occasion' which is not the prolific Binney's newest recording, (which I think might be the wonderful 'Graylen Epicenter', another recording which I've enjoyed very much). 'Third Occasion' is from 2009, but features many of the qualities that make Dave an important figure on the contemporary jazz scene. Although he's a virtuoso player in every sense of the word, his compositions are not just vehicles for his playing, but also form a vital part of what is clearly an overall musical concept rather than an instrumentally driven ethos. His music is not easy to play and often features complex rhythmic and harmonic structures, but he has a unique leaning, (in this very contemporary jazz setting), towards melodic hooks in his pieces that not only serve the music well, but are deeply attractive in their own right.

He has an ability to use simplicity to great effect - I'm always surprised by how much unison melodic writing there is in his pieces, even when there's more than one horn. Ones instinct when you've more than one melody instrument is to write contrapuntal lines, but Binney often eschews that and goes for repeated unison hooks that are almost anthemic at times.

Dave also has a great sense of the right collaborators for his music, and here with Craig Taborn, Scott Colley and Brian Blade he has chosen musicians which, like Dave, are all virtuosos but play for the good of, and from the inspiration of the music. This is not a playing by rote/soloist with rhythm section recording, it's a true collective, all playing for the good of the music and stepping out to make individual statements when called upon. I find Craig Taborn to be a particularly inspired choice as the pianist on this recording - he is a true individualist and his playing has a crystalline brilliance that really works well with the alto, creating a transparent sonority in the ensemble and brilliantly original solos. Check out "Squares and Palaces' as a great example of all the things I've mentioned.

Michael Formanek

Taborn's presence on the second recording I'd like to mention, Micheal Formanek's 'Small Places', also contributes in no small measure to the success of the music. Here Taborn's originality and control of sonority is captured beautifully by the ECM recording. Taborn is a true original, he is clearly a contemporary jazz pianist, yet he borrows none of the clothing of the usual modern jazz piano suspects - he is resolutely his own man, unpredictable and endlessly creative. He is getting a bit more credit for his brilliance these days, but I still think he is very underrated.

As is Michael Formanek. A real musician's musician and one of those 'super bassists' (like Drew Gress and John Hebert), who can really play anything, from very straight ahead to complex rhythmic music or completely open improvisation. But as if his versatility as a bassist wasn't enough, Formanek has always been a formidable composer. I've been listening to an old recording of his, 'Wide Open Spaces', for over 20 years. Small Places is his most recent album and again features wonderful writing - writing that suits the ensemble so well and sets them up for improvising. Again there is that crystalline alto with piano sound that I also remarked upon in Binney's recording, and some of this probably has to do with Taborn being on hand again. And once more the ECM recording with its molto-reverb policy, suits the music very well. Again this is music of complexity, and although it doesn't have the more conventionally melodic hooks of the Binney recording, it is often deeply attractive music, with an astringent lyricism. As it is with Dave's recording, there is never a dull moment here, since all of the players - Formanek, Taborn, Tim Berne and Gerald Cleaver - are great soloists and when you combine this with the very original writing, the interest never flags for a moment.

To hear what I'm talking about, have a listen here:

Tim Berne

Part of the fascination of Michael Formanek's album is hearing the very unique Tim Berne negotiating the harmonic landscapes of Formanek's music. Berne is a true original, with a sound all his own, and he has created music that is almost genre-specific to himself. He has almost created his own genre - something that only a very few can claim to have done. His playing owes almost nothing to the jazz mainstream, yet is clearly part of the jazz tradition. His music is acerbic, very rhythmic and has a concern with sonority that is all his own. I've been an admirer for along time and was looking forward to hearing this new band. What I wasn't expecting was how different this recording would be to what I'd known of Tim's music up to this point.

In a career liberally studded with unique recordings, this still qualifies as being pretty unique. It's almost like a chamber music recording - the instrumentation of alto, clarinet (Oscar Noriega), piano (Matt Mitchell), and drums/percussion (Ches Smith), gives it a lightness of sonority and clarity that took me completely by surprise. When I think of Tim's music I usually associate it with density and the gnarlier end of the spectrum when it comes to timbre. Here so much of the music has a transparency that is both refreshing and delightful. There's a brightness about the music that I believe is unprecedented in Tim's recorded output. There were hints of it in the past - I first noticed it on the coda to one piece on 'Science Friction' - but here it's given full reign and I've been listening to this music constantly since I bought this, amazed over and over by the sound of the music as well as the content.

What really strikes me about this recording is how European it sounds. I don't mean that as a criticism, or as a means of praise, just an observation. So much of this music has echoes of European art music in it. If someone had played me some of this music as a blindfold test, I would definitely have ventured that they were European musicians. At least up to the point where Tim took a solo - that would have been a give-away. As would the opening of 'Scanners' Both that composition (and Tim's soloing), are completely Berne-esque, and there's no mistaking the author of both alto sound and music. But there are other sections where the music has such overtones of European late 20th century art music, and also it has to be said, of European contemporary jazz of a certain stripe, (I'm not citing that as an influence, it probably just shows a common interest in similar musical idioms), that one could be forgiven for believing these musicians to be from the old rather than the new world.

But that observation aside, I must say I think this music is extraordinary. So original - there's a passage at around 5.25 of 'Simple City' that has a mesmerising harmonisation of the melody line - magical is not too strong a word to describe it. I love the ECM recording effect on Tim's sound too - he does have a very brawny sound and the ECM reverb takes some of the edge off that, which I think suits this music very well. I really regret missing the band when they were in Dublin last year - I hope to get to hear this amazing music live sometime. If only all through-composed contemporary music was as good as this..........

You can get a taste of the music here:

Three great musicians, three great bands, three great albums - although I don't follow everything that's going on as assiduously as I used to, it's so great and inspiring to come across wonderful music like this. Jazz is dead? Bullshit!

Here's Dave Binney with Taborn, Colley and Blade, live in Paris

How Does The Music Feel?

A friend of mine told me that at a recent jazz workshop, a very well known drummer said to him (concerning drum students attending the workshop), 'Man, all these guys can really play - and they all sound terrible!' A very funny remark, but with a huge truth contained inside it. As contemporary jazz grows ever more complex - especially in the field of rhythm - and as jazz schools raise the technical level of students to unprecedented heights, there is no doubt in my mind that we are often guilty of ignoring one of the most important elements of all music - its rhythmic feel.

By 'feel' in this context, I don't mean a generic feel as in 'swing feel' or 'Brazilian feel' or something like that, I mean the groove or the rhythmic centering of the music. I notice more and more that the idea of getting a good rhythmic feel - as opposed to playing accurately and in time no matter what the time signature - seems to be further and further down the agenda, if it's on the agenda at all. But the feel of music is incredibly important - it's arguably the most important thing, since it evokes an immediate response from the listener. And most listeners - which is something we musicians often forget - are not players. They're civilians, they're not in the jazz army and they don't care about the complexity (or lack of complexity) of music. They're there to listen and to experience, not to analyse. Most people couldn't care less whether you play in 15/8 and superimpose a 3 feel on top of that. That's the kind of detail that is only of interest to musicians.

Not that I've anything against complexity per se - I've spent a lot of my professional life playing complex music and spent countless hours trying to figure out how to do it and get better at it. I enjoy both simple music and complex music - to me it makes no difference what means you use to get to your message. As long as you actually have a message that is more than just the technique of the music. And there's the rub - I think there's a lot of music around that is solely about the techniques being used by the players, rather than having an overarching intent that is beyond the technique.

Of course this is an argument that has gone on forever in jazz - every generation of jazz musicians has accused the next generation of sacrificing feeling on the altar of technique. There's an element of circling the wagons about this kind of thinking, of protecting something - real or imagined - from the attacks of the avant garde. But this is not really where I'm coming from with this - it's more about the idea that no matter what form of rhythmic expression you choose, that it should feel good!

Feel good? What does that mean? Couldn't it be said to be subjective? Well, ultimately yes. But I do think the idea of something feeling good is not as abstract a concept as it might sound. What I mean by this is that the rhythm of the music should feel as if its coming from a central place, that it should have a weight, an internal energy a kind of groove template from which the music ultimately emanates. Without this central core the music just won't feel good - it may have a lot of detail to it, it may be technically adept and accurately in time, but it won't have that spark, that energy that carries the internal message of the music and that connects it to a tradition of some kind.

This word tradition is important here. Most rhythmic music is, or was at one time, connected to dance. Dance needs a rhythmic core that gives the fundamental energy to the dancers and around which all the music happens. There are so many examples of this - Afro-Cuban music, Belly Dance, Samba, Indian classical music, and of course at one point, jazz.

Jazz moved away from dance a long time ago, and indeed it's hard to make any case for jazz as a contemporary dance music after 1950, but the fact that jazz once was associated with dance has meant that the rhythmic impulse of jazz  always had a central core -  a groove - around which the music moved, and from which the music emanated, no matter how active and complex the music that whirled around this central core was. Despite jazz losing its direct connection to dance, and the rhythmic physicality of playing for dancers, the ghost of the the dance has always been there. This is the 'feel' which I'm talking about when I say that the music should feel good.

It seems to me now that this connection between feel and the music is often lost. Perhaps in chronological terms, the music has moved so far away from its dance origins that the physicality of the rhythm of jazz is something that is being forgotten or buried under the detail of an often complex music. Which would not just be a pity, but would also be dangerous waters for the music to sail into. Jazz has a hard time in the market place these days (or what remains of the market place...), and the permanent removal of a rhythmic feel good factor, would be a tragic loss for the music.

Because this rhythmic feel good factor is part of the music's history and tradition. The ingenious rhythmic placement of Armstrong's lines, Basie's rhythm section, Bird's rhythmic power, Blakey and the Messengers, Miles phrasing, Miles' various rhythm sections, the Coltrane Quartet, Monk, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Headhunters, Weather Report, Wynton's first quintet, Steve Coleman and Five Elements, Wayne Shorter's current quartet, Brad Mehldau. The music of all of these players and bands, despite their often widely different styles and different eras from which they come, exhibit the rhythmic impulse that I'm talking about - a connection to groove and rhythmic physicality around which the rest of their music is formed.

I'm missing that rhythmic and groove impulse in a lot of the music I'm hearing recently. Drummers are hyper-active but often without a foundation - all that clattering piccolo snare drum stuff, fill after fill without any room for an underlying groove to make its presence felt. Bassists playing without connecting with the drummer, pianists and guitarists comping without rhythmically interacting with either bassist or drummer... Soloists with lots of notes but not really locking into the rhythm and the time. Generic grooves played without any understanding of the tradition and impulse from which they originated.

Musicians need to check out the fundamentals of the music and the history of the music. Anyone serious about playing jazz must study the rhythm and the rhythmic impulse of the music, and in particular they should study the feel of the music. Listen to this aspect of the music of the great players past and present and try and identify the rhythmic DNA that circulates through all of their music, giving it its rhythmic strength and feelgood factor. To all serious musicians - don't just ask yourself how your music sounds - how does it feel?

Here are three examples of rhythmically powerful pieces of music, all very different, all of which have a great rhythmic feel at the core of the music.

Wayne Shorter's Quartet - abstract and impressionistic yet rooted




Here's Herbie Hancock, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette swinging mightily while playing both complex harmony and rhythm




Steve Coleman and 5 Elements connecting complex harmony with interlocking odd metre funk