Unusual Subdivision in Jazz Improvisation - a Step By Step Guide

Finding a way to use unusual subdivisions in an effective way in jazz is challenging. Especially if you're using the traditional jazz language of swing over changes. And if you're trying to do this, it's important that you should be doing this for musical reasons - i.e these subdivisions are being used for expressive purposes, rather than it being some kind of science project - a trap many fall into. The reason I use these kinds of unusual subdivisions in improvising is because they feel different to the more conventional subdivisions  - not better by the way, just different. No subdivision is of itself better than any other - it's how they're used that gives them their value.

Bearing that important point in mind, it is true to say that using 5s (quintuplets), or 7s (septuplets), or indeed triplets in unusual groupings (4s or 5s for example), does give a different feel to the music. And this is the reason why they are worth exploring and incorporating into your language - they can give you a greater variety of expressive possibilities if used creatively.

So this is the aesthetic and musical reason for exploring this world. The challenge is then how to work with these unusual groupings and to make them sound, and indeed be organic.

The first step is to just get used to the different subdivisions and, like most things in music, the best way to do this is to be able to 'sing' them. By sing I mean recite them, over a fixed pulse. The best way to do this in my opinion, is to use Konnekol - the South Indian rhythmic solfege system, where syllables represent numbers.

Konnekol

The system is very simple - it consists of five syllables, each one representing a number:

Ta = 1
Taka = 2
Takita = 3
Takadimi  = 4
Tadigenaka - 5

All other numbers are created using combinations of these syllables, for example 7 could be Takadimi/Takita, or 9 could be Taka/Takita/Takadimi

In this first video, I divide the clapped beat from 1 up to 9, and back down again. This a great exercise on its own, as it really shows you how accurate you are with regular subdivisions such as 4 or 3, as well as the more unusual ones



So once you're comfortable with that, (and be honest with yourself on this - this kind of thing usually takes weeks to become second nature, and patience is definitely a virtue in this instance!), you can look at putting it on your instrument in some way. And a good way to do that is to combine scale practice with rhythm practice

Combining Scale and Rhythm Practice

In this next video I combine playing a scale (in this case Bb Dorian Minor) with using different subdivisions - 1 through 8 over a slow metronome beat in 4/4. In this case I am playing up to the 11th, so each subdivision needs to be played a set number of times in order to align the beginning of each new subdivision with the downbeat of the bar. Apart from being a good exercise for your subdivisions, this is a good rhythmic relationship exercise too, as you have to hear how the pattern relates to the 4/4 cycle





Once you can do that accurately and comfortably, I would suggest trying to play and improvise over a static chord or scale (a major key is fine for this), using different subdivisions. Maybe set up a drum groove in a sequencer, (or use an app such as the great Drumgenius). Once you're comfortable with that, you can move on to playing over changes.

Using Different and Unusual Subdivisions Over Swinging Changes

Using unusual rhythmic devices for improvising becomes a completely different animal when played over changes, and in the swing idiom. It's definitely more challenging - that's probably why so many avoid it. In suggesting you try this I'm assuming two things: 1) You're comfortable playing over changes in a conventional setting (if not you've got some basic work to do before trying this!), and 2) You really have practiced the earlier exercises and they are second nature to you.

So, assuming that, what I'm doing here is using four different subdivisions over four choruses of the great standard 'Alone Together':

1st Chorus: Behind the beat - a classic feel from the jazz tradition, but one that requires great rhythmic control to bring off successfully - it must be behind the beat, but must not slow down!

2nd Chorus: Quintuplets - 5 over 2. These really have the feel of lazy triplets

3rd Chorus: Sextuplets - 6 over 2. Not such an unusual subdivision in itself, but when they're regrouped into groups of four as they are here, then they take on a very different feeling.

4th Chorus: Septuplets - 7 over 2. These have the feel of 8th note triplets after a lot of coffee

So these then are some possibilities for jazz improvisation using unusual subdivisions. Of course in the video I am exaggerating them for demonstration purposes, I would not play a whole chorus with any one subdivision in the real world! But I think they have great expressive possibilities and when you get them in your ear and under your fingers they definitely open up some new and exciting vistas for the improviser. 

Rhythm Geekery 1

In this post I’ll show some of the structural underpinning of an improvisation I did on the old standard ‘There Will Never Be Another You’. I made a video of this improvisation and explained a little of what I was doing at the beginning of the video. However I’ve been asked several times to explain in more detail what is going on, so for those who like to be able to have a look under the hood, here is a score of the structure of the subdivisions I used for the improvisation. This gets a little bit rhythm geeky, so if you’re interested in that kind of thing then read on, and if not then just have a listen to the video performance and hopefully you can enjoy it on pure musical terms.

In this improvisation I set out to use asymmetric structures of 5 and 7 and layer them across the very symmetric structure of this well known standard. This creates constant movement of tension and release as the asymmetric structures cross the changes which are grouped in the conventional 4s and 2s. 

The challenge is two-fold:

1. To hear the relationship between the 5s or 7s and the underlying 4, and hear how they move around each other

2. To make the voice-leading work over the changes while using the asymmetric groupings

Here's how the groups of 5 work over the tune. If you do the maths, the two patterns meet every five bars of the 4/4 meter. But of course the changes are based on eight-bar groupings, and the tune is thirty two bars long - a number not divisible by five without using decimals. So your ear has to be attuned to the many different ways the 5s relate to the changes as the tune goes on.

For example the form of this tune is ABAC, both A sections having the same changes. Well because of the asymmetry of the 5s, the subdivision will be different for the two A sections.  Here's a comparison of the first four bars of both A sections:

So here is the full tune, with the subdivisions of 5:

And here is the same tune, and same principal, this time with groupings of 7:

And here is the video I made which explains this a little and then demonstrates it. I want to stress that this is an improvisation, the notes I chose were not worked out in advance, I just practiced this a lot to enable me to hear the voice leading. I intersperse the 5s and 7s, with regular choruses and finish by improvising various combinations of 5s and 7s. Big fun!

News and Upcoming Events

Happy New Year! Here’s a little update of some the things I’ll be doing musically over the coming year in case any of these might be of interest to you.

(Tom Rainey, Dave Binney, RG, Chris Guilfoyle)

New CD recording!

Just recently I was in New York recording my new CD featuring Chris Guilfoyle and two of NY’s finest musicians - Dave Binney, and Tom Rainey. We recorded at the wonderful Systems Two in Brooklyn and I’m very happy how everything turned out. Everyone played great and it was great to have the opportunity to record some new compositions. I’ll be mixing and mastering it in the coming months and then getting it out – watch this space!

New rhythm teaching video series

I am very excited to say that (at last!), I’m getting around to putting together a new rhythm teaching video series. I published my rhythm book over ten years ago, and it seems that it continues to be of use to musicians, which is something I find very gratifying. This book is very much aimed at jazz musicians and jazz techniques, but while teaching this material over the years, I noticed that there was a real need for some other material, material that covered more basic things like how to develop your time, how to be able to perceive rhythmic relationships etc.

I’ve been promising (threatening?), to put together all this material for several years now, but at last I’m getting around to it. The format for the material will be through a series of videos which will act as a comprehensive rhythm course for any and all levels of musicians, and for people in any genre. I’m happy to be doing this at last, and I will keep you all posted of how it’s coming along and when it will be ready

Upcoming performances and teaching events

I have a variety of things happening on the playing front over the coming months. February 6^th, in JJ Smyths in Dublin, will see the first performance by the Guilfoyle/Nielsen Trio in nearly four years. The GNT was a group that was very important to me, especially regarding the development of my rhythm concept, and over a fifteen year period we really developed something unique. I’m really looking forward to this reunion!

(Counterparts at the Mermaid Arts Centre)

Later in February I’ll be touring in Ireland with Michael Buckley and two great US musicians -  the guitarist Rick Peckham, and drummer Bob Gullotti, while in March I will be performing with two other great American musicians the saxophonist John O Gallagher and the drummer Jeff Williams. In June I will be performing with my ‘Counterparts’ group at the Centre Culturel Irlandaise in Paris, and in July I will be performing in South Africa at the Grahamstown Festival with Pekka Pyllkannen and Nick Smart, and in September I will be touring in Denmark with the wonderful Danish musicians Lars Moeller and Jonas Johansen. This tour will be celebrating the release of our CD ‘Divisions’ which was released last year and which I am very proud to be part of.

There are various other activities in the works for this year, and I will let you know of them as they develop and come to fruition. In the meantime, I hope you will find something in these various events that will interest you – thanks for listening and I hope to meet as many of you as possible in the real world in the upcoming year!

Metronome Lesson

This is pretty amazing to watch.

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

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

Rhythm-A-Ning - 2

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

Rhythm-A-Ning

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

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




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

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




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



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

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



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

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

Rhythm People

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

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

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

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


(Rudresh Mahanthappa)

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

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

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


(Karim Ziad)

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

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

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

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

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

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