The swing feel IS truly a feel

[mr. beaumont]

Yeah, I'm being a little silly...swing means groove, really. Unless we're getting overly academic about it, but we'd NEVER do that here

[Stevebol]

The sarcasm of the year award goes to...

[PMB]

So I've been playing around with this today. I've kind of avoided heavy dot swing in my eights for a while now, so it was fun to lock in my quarters at medium tempo more and find that it doesn't sound corny at all.

I think the usual mistake people make with swing feel is playing an inequality but not placing the upbeat late enough and accenting the downbeat. So it comes back to finding the position of the 'ands'. Which Ray here is couching in his own terms, but any good jazz educator would emphasise the importance of finding.

The 'almost downbeat' thing does put me in mind of the way that Mike Longo handled counting in his teaching. Take this rhythm:

Attachment 128794

So here we interpret this push rhythm as a push of the 1st beat. This is generally the way I conceptualise this structural upbeats.

He counts eight note lines traditionally. So if you have a string of 8ths with a push at the end, you actually get this:
Attachment 128795
So yeah, I like this way of looking at it, and I can use it in my own teaching. I teach this thing to kids:
Attachment 128796
So we'd count 1 2 3 | 1 2 3 | 1 2 3 4 1 |---for the first line haha.

Most of them get the swung eights but play the tied push early. I have to coach them to get it more in the pocket. But it's something you can start pretty early on in the learning process.

It's a problem with notation not reflecting the actual music, as others have mentioned. So we used number of notational conventions that aren't obvious to non jazz players to represent jazz rhythms. Ray is obviously a big band leader and is dealing with horns that need to interpret notation. But, if you transcribe a lot and play with recordings - or of course with experienced professional section players in a big band etc - you are going to find things out about the placement of those pushes if you are paying attention.

I found this a few years back with NYJO. Some of the junior groups were learning by ear (which was quite new at the time) and the older groups were playing from charts. Guess who swung more?

[Mick-7]

Eh? there's a drummer.

Ah yes, I could barely hear the drummer playing the traps, the guitar was louder.

[dharma2020]

It's funny, I come from blues background and for me it's actually harder to play straight eight notes, after so many years of playing with a shuffle rhythm.
I think what helps is transcribing/memorizing a solo and then playing it over the recording.