Ice Cream is the only remotely tolerable Sarah
McLachlan song because its underlying groove is a hip jazz waltz
Snobs like me consider Sarah McLachlan to be offensively
inoffensive, like a too-sweet-smelling aromatherapy candle.
But Ice Cream is a whole different story, and though I've
always liked it, I only just now figured out why: it's the
drum part.
Ice Cream
Most S McL songs are based around different bland grooves
in four-four time. But Ice Cream is in three-four, and a syncopated,
swinging three-four at that. While your conscious mind tends
to focus on the lyrics and such, your monkey brain starts
happily tapping its toes to the tune's happening beat.
A little history is in order here. A common nickname for
three-four is waltz time, and the waltz used to be one of
the dominant styles of popular music (think Blue
Danube, its era's memetic equivalent to Thriller.) But
somewhere around the beginning of the twentieth century, the
waltz got played out, and has since been regarded mostly as
corny. Country music does still use a lot of waltz time, but
it tends to pride itself on its atavistic corniness. The blues
shuffle common in rock and roll has kind of a three feel,
but it's part of a larger twelve-eight, actually a very slow
and triplet-heavy four-four. With few exceptions, American
music has been a waltz-free zone for the past half-century.
In the late fifties and early sixties, bebop musicians started
to investigate three-four time in earnest, for them an exercise
in exotica. They quickly discovered that three sounds better
if you play it slower, looser and with more surprises in it.
The jazz waltz as perfected by the John Coltrane quartet with
Elvin
Jones is a different animal entirely from the "oom-pah-pah
oom-pah-pah" used by Strauss.
The canonical example is
Coltrane's version of My Favorite Things, off the classic
album by the same name.
My Favorite Things
You can hear some other Coltrane quartet facemelters in waltz
time on his 1961 Village Vanguard recordings.
dig any version of Spiritual or Greensleeves
Here's a typical Elvin Jones three-four ride cymbal pattern:
