What's with that constant cymbal tapping in jazz drumming?

I agree the triplet-based swing thing appears in other places, and 12/8 is a characteristic blues shuffle and much rock derives from blues. And some of the early pop players (eg the Motown guys) were basically jazzers and that feel steals in all over the place. (One of the subtler things is that in some r'n'b eighth-note rythms are played straight but 16th notes are swung - "Until It Comes Back to Me" by Aretha, an underrated classic with great bass playing by Chuck Rainey is a good example.)

My preference for a rhythmic distinction between jazz and not jazz is not that its perfect. But it has the virtue of simplicity and I think it gets it right more of the time than any other method, especially since the area of contention most often discussed is between jazz and rock/pop.

If we're going to call Bitches Brew jazz I can't see where you stop as you move through to Mahavishnu and then to Carlos Santana or Cream. And the popular notion that jazz = improvision is a non-starter because it's easy to think of so much improvised music, from rock to raga that's clearly not jazz.

A certain amount of music with a jazz feel contains little or no improvision (Sinatra with Nelson Riddle, etc). If Miles wrote out his trumpet parts on the Gil Evans stuff would it stop being jazz? Louis Jordan (or certainly early LJ) as far as I'm concerned, is jazz. I'm aware that he re-recorded a lot of stuff in the fifties with production-values and instrumentation designed to appeal to rock'n'roll fans (Scotty Moore-style guitar and a more heavily emphasised back-beat) but I'd need to hear that stuff again to offer an opinion on how far it moved away from a swing feel.

But this is semantics: I personally find it the most useful way to draw the distinction, and in an ideal world I'd like to see it become the norm, but realistically it ain't gonna happen. Record stores are not going to start filing pre IASW Miles in a different place from post.

Once you get into Latin music things start to get really hard to describe. Just to take the most basic traditional Cuban son, for example: the implicit feel is derived from the clave-pattern which can be 3-2 or 2-3. A 3-2 clave will involve a repeating 2 bar pattern. In the first bar the clave is struck 3 times, the first time on the one beat, the second and third time on the off beats ("2 and" and "3 and"); in the second bar the clave is struck twice (on the on beats 2 and 3). Against this the simplest bass can be a completely unsyncopated half note on 1 followed by quarter-notes on 3 and 4 (both bars). Two simple rhythms played against one another, but already the "egg rolling down a hill" feel of so much latin music is there. Against this the timbales might play 5 beats in the first bar (on one, 2, 2-and, 3-and, and 4) and 4 in the second (regular quarter note on-beats). You can see how complicated this is getting, but this is still the rhythm for a simple, rustic Cuban dance: think how rarely you hear a Cuban bass player playing regular on-beats and you'll realise just how much of a simplification it is.

The rhythms derive from traditional dances, and have their roots in African music. Already complex rhythms were made increasingly complex by brilliant innovators like Cachaito. And different parts of Latin America have different traditions.

Obviously people from a jazz or rock tradition will not import these rhythms unchanged: often they simplify them drastically , so that a basic bass rhythm in most jazz bossa is based on playing a dotted quarter note followed by an eighth note (the rhythm at the start of "Rikki Don't Lose That Number".

You're probably not going to find much of that helpful as it is overly technical but the subject is just so huge. I don't have much experience of playing Latin music and someone who does might be able to do a better job of simplifying the subject and extracting the essence.

Have you heard his solo album? It's great.

The problem with Marsalis is that he (being the ideological fool he is... doesn't he know that he is working to consign jazz to the role of mood music for white bobos?) leaves out a lot of techniques of avant-garde jazz drumming. AG drumming, or Aaron Grossman drumming (oopps haha I mean Avant Garde) can be very abstract. I would compare some of it to Abstract Impressionist painting. WIth Pollack, Rothko, etc., color and mood take precedent over direct figurative representation (the jazz analogue being ting-ting ta-ting). In AG drumming, the drumer can be more of a soloist on an equal level with the other players.
Here are some themes and highlights of post-bop drumming (a very incomplete survey):
* Tony Williams playing "So What" on Miles' 1964 Complete Concert. On this track, one can really hear Tony pushing the band. He plays very loudly at certain moments, pushing the rhythym section more towards the forefront. He also uses some rolls and a few minimal little repeated parts to break up the time. There is a moment in which he plays a roll during a solo where he starts off more intensly and then brings the volume (and pitch too) down and effectively guides the solo.
* Tony Williams playing on "Hat and Beard" on Eric Dolphy's "Out to Lunch". Listening to the beginning of this track, one can hear Marsalis' swing conception fall apart. Williams plays some very straightforward ideas. His playing at times is almost military.
* Milford Graves playing on all of Albert Ayler's "Love Cry". I still can't decipher much of the drumming on this album, but it is worth noting that just as Ayler tried to bring the music back to its more chaotic and melodic roots in New Orleans, Graves sounds like a marching band that has had too much to drink. He plays a lot of rolls all around the kit, and the rolls add color, and sometimes seem to not have anything to do with timekeeping at at all.
* Pete La Roca Sims playing "Sin Street" on his own album "Turkish Women at the Bath" This whole album is classic. It has John Gilmore on sax, a member of Sun Ra's band, and a major influence on Coltrane. It also has Chick Corea pre-scientology. Most importantly, Pete Sims plays very well on this record. Sims is one of the most underrated players in jazz. He played (undocumented) as one of the first drummer with John Coltrane's classic quartet, and he also worked with Sonny Rollins, Joe Henderson, and Jackie McLean (Sims' solo on "Minor Apprehension" on the album New Soil is supposed to be incredible but I have yet to hear it). Sims' playing on "Sin Street" is mind-boggling, as he manages to make the odd-time signature swing very hard. His solo, however, is incredibly loose and impressionistic.
* There are a lot of other great AG drummers out there, but two more I would like to mention are Jim Black and Susie Ibarra, who are both doing a lot to advance the idea of the drummer as creator of texture. They both utilize a whole range of percussion onstage (or so I have heard, as neither have made it to DC recently). They have both played on a lot of different sessions, so just go to Allmusic...

blah

And then on the record on which Miles most closely borrowed from funk, On the Corner, you could argue that the drumming in a sense takes funk's radicalism further, inasmuch as the drummer (I forget who it was) just plays the same extremely simple stacatto pattern for pretty much the whole 30 minutes (I don't know how to put it in technical terms, but it's a real short little riff on hi-hats, I think), with a breaks to lay out into the relatively straight-ahead, catchy rock groove, handclaps and whistles of "Black Satin" (maybe that's why that's the most well-known tune on the album).

If you compare it with Sly's "In Time" off Fresh, which was an inspiration for On the Corner, you can see how they sound similar, yet it's like Miles has cubed what Sly was doing. Not only is the basic drum pattern simpler, more aggressive and higher in the mix, but it's then supplemented by tablas (which lock into the drums' groove quite organically, unlike some of the other stuff on which Miles threw in tablas as superfluous atmosphere). Then you have the bass and the guitar playing these short, incredibly angular riffs against the grain of the drums, and the mix is panning around the soundfield, emphasizing and deemphasizing different elements with its own sense of rhythm, and the tabla is droning away in the backgroun... there's so much going on in that record.

The great thing about Miles' fusion stuff is that it's all so different. People tend to lump it altogether, but he was evolving from record to record just as fast as (or faster than) any other time in his career.

I think there was a lot of looping and splicing on On the Corner, but I haven't listened recently (and often can't tell when I listen, anyway).

Next question: what about no wave? When I was in New York in the late '70s early '80s, there were jazz musicians and nonjazz musicians going out of their way to play with each other, to see what would happen. Some of this was in no wave, some of this was in "improv." Bob Quine of the Voidoids and Jody Harris of the Contortions took lots from On the Corner, though they're guitarists, not drummers. Seems that there's so much ongoing cross-fertilization, and if you don't let it in to your sense of "jazz," you banish jazz from the present. It may be just the word jazz that gets banished, but nothing is just semantic.

As for defining jazz, some semi-famous musician (can't remember who) said that "the only tradition in jazz is innovation" and that is how I look at it. If one considers how quickly the music evolved over the last 100 years, reactionary attitudes make even less sense.

I don't think it was an identical pattern, but similar ones: he'd play consecutive sixteenth notes sometimes for just under a measure and sometimes just over a measure, and then stop dead for the next measure (plus or minus the remainder), which had the effect of screeching the car to a halt every other measure while the rest of the music tumbled forward into a ditch. I don't know enough about funk or jazz to know if this was unique to Miles' recordings, but I suspect it was; and it's related to what Miles himself would often do: just play a trumpet note or two, or a squiggle, and STOP. Same effect. (Or he'd fool around during the mixing, keep punching a hair-raising organ sound in and out, on and off; especially in "Rated X" (on Get Up With It), a track I refer to as "Shaft Goes To Hell." For better or worse, all this had an inspiring on my guitar playing, since I got the idea to play a couple notes and then stop and not play anything for a bar or two. I found this appealing because it seemed to give me great power to shape the music without having to actually play very much, which was good strategy, since I couldn't improvise for shit.

"Once a groove was established on 'Rated X,' at several points it was interrupted or suspended by the engineer's abruptly cutting off the rhythm tracks, leaving nothing but the sustained, floating sound of the held keyboard chords. A sudden loss of sound like this can feel like a physical leap into space, or something like a gravity-free move into another kind of music. It was very different from breaks in traditional jazz: if heard live, the listener could see that the musicians were still holding their instruments and would continue playing once the break ended, and through repeated listenings to recordings in the jazz tradition, one knew that the musicians would always start up again after the break. But this was something new. Using four tape recording machines in postproduction, the engineer switched from one tape to another, and some of the musicians were made to disappear--instantly, with no sonic residue or echo remaining. Adding to the indeterminacy was that 'the organ track came from Miles' contribution to a different song,' according to Teo. 'It had nothing to do with the song 'Rated X' originally. You hear this band drop out, right? The organ just sits on it. That was a loop. I brought the band in one or two bars later. That track was done in the editing room.'

Coming after the relentless tumult of the groove, the effect of the loss of rhythm is heart-stopping, if not apocalyptic. The return of the rhythm calls attention to the groove and forces the listener-dancer to attend to it, even in its absence. Once again, Miles had bared some of the work that went into the making of the recording and foregrounded the point at which the musicians end and the technology begins. Miles had been dropping free-floating passages into his music ever since 'Deception' in 1950, but this was more radical in intent and effect. He once spoke of doing music such as he had heard in Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck, where during the perforamce, 'A window is opened, suddenly the orchestra stops and you hear a marching band outside. When it's closed, the orchestra starts again. That's the kind of thing I want to do, open some windows.'"

These days we would probably call that the 'drop,' and of course it's standard operating procedure in dance music now.

I think ArfArf is right about Miles' fusion not being jazz, and I think Miles himself would have agreed. He wasn't actually listening to much jazz at this time, mostly disparaged it in interviews, was listening to a lot of pop and funk, and wanted to break out of what he saw as the jazz ghetto and over to a different audience.

I thought I would have mentioned this above, but I didn't: I think one of the big reasons that modern jazz drumming and the emphasis on the ride cymbal developed is its sonic place in a small group.

Since it's acoustic music, the musicians have to create their own natural balance obv., and it's natural to stay out of each other's way. The horns do their thing, the piano stays away from roots and the lower register to give room to the bass, and the ride cymbal cuts through clearly and takes up a lot of frequency room without covering anything up. It's all well and good to play more time on the toms 'Sing, Sing, Sing' style in a big band, where the volume is so much higher and the low brass are playing bass lines, but in a small group it would pretty much obviate the upright bass. Playing on the hi-hat all the time creates more white-noise wash when it's open and a too-small, too-tight sound when it's closed.

I don't know, I could write poetry about a nice ride cymbal. It just sounds so RIGHT in the context of that music, like it's the other half of the basscymbal. It completes the upper half of the bass, the half with the attack and sustain and defined swing. And I think drummers SHOULD use all the sound sources they can and be creative, and I do (christ, I bring a cooking pot to all my gigs), but it all comes back to the ride cymbal beat as home base, for sound musical reasons.

When you play jazz (or really any music where improvisation is a big factor), I think you have to use the whole kit is a single instrument, rather than thinking "snare for backbeat, hihat for time, bass for bass" etc etc. You can usually spot drummers with jazz backgrounds a mile away because of this - for example, listen to Bill Bruford play. I don't even think he's that great a *jazz* drummer, but it's obvious he isn't thinking in narrow "bass + snare + hihat" terms when he plays.

In another way, I approach playing drums in jazz the same way I approach arranging a composed piece, in that there is a responsibility to "support" the music but there shouldn't necessarily be only one way of delegating the various "jobs" you are performing to specific drums, styles, accents, licks, etc. If I'm listening to a drummer, and it seems he's just staying on the ride with the same pattern over and over, then I'll think:
a) he's either playing that because the band has bad time and he has to do it, or
b) because he's got other interesting things happening elsewhere, and the ride is merely setting that up, or
c) he's playing a chart that tells him to do it that way

Or it could be that he just isn't thinking about much other than keeping a pulse (which in jazz usually equates to really boring drumming - though even then there are exceptions like Tony Williams playing that hihat thing for 15 minutes on In A Silent Way, obv a considered compositional choice rather than him not being able to come up with something). But then, I don't really have a problem listening to someone play on the ride a lot. Good musicians tend to can make almost anything sound good.

. It's still a sound that bugs me most of the time

Can't argue with that I guess.

I just have a boom-box type CD player so that might be part of the problem, but I'm sure there are many people who have equally low quality stereos for whom that sound isn't a problem.

(I shouldn't have chimed in again, anyway. It's not as if this is the only thing preventing me from loving jazz.)

Boba Fett79 (not a name I recognize) (and why am I dredging up my own old threads I know I know), I don't know who that was addressed to, but according to the experts on this thread, I don't think it was thought up in New Orleans, and whatever bad things can be said about me, I am not a fey indie rock nerd.

I shouldn't keep reviving this thread just to repeat myself. That was a bad move on my part last night.

I would definitely like to like more jazz, but I continue to just like a small portion of it.

"Believe me, all these young kids growing up in inner city schools, before they get into the rap they should know who Coltrane and Ellington were"

"I just think we don’t require skill in art anymore. That’s what perplexes me, because it’s totally commercially driven. The lowest common denominator. But we have great musicians in this country. We just need to water them, like a flower, and let them grow, and respect them and encourage them. But we don’t."

blah blah, same old shit

I resent statements like this that imply that bop is neither "thoughful" nor "cerebral." What, do you think bop solos are just people playing scales really really fast?

But:

Wynton Marsalis said on the Ken Burn's thing that his definition of jazz was music with a particular triplet-based rhythmic swing. (Despite having quoted WM twice approvingly on this thread I'm not a disciple or a particular fan). We are never going to get agreement on where the barrier between jazz and not-jazz should be drawn, but for various reasons I think this is the most practical place. The issue is clouded by the fact that "not-jazz" is too often used as a pejorative term by critics: in my view it should be a purely descriptive term with no value attached.

If you accept this definition "Bitches Brew", for example, is "not jazz" (I love "Bitches Brew" - this is not an attempt to sneak in a denigration of electric Miles).

You can see where my argument is headed: once you look at "jazz" that is influenced by Sly/JB, then if you accept my argument it is "not jazz" and even if you don't there is a quantum leap away from the jazz that went before. We are not talking subtle gradations of difference.

Looking at the characteristics of funk rhythm sections as opposed to jazz (caution: gross simplification/generalisations to follow)

- the implied triplet feel of jazz is replaced by a squarer 4/4 time where 8th beats are regularised.

- much more of the drum kit is given over to keeping time. Typically the bass drum and snare drum will play repetitive patterns as well as the cymbals. That so much more whole kit is dedicated to keeping time gives the drummer the choice of using cymbals to reinforce the regular pattern or frees them up for emphasis/decoration.

- These repetitive patterns can be extremely complex though. The mix of offbeats and on-beats is much more sophisticated than most earlier rock drumming. They would also vary between sections of the song (in some James Brown songs the tendency to stay on a single chord meant that subtle differences in the basic rhythm might be the only or main difference between verse and bridge, for example).

- Because many of the guys playing this style were virtuosi they could maintain and subtly vary these sophisticated patterns while

- The bassist will "lock" with this overall pattern (this is very different from the typical jazz pattern where, as mentioned, the bassist locks with the cymbal and the rest of the kit it freed up for more creative emphasis etc).

- The bassist will also play a repetitive rhythmic pattern, often on a single chord throughout. This has important implications:

1 In jazz the division of time into bars is much less obvious because there is a fairly even flow of quarter beats on cymbal and bass. In funk the more typical pattern is for the bass and drums to come together strongly on the "one" beat of the bar followed by the drums and bass playing divergent but complementary patterns of off and on beats. Hence in Funkadelic the constant quasi-mystical reference to the "One". (Just to illustrate how simplistic this is the repetition could be over two bars not one, so the "One" is emphasised only every second bar; and some patterns manage to emphasise the "One" even though neither the bass or drums play the one beat!

2 Funk tends to be harmonically very simple and is glued together by the bass playing a repetitive harmonic pattern. Jazz tunes tend to go on a harmonic journey coming "home" by resolving to the tonic periodically every 8 or 16 or 32 bars. Funk typically comes "home" harmonically at the beginning of every bar when the bass thumps out the root note of the chord. In any case the bass's use of repetitive patterns glues the harmony together.

One consequence of this is that extremely discordant elements can be introduced. The discordant elements in jazz tend to be "controlled": increasingly discordant harmonies are introduced as the music develops and the ear accepts these for two reasons:

1 These discordant harmonies are resolved to the more consonant tonic.

2. With familiarisation the jazz fan learns to regard these harmonies as beautiful (or semi-consonant) in themselves.

In funk the second reason can effectively be done away with: the "glue" of the harmonically repeated bassline and the return "home" to the root at the beginning of every bar means that the ear will tolerate a much greater amount of temporary dissonance, because it is so transient. There is no need for the dissonance to be controlled or consonant to the "educated" ear. This has huge implications for rap and other sample-based forms where the
samples of non-musical materials, or music from different keys can be collaged together and be made to sound congruous by the repetitive harmonic and rhythmic patterns of bass and drums.

(A similar effect is achieved in a lot of free jazz where the use of modal harmonic background means that extreme discordancy can be offset by a continual returning home to harmonic familiarity. That's why lots of listeners brought up on funk or certain rock forms can respond more easily to free jazz than to mainstream jazz: it's a smaller leap, because it's much closer to what they are musically familiar with).

-- ArfArf (ArfAr...) (webmail), January 16th, 2003 6:18 AM. (link)

best post on ILM i've read in two years

(Wish I had something of importance to add to it...)

The bass is the pulse, the drums are also to a certain extent, but they're more there to provide color and accents. There's a soloist trying to play over chord changes on top, so you can't have the drummer playing all this thunderous stuff all over the kit (at least in swing, bop, etc.) Jazz drumming is significantly more subtle than rock drums, and if you listen closely, you may realize that there's a lot more going on besides the ride cymbal than you realize (light comping on the snare, kick etc.)

If you want examples of music where I especially like the sound of the percussion and like the rhythmic approach, I would point to: most Arabic music (limiting it to styles from before the 80s) and most salsa, as well as most Sun Ra. There are some examples in rock, but not all that many really.

Granted, it was kind of a dumb question to ask, or to phrase the way I phrased it, but sometimes bluntly asking things that way can lead to some interesting responses. I was pretty impressed with a lot of the responses here.

I just don't like the sound of most jazz drumming (with the ride cymbal tapping as the ultimate annoyance) or relate to its rhythmic sense, at least when it gets into Elvin Jones territory. For color and timbre, I'll take a combination of congas, bongos, and timbales over the standard drum kit any day. Ditto for the typical Egyptian or Lebanese percussion combination (though I don't know the names of all of that).

I don't think it's right to just look at as the primitive ancestor of jazz drumming, because the style has continued to develop there for the last, oh, century or so (both on drumset and the street music bass drummer/snare drummer configuration). It's still jazz, but it's focused on the drums rather than the cymbals and it's dance music first and foremost. For modern New Orleans drumming, I'd check out:

Leroy Jones, Mo' Cream from the Crop (w/Shannon Powell)
Derek Shezbie, Spodie's Back (w/Herlin Riley et al)
Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Shake That Thing
New Birth Brass Band, D-Boy
Rebirth Brass Band, We Come to Party, Hot Venom

Rockist, given what you like (Latin music, etc.), I really think you'd like New Orleans brass bands .

Yes. Ole I didn't like, but it may have had more to do with other things in the music. I did try to listen to what you or someone pointed out about Afro-Blue, but I didn't get it. I do like some Coltrane, but often in spite of the drumming.

(I do like a fair amount of traditional African drumming that I've heard, though I didn't mention that hear, but that's kind of implied in my mention of salsa, so you are right to mention Africanicity.)

Basically, brass bands and trad bands can both do the traditional New Orleans jazz/gospel thing, but modern brass band music can also have a lot more clave and r&b in it.

So many wild opinions in this thread!

A whole lot of pop music now does not really have that much harmonic information to really use it for something to improvise over. Some stuff is just a 4 bar beat loop, a sustained pad sound (maybe not even a chord) and then multi tracked vocal melody and a sample sound of some sort. Chord progression...eh, maybe kinda. Bassline...sometimes not even used. Vocal melody...lots are pretty childrens song like, which is often catchy, but not exactly some great leaps in intervals and the music juice that jazz musicians like, which is often a bit more obscure than the usual listener (at least now).

There have been so many jazz recordings of "Black Hole Sun," and I know I've seen several jazz groups perform it live, that it seems as if it has become a "contemporary" jazz standard. I wonder what it is about that song that draws the attention of jazzers.

I didn't know that but going over it rn, it makes sense. The harmony and melody are filled with modal mixture, with a lot of bIII and bVI, and both major and minor versions of the 3rd and 7th scale degrees in the melody, and that weird bII at the ends of cadences in the verse, while the chorus ends with a good proper V chord. The melody is also syncopated and lends itself well to jazz rhythm.

no one ever said jazz has to have constant cymbals - and have I not been constant?

If a steady yet subtly syncopated ride cymbal (with a good balance of ping and wash) is wrong, I don't wanna be right.

Jazz ride cymbal is one of the most satisfying of all sounds, imo

Saw some interesting social media post yesterday in my feed about Stewart Copeland discussing the Jazz influence on Charlie Watts and how he could perceive it in a general sense even if Charlie never ever did the cymbal tapping thing.

now yarn mallets on a cybal bringin a creshendo is a thing to be cherished - like in THE OCEAN by Lou Reed

Lol