Building the Funky Drummer beat

I’m developing some groove pedagogy for an instrumental method book I’m working on with Heather Fortune. The goal is to help people understand and create Black American vernacular rhythms, specifically blues, rock, funk, dance, and hip-hop. As we started collecting and transcribing grooves, we quickly ran into a problem: all the really good ones use complex syncopated rhythms that are hard for beginners. Meanwhile, the music in beginner-level method books is rhythmically bland and unfunky. What do we do?

Heather takes a creative approach to arranging for her school bands. For each part, she creates two versions: a simplified one and an advanced one, which she places side by side in the score. Students can start out playing the simplified versions, and when they are ready to challenge themselves with the “real” music, they can just jump seamlessly over. This enables Heather to accommodate players at different levels in the same ensemble. I like this idea, and it made me think we should do something similar for groove pedagogy. My thought was this: for each groove, create a series of simplified versions, moving in incremental steps from basic quarter notes to the full syncopated complexity of the actual music. The real challenge is that we want each version of the groove to be musically satisfying, so even if you can’t handle the pure uncut funk yet, you can at least play something that sounds good.

In this post, I test the method out on the Funky Drummer break. The video below shows an Ableton Live session I made that moves from an extremely simplified  quarter note version through incrementally more advanced rhythms every four bars.

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Bach’s mysterious Sarabande

While learning and learning about the Prelude to Bach’s G minor Lute Suite, I also came into contact with the suite’s Sarabande. This piece is famous among music theorists, because while it’s only forty measures long, those forty measures are action-packed, harmonically speaking. Here’s a performance by Evangelina Mascardi.

I appreciate that Mascardi doesn’t play it with too much melodrama or rubato. Note that, like most lutenists, she’s using Baroque tuning, so it sounds like she’s playing in F-sharp minor.

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Pieces vs Songs vs Grooves

In preparation for making a bunch of new YouTube videos, I have been thinking about Anne Danielsen’s distinction between songs and grooves. It’s a useful scheme for thinking about pop, but it doesn’t cover everything in Western music. We need a third category for linear through-composed music. So here’s my proposal: all of the music in our culture falls into three big overlapping categories: pieces, songs, and grooves.

  • A piece is linear: a series of non-repeating events that occur in a specific order.
  • A groove is circular: a short cell that repeats an indefinite number of times, without any larger-scale structure.
  • A song is in between: a linear arrangement of circular elements.

The categories are not perfectly distinct. Think more in terms of a continuum. On one extreme, you have total circularity, an infinite loop of a breakbeat or drum machine pattern. On the other extreme, you have total linearity, a serialist composition without any repetition at all. All Western music lies somewhere on this continuum. (All other music probably does too, but I don’t know enough about everyone else’s culture to be able to speak confidently about it.)

 

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Oye Como Va

Santana’s recording of “Oye Como Va” is one of the most outrageous grooves I’ve ever heard. David Welna describes it as “a Cuban cha-cha composed by a Puerto Rican New Yorker and performed by a Mexican immigrant and his San Francisco rock band.” It’s red-hot from its opening seconds. As the organ starts the montuno, someone in the band says “Brrrrrr, sabor”, meaning flavor, and that is definitely the word.

The song is a cover of a 1950s cha-cha-chá by Tito Puente.

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Swing primer

It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing, doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah” – Duke Ellington

Hear a seamless collage of several varieties of swing:

Aside from the blues, swing is the United States’ most significant musical innovation. People typically associate its rubbery, sensual feel with jazz, but swing is everywhere in the musics descended from the African diaspora: ragtime, blues, musical theater, country, R&B, rock, funk, reggae, hip-hop, electronic dance music, and so on. The best way to learn about swing is through aural and hands-on experience. The Groove Pizza is a good way to get started.

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What does it mean to remix the classical canon

Here’s an exciting thing that happened recently.

I didn’t have an explicitly anti-racist motivation when I started making the remixes, but if they’re being received that way, I’m delighted. In this post, I’m going to do some thinking out loud about what it all means.

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Party like it’s 1624

In trying to learn (and learn about) the Bach Chaconne, I’m facing a struggle that’s familiar from trying to learn about jazz. The chaconne is a dance form originating in the Americas, or among African people who were brought to the Americas. Spanish and Portuguese colonists brought the chaconne to Europe in the early 1600s, where it became a wildly popular dance. Over time, composers of “art” music got interested in it too, and they used it as the basis for an entire genre of increasingly abstracted compositions. By the time Bach wrote the chaconne in his Partita for Violin No. 2, he was referring to an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction, something like a John Coltrane arrangement of a pop standard. It makes me wonder what a chaconne might have sounded like in its original context. Bach’s (and Coltrane’s) abstractions are wonderful in and of themselves, but you can’t fully appreciate them without understanding what they’re referring back to.

It’s easy to listen to Coltrane’s source material. If you try to do the same with for Bach, however, you have a harder time. When you do a Google search for chaconnes, you mostly find performances of Bach, or similarly abstracted works by other canonical composers. Thanks to Wikipedia, though, I did find a chaconne of the kind that a person might have actually danced to back in 17th century Spain. It’s a tune by Juan Arañés called “A La Vida Bona.” Here’s a performance by Piffaro, The Renaissance Band.

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The “Rockit” rhizome

I have come to believe that Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit” is the most interesting musical recording of all time. It touches every form of twentieth century American music, from blues to jazz to rock to techno, and it’s one of the founding documents of global hip-hop. Not bad for a last-ditch effort to keep Herbie’s label from dropping him!

Here’s the album version:

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