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

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.

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