Rhythm trumps everything

[docbop]

So we've all heard melody trumps harmony and via Dizzy and other rhythm is everything, so guess you could say rhythm trumps everything.

Well from some recent things I'm checking out I'm getting that rhythm boils down to the accents. The masters would think about what rhythmic accents they wanted, then what notes/sounds they wanted on those notes, then the rest of the notes were just filler, whatever happened, happened. Of course after logging thousands of hours in the woodshed their subconscious filler is really solid stuff.

To me it make sense especially considering the tempos they like that the thought process was simplified to "what do I want to point out, accent and rhythmically where".

Does that make sense to you too?

[medblues]

It does to me, learning rhythm accompaniment with a hand drum and being able to do simple bass grooves are very helpful for developing improvisational abilities on the main instrument. For instance, I silence the bass and/or drums in BIAM or iReal and try to fill them in with my guitar. Obviously, live situations help much better.

[dasein]

A while back, I had a recording of 15-20 Charlie Parker solos that I would listen to on repeat throughout the day.

Anytime I was in the subway, the roar of a passing train would make it impossible to discern any pitches. But even in that din, you could still make out his rhythms -- the accents and syncopation. That's when I really gained a sensitivity to it.

Steve Coleman got very deep into this in his article on Parker. When we start dealing with very rhythmically advanced music -- whether that's West African, Indian, Javanese, Balkan, etc. -- you have to decide how deep down the rabbit hole you want to go.

[Rhizomeman]

Bergonzi's DVD v. 3 has great rhythm exercises. They have really helped my playing.

[Reg]

yea... accent patterns. And context of course.

I always think and perform with reference to repeating everything... even if it's just one time through, there are usually still references and implications to accent patterns.

If you just think about it.... for music to have a shape... there is some type of form within the duration.... the spatial thing.

[Illuin]

Charlie Parker said it himself... Rhythm is the most important thing.

If you've got that going on, the rest doesn't matter quite so much.

If it ain't got that swing...

[christianm77]

Correct. Next question? :-)

[nickel]

Agreed. Rhythm is pretty much everything.

[princeplanet]

I work hard on my rhythm, solid time, good sense of swing and really try to bring out accents where I want them BUT:

I just can't agree that rhythm is everything. If that were true then 2 players with the same rhythmic skills but totally dfferent melodic/harmonic skills would be equally satisfying to listen to. Surely it depends on our own sense of taste in what we like?

I'd much rather listen to early Pat Martino running virtually unbroken 8ths than GG or K Burrell playing simple bluesy motifs with 'interesting" rhythmic variety.

So for me, good rhythm plus good note choices trumps good rhythm alone, (Maybe drummers may disagree )...

[matt.guitarteacher]

I work hard on my rhythm, solid time, good sense of swing and really try to bring out accents where I want them BUT:

I just can't agree that rhythm is everything. If that were true then 2 players with the same rhythmic skills but totally dfferent melodic/harmonic skills would be equally satisfying to listen to. Surely it depends on our own sense of taste in what we like?

I'd much rather listen to early Pat Martino running virtually unbroken 8ths than GG or K Burrell playing simple bluesy motifs with 'interesting" rhythmic variety.

So for me, good rhythm plus good note choices trumps good rhythm alone, (Maybe drummers may disagree )...

I'd agree. Maybe, "all things being equal, rhythm trumps" would be more accurate. That's usually implied in that kind of statement anyway.

As far as steady 8ths goes, there are usually rhythmic elements involved as well, like harmonic/melodic rhythm. Many years ago when I first heard Keith Jarrett's playing, I was put off by his occasional runs of steady triplets, eighth notes, sixteenths etc.

But the rhythms are in the changes of direction, the melody, the harmonic rhythm underneath , in usually quite sophisticated and interesting ways, once you learn to hear them.

Kind of reminds me of listening to Bach when you're younger, and it all sounds like "just a bunch of notes". Yeah, it's the harmony and the melody, but the harmony and the melody have rhythmic elements as well.

[princeplanet]

I'd agree. Maybe, "all things being equal, rhythm trumps" would be more accurate. That's usually implied in that kind of statement anyway.

As far as steady 8ths goes, there are usually rhythmic elements involved as well, like harmonic/melodic rhythm. Many years ago when I first heard Keith Jarrett's playing, I was put off by his occasional runs of steady triplets, eighth notes, sixteenths etc.

But the rhythms are in the changes of direction, the melody, the harmonic rhythm underneath , in usually quite sophisticated and interesting ways, once you learn to hear them.

Kind of reminds me of listening to Bach when you're younger, and it all sounds like "just a bunch of notes". Yeah, it's the harmony and the melody, but the harmony and the melody have rhythmic elements as well.

Great points, and I agree, but people who claim the OP claim can't possibly be meaning that, by "rhythm", they actually mean "harmonic / melodic rhythm"..... They may as well be saying that "Music trumps everything" !

[Nate Miller]

"Does that make sense to you too?" - it's how I play bop, so yea.

I've had guys tell me all my life that if you play the wrong note, the other musicians in the house are the only ones who are going to know. You play a wrong rhythm and EVERYBODY in the house is going to know

So if you have to screw up one or the other, please, bust on the notes and get the rhythm right

if you do bust on the notes, play the mistake again and start working with it. That's how you make it a "musical mistake"

and it is absolutely true that those notes that are accented are the anchoring notes and the ones in between are secondary to those notes on the phrase's accents. Note that I did not call those notes "filler".

[Dana]

This is just an observation. It’s not based on anything but my own personal experience.

It seems to me that rhythm is a higher level concept to practice than melody & harmony. In order to really learn it, a player has to be at a point where they are no longer thinking of notes and chords directly.

I see it so much in my teaching and performing. When improvising, everybody is thinking of the notes. I can almost hear the internal dialogue going on while watching someone improvise, “I have to get that F here, I know a good II-V for the next section, oh S**, what scale goes over Gb7 b9,b13?”

I’m guilty of it myself. When I first look at a tune, the first things I’m thinking about is melody and harmony. What key is it in? What is the form? Any major/minor II V’s? Is there a modulation somewhere? Any weird chords? Usually the only discussion that comes close to rhythm is, “latin or swing feel.”

Take this forum for example: I notice there are sections on Chords, Technique, Chord Melody, Theory, Composition, but no section dedicated specifically to Rhythm.

So, when these posts pop up from time to time that proclaim, ‘rhythm trumps everything’, I think to myself, “I agree, but why aren’t we as players more focused on it?”

[Dana]

If you haven't heard it, Bill Evans discussed working on rhythm and rhythmic displacement when interviewed on Piano Jazz. Check it out starting at 2:30.

[Nate Miller]

"In order to really learn it, a player has to be at a point where they are no longer thinking of notes and chords directly."

I don't believe that is an absolute. I think it is more a product of how jazz is taught these days. There is so much more focus on chords and scales because there is just so much more material there to make a book out of. A casual observer could even get the impression that jazz is nothing more than an exercise in negotiating chord changes

but to really learn something musical, you do have to isolate it. So to talk about diminished studies, for example, you generally see that done in the context of a short progression or maybe even in the context of one chord

Same goes for real rhythm study, but you don't really need that to get your feet wet and start playing jazz. The reason is that a lot of the repertoire is in 4/4 and in an AABA 32 bar form

when you talk about rhythm in the context docbop is talking, you are talking about the rhythm of the phrase

some of the best advice I ever got on that subject was bone simple....I was in music school and I was all caught up in the normal type of jazz theory that you get crammed down your neck in school and I asked a friend who was one of the top players there in town some off the wall question and he said to me, "listen, Nate, you know what jazz sounds like, right?...then just play jazz"

so you can intuitively phrase jazz by simply listening to a lot of jazz

[matt.guitarteacher]

This is just an observation. It’s not based on anything but my own personal experience.

It seems to me that rhythm is a higher level concept to practice than melody & harmony. In order to really learn it, a player has to be at a point where they are no longer thinking of notes and chords directly.

I see it so much in my teaching and performing. When improvising, everybody is thinking of the notes. I can almost hear the internal dialogue going on while watching someone improvise, “I have to get that F here, I know a good II-V for the next section, oh S**, what scale goes over Gb7 b9,b13?”

I’m guilty of it myself. When I first look at a tune, the first things I’m thinking about is melody and harmony. What key is it in? What is the form? Any major/minor II V’s? Is there a modulation somewhere? Any weird chords? Usually the only discussion that comes close to rhythm is, “latin or swing feel.”

Take this forum for example: I notice there are sections on Chords, Technique, Chord Melody, Theory, Composition, but no section dedicated specifically to Rhythm.

So, when these posts pop up from time to time that proclaim, ‘rhythm trumps everything’, I think to myself, “I agree, but why aren’t we as players more focused on it?”

I agree with what you're getting at, but I think that the problem isn't with hearing and understanding rhythm as much as communicating it. Like was said earlier, everyone knows when the rhythm isn't right, and I think that's absolutely true. We just don't really have a vocabulary for rhythm the way that we do with pitch. There's no way of communicating the rhythmic equivalent of [singing] "C-E-G is a C major chord", and saying "now, you...". That's why I brought up takadimi in the other thread . Indian drummers can verbalize very sophisticated rhythmic ideas simply, and I think it would be just as easy for children or rank beginners.

If you analyze it in terms of the language/grammar aspect. C, E and G are very concrete. A quarter note doesn't really make as much sense outside of measures, barlines, and the context of note values proceeding and following. In order to learn basic rhythm, you have to learn a more complex system of relationships. Beat 2 or the &-of-2 doesn't have a physical space in the measure. It doesn't really have a sense of "place". Think about it. You learn to do addition and subtraction processes in order to determine which beat it's on.

You have to look at the note or rest before and subtract in order to do this. It's on beat 2 if preceded by a quarter note, the "&" of the beat if preceded by an 8th etc. As adult musicians we take all of this for granted, until we start teaching music lessons to children and notice that it's not as simple in the beginning. I've taught children's choral music for about 20 years now, off and on, and I noticed pretty quickly that children's music is often much more rhythmically sophisticated than the adult music. Hearing and understanding (on a visceral level) very complex polyrhythmic patterns is absolutely no problem for kids, but again, we simply don't hear by addition and subtraction.

The invisible barline helps substantially in providing a sense of "place", but the problems which are noticed very easily in teaching beginners still remain for us as adults when we get into sophisticated syncopation and polyrhythmic patterns (especially with triplets and unfamiliar etc). Meanwhile, you can teach rank beginners 16th-note polyrhythms on guitar pretty quickly by utilizing "sophisiticated" phrases like "watermelon, strawberry, strawberry, strawberry, strawberry", which would be murder to teach with the "1-ee-&-uh" beat reference.

If we're honest (and we can remember back that far) most of us who learned how to count complex rhythms spent our time figuring out how to count it, and then, after all the work, our mouths or instruments taught our ears what the sound was. But once you internalize it, you're not really counting anymore either. You feel the beat reference, but you're not really counting polyrhymically according to beat (quarter note) as much as your feeling the spacial distance between notes and relationship to the real reference (16th or least common denominator) ... "1-2-3-4, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3" etc.

Pitch isn't quite the same. We relate to "C being C" pretty much the same way we always have. I think the Indian drummers have it. They keep the beat reference going and felt, but the reference for the micro rhythms is more the relationship of the note lengths themselves, which is how we feel polyrhythm anyway. BTW, most of what you see on the internet in print re. takadimi is a westernized, simplified version which references beat more than the internal references between notes.

Do a little digging and find the youtube videos of these guys vocally riffing on it. It's a different beast. It's a nerd curiosity and distraction perhaps, but I find what they're doing pretty compelling.

[Dana]

"In order to really learn it, a player has to be at a point where they are no longer thinking of notes and chords directly."

I don't believe that is an absolute. I think it is more a product of how jazz is taught these days. There is so much more focus on chords and scales because there is just so much more material there to make a book out of. A casual observer could even get the impression that jazz is nothing more than an exercise in negotiating chord changes.

I dunno. I think it takes more than a casual observer to get the impression that jazz is nothing more than an exercise in negotiating chord changes. A certain amount of musical training would require at least that level of understanding. But I get your point.

when you talk about rhythm in the context docbop is talking, you are talking about the rhythm of the phrase

If I understand docbop correctly, he’s saying; phrasing boils down to accented points, surrounded by other melodic/rhythmic material that is just filler.

It’s like taking the sentence; “The dog jumped over the fence.” Which boils down to: Dog, Jumped, Fence. From those 3 words one can get the gist of what the sentence is trying to convey. But we don’t talk that way. It’s the filler that makes the phrase ‘musical.’

[Nate Miller]

" I think it takes more than a casual observer to get the impression that jazz is nothing more than an exercise in negotiating chord changes" - not sure if you understood me there. I mean that jazz is not an exercise in negotiating chord changes, but to read a lot of the material out there one would get that impression.

No, playing jazz properly is much more than just making the changes. As I say this, I am listening to Bud Powel play "Somewhere Over the Rainbow". I can assure you all that there is more going on in that track than simply Bud making the changes


"If I understand docbop correctly, he’s saying; phrasing boils down to accented points, surrounded by other melodic/rhythmic material that is just filler."

again, with respect, but you may have misunderstood that as well

what I said right before your post was "it is absolutely true that those notes that are accented are the anchoring notes and the ones in between are secondary to those notes on the phrase's accents. Note that I did not call those notes "filler"."

I'm not trying to be mean or bust your chops, I just want to be clear because its not a trivial matter. I would hate to think that I gave someone the impression that jazz is nothing more than an exercise in making changes and really, I do have a theoretical problem with calling the unaccented notes "filler". Listen to a chorus of Bird playing anything and then go to your Omnibook and take a look at what that "filler" consisted of. There is a lot of depth there whether you realize it or not, and that is precisely what makes bop bop

so please don't take offense, I'm just trying to help

[Dana]

I'm not offended. I think both of use know exactly what we're trying to say, but apparently I'm not understanding you, and you are definitely not understanding me.

I'm out. I have to keep reminding myself not to try to engage in conversations like this over the internet. Good luck with your musical endeavors.

[Nate Miller]

fair enough, buddy. It can be hard sometimes in this kind of setting to understand each other. I bet if we were sitting across from each other with our axes, we'd find common ground pretty quick

[Dana]

fair enough, buddy. It can be hard sometimes in this kind of setting to understand each other. I bet if we were sitting across from each other with our axes, we'd find common ground pretty quick

I try not to play with other guitar players cause they don't listen (KIDDING!).

[christianm77]

I work hard on my rhythm, solid time, good sense of swing and really try to bring out accents where I want them BUT:

I just can't agree that rhythm is everything. If that were true then 2 players with the same rhythmic skills but totally dfferent melodic/harmonic skills would be equally satisfying to listen to. Surely it depends on our own sense of taste in what we like?

I'd much rather listen to early Pat Martino running virtually unbroken 8ths than GG or K Burrell playing simple bluesy motifs with 'interesting" rhythmic variety.

So for me, good rhythm plus good note choices trumps good rhythm alone, (Maybe drummers may disagree )...

Ha your loss baby! There is so much Art in the way Grant Green plays simple things... I wouldn't go as far to say it's easier to imitate Pat Martino, but at least with Pat I'd have a road map.

Anyway it's not a competition.

I'm also sure you didn't mean it this way but to reduce Pat Martino to 'unbroken 8ths' is also to miss what is really good about his lines rhythmically. The ebb and flow, the emergent accentuation in the line. It's very sophisticated.

I suspect where we differ is that I see the function of changes playing to gain freedom through the changes so that I can be as rhythmically free as possible. The note choices (other than the odd tasty use of extensions for effect) are much less interesting to me.

This is something I hear very much in Martino's playing as well as Grant Green's....

Which is not to say note choice is totally uninteresting to me. I like the sound of intervallic stuff for example - something with Martino's use of fourths etc... But to a lot of listeners Pat's playing sound likes notes...more notes...more notes...MOARRR DAMN NOTES.... ARGGGHHH NOTES!!!!

That's how I used to hear it, although I still prefer his earlier playing.

[christianm77]

I like what Nate said about chord changes.

The aim is to play melody. It's easy to get over interested in the chord progression... It's something I'm trying to get out of myself...

[bobby d]

I would say that some people have rhythm and some don't. Also, if one has no rhythm, they will lack an important part of being a musician. How important depends on what type of music, but most genres require good rhythm. I believe rhythm can be improved and cultivated, but some people just don't have it!

Accents are part of it, but there is also duration of notes and playing ahead, behind or right on the beat. Listening carefully to Swing, Funk and other rhythmic music (forget the notes while listening) will help in getting rhythm IMO.

A lot of it is concentrating on the 2 and 4 and where it lands (ahead, behind or right on the beat). Moving your body with the beat or dancing can help in getting more rhythm too. Ya gotta feel it!

[Irez87]

This post is interesting

but...

Let's not forget that practicing the rhythmic fundamentals until they are fully engrained is more important than the polys and metric modulation. Try playing a nice full quarter note at 60bpm while practicing scales. That's what Harvie S. had to me practice. Try only using a click to reference every 8 beats (2 measures in 4/4) or 64 beats (4 measures in 4/4) and engrain the SPACE between the phrases.

Comping is all about rhythm as well. Rhythm has it's own natural cadence and tension, and when used with simple melodic ideas, can be stronger than all the tritone subs you can throw into a tune. Bill Evans had a unique sense of the phrase, so did Dex.

I've noticed that my playing is on like a song when I play intune to the pulse and rhythm of the musical space. When it's not, nothing sounds right.

By the way, you can communicate rhythm just as easily as you can communicate melodic content. Talk to drummers that really know the craft, they can talk rhythm for days. A phrase built off the and of the 4 sounds different than the and of the 2. They can hear rhythm, and can build "perfect rhythm" like people have perfect pitch.

Unfortunately, as guitarists, we often get caught up in other things... Still love the guitar, though. But, drummers... A good drummer can get me going a lot quicker than a good guitarist.

Study phrasing and then you can get into that language of the drum.