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Since playing with a swing feel became a thing, no one has ever come up with an accurate way of notating what a swing feel actually is. So since no one can actually write it in notation, what a swing feel is, does that mean it truly is just a feeling being expressed from music?
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02-15-2023 04:18 PM
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First you'll need to define swing...
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i love questions like this.
Originally Posted by James Haze
I think it can only be learned by feel… but it is specific (and maybe even measurable.)
the main problem that people get hung up on when learning jazz is the inequality of the downbeat upbeat. In practice most jazz players (esp guitarists) play quite legato (as in connected, not necessarily using hammer on or pull offs) and even and focus on placing the accents accurately. They don’t tend to accentuate the swing inequality heavily (there are exceptions esp on piano) Players often think they are swinging when they are not. I know I do/did haha. So record yourself and listen critically.
The best advice is often ‘don’t try to swing.’ Quite a few students of mine have improved right away after that advice. The swing comes out naturally instead of forced and jerky.
Relaxed accuracy is terribly important for all playing when it comes to time. That’s a combo of inner ear, secure technique and mental state.
In general, if you are hearing it right (if you have listened to a lot of jazz usually and sung along with it) and are relaxed and technically able to play your instrument, your body should do the rest.
Usually the biggest rhythmic problem is the placement of the swing ‘and’; if you can accurately and reliably place that at a given tempo that’s a lot of it. Singing along with Baisies L’il Darlin is good basic practice. Other important rhythms include the quarter and half note triplets, clave and the bembe 6/8 bell patter superimposed on 4/4. Nailing these things accurately can help unlock phrasing and accentuation patterns.
Get that together and the next step is to play with the best rhythm sections you can find. For all you can work on accuracy with metronome and listening to recordings of yourself and so on, swing is really a communal thing.
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Yes, I think it's definitely more intuitive than academic. Notation can't accurately describe it. You probably still could describe it scientifically tho. The 1st 8th note takes up this proportion, the 2nd takes up this proportion etc.
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People who sit around worrying whether they're swinging or not will never swing.
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This topic keeps coming up. It's important to listen - and note the many variations.
Here is a technical analysis based on drummer's ride patterns.
https://www.audiolabs-erlangen.de/content/05-fau/professor/00-mueller/03-publications/2015_DittmarPM_SwingRatio_ISMIR.pdf
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It can't be notated partly because it's tempo dependent. Standard notation doesn't permit that. One can imagine a more complex notation which might, but I've never seen anything like that.
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For what it’s worth, there’s a fair amount of ethnomusicological research on the question of jazz swing. Most of it is ethnographic, simply asking musicians what they think is swing and collating the results. A less pervasive, and perhaps more novel, approach has been to attempt to measure “swing.” From that angle, this article from almost 30 years ago suggests that swing derives from the “participatory discrepancies” between players. It’s a long read but may be interesting to those who are curious about the topic.
The Progler Papers: Searching for Swing: Participatory Discrepancies in the Jazz Rhythm Section
Led by Charles Keil, it was part of a larger series of studies by American, European and Caribbean ethnomusicologists into the question of swing and groove, although the ethnographic approach seems to be more commonly preferred today.
The contrast between the two approaches is remarkable. The ethnographic camp looks at the cultural meaning of swing and leans toward interesting, if not mysterious or even mystical, descriptions. The other camp takes a more physical approach by attempting to look at what musicians are actually doing in practice, rather than how they talk about what they are doing.
I do lean toward preferring the ethnographic approach because the stories are more interesting, perhaps more human, than the numbers. Yet, the measurement approach is to me still intriguing.
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I agree on this: “The best advice is often ‘don’t try to swing.’ “
This is also what Bruce Forman tells in his workshops.
For my part I push the concept even further and my suggestion is: try not to play with swing!
This idea of ??mine seems absurd but working with Coda Finale on various solo transcriptions I found that the best "Human playback Swing" setting is about 20/30.
A very low value that approaches the no-swing (straight eights) playback.
Obviously the concept of swing is very, very personal and essentially (as with many aspects of studying the guitar) you have to start by asking yourself a question: am I satisfied with my way of playing?
If the answer is YES, there's no point in wasting any more time.
If the answer is NO....then one or more strategies must be put into practice to obtain a better result. I personally believe that listening to jazz recordings from all eras is the foundation of everything.
Ettore Quenda.it - Jazz Guitar - Chitarra Jazz
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You have to find the pocket. You can’t find the pocket by synching to a click btw; it’s best done playing with a real drummer (inc on records) until you feel it. Drum genius is a good thing to use. In general, lay back, play even
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This is a male-dominated forum. Everything's got to be technical, measured, calibrated. But human beings aren't machines and if they're trying to be like perfect machines god help them. Either you swing or you don't. If you can't, too bad. It can be 'improved' by exercises but it's not the real thing. So play bossa or classical instead, much easier. Or give up. Too bad.
Teachers hate all that, of course, puts them out of a job :-)
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I wouldn't talk about swing if I were you.
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I’m amused by the notion that Brazilian time feel is easier to get than swing.
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Metronome on 2,4 and try NOT to swing. Then you swing.
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The downbeat of one. The upbeat of three. Simple.
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But we still haven't even defined it...
I mean...Lester Young swings...Coleman Hawkins swings...Dexter Gordon swings...Gene Ammons swings...Hank Mobley swings...Paul Desmond swings...Jackie McLean swings...Gerry Mulligan swings...
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I dunno about trying not to swing or not. It's a matter of your note placement/timing over the rhythm. Take a few passes at a recorded solo. Often, one will swing more than the other and in doing so, it sounds better. At least I find this with my own playing. It's not predictable, putting together a solo that swings, but I think with some focus you can put a track down that swings more than a previous one because you start to hear where the notes should've been rather than where you put them. But yeah, overthinking on the spot it doesn't work well. It's a feeling.
A hot solo ripping a lot of notes that don't swing sounds a lot less cool and attracts the ear less than a more spare solo with notes that swing. I will be doing a lot of this sort of thing in the next few weeks since I am recording an album and getting all the main tracks down and then coming back to overdub the solos and vocals. It has to swing as several of them are medium tempo shuffles and funky blues.
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I think a lot of time, swing is the sum of parts. You can play some very evenly spaced eighths against a rhythm section that is swinging their ass off, and the net result is fantastic.
Swing is groove, to an extent. I know it can be qualified further than that, but to me--this "swings."
Like, does Freddie Green swing? Or does he make the band swing?
Re: trying not to swing--there's a lot to that. I played in Django style groups for a few years and I felt like it made my swinging in playing situations outside of that element sound very corny and contrived. And I still think I might accent more notes than necessary in eighth note lines...I dunno...I'm old fashioned maybe?
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And what jazzman with a great name doesn't swing? Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
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Somebody will find a name to argue, I'm sure. Originally Posted by kris
And what jazzman with a great name doesn't swing?
But exactly...they all swing...and their swing doesn't sound anything alike!
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Word-guy mode: Is "swing" one property or a range of properties/characteristics? A lexicographer would start by collecting as many referents (exemplars) as possible and sorting through them, looking for commonalities and distinctions in usage. I suppose a musicologist would do something similar with musical examples: collect and analyze. And with modern tools, I would think that precise analysis is possible. But putting the results into standard notation, I suspect, might not be so easy.
The challenge of notating swing is interesting--the impression I got from most of my workshop teachers is that conventional notation is suggestive rather than precisely descriptive, that what happens in performance is too subtle and variable to be nailed down on the page, and that you know it when you hear it. (Hearing it is the only option I have, since getting time/phrasing was the hardest part of my failed attempts at reading notation. But I can hear it and imitate it well enough.)
BTW--Bossa doesn't swing? It's certainly doing something that makes me want to dance. As do some classical waltzes (Tchaikovsky comes to mind), which nevertheless don't feel quite the same as musette waltzes or "Take Five." Does two-against-three fit in here somewhere?
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The word used in Brazil is Ginga. Refers to Brazilian swing. I've read that even the Brazilians went crazy trying to nail Joao Gilberto's comping which, at a superficial level, often seems to be 1 2 3&. But, not exactly. And, there's a documentary about the original Bossa Nova guys which makes the point that every guitar player had his own way of doing it. Originally Posted by RLetson
Seems to me that it's human nature, it's music and it ends up with subtleties of groove whether it's Bossa or Swing.
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You have a point, but it's swing feel that the conversation's always about... interminably. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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Ginga. Not to be confused with Guinga. Although Guinga has ginga. Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
Joao’s thing is deceptively simple innit
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But Hawkins 'swing' is a completely different type of swing than the more Bird influenced swings. Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
Jimmy raney goes over that in his great intro to his Aebersold book.He says the common mistake about the "Modern Jazz" of Bird was that he wasn't paying even 8ths.. But Bird was playing even 8ths, it's just that he accents the off beat more than the on beat, and then JR shows how he does it with down and up strokes, or on that video, slurs. Then he shows how he used accents to demonstrate the 3 against 4 concept, while still playing even 8ths. This is part of my problem with the Chuck Wayne style of picking; it often eliminates the means to employ accents like Raney, Bird, Diz, etc.did,.yet paradoxically makes some of their most difficult lines easier to play compared to alt. picking all of them. That's why Raney used a combination of plectrum techniques...
He then goes on to say that the 60s brought on the blues/soul type of players who wanted to go back to the "roots" of Black music (I think I'd put Benson and Rodney Franklin in that bag), who go back to the older way of playing 8th notes.
That's why I think that rock players immediately latch on to Benson. Benson even says that Bird destroyed jazz, in his autobiography, but that he is going to "save" jazz by taking the harmonic ideas of Bird,, and blend them with the rhythmic feel that the modern players he plays and identifies with use.
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