Building the Amen break

I continue to refine my new groove pedagogy method: teach a complicated rhythm by presenting a very simplified version of it, then a less simplified version, then a less simplified version, until you converge on the groove in its full nuance. Imagine a pixelated image gradually gaining resolution. My goal with this is to have each simplified version still stand on its own as a musically satisfying groove. I tried the method on the Funky Drummer break, and now I’m doing something more complicated, the Amen break

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There Was A Time (I Got To Move)

Being a fan of James Brown can be a challenge, because his classic songs have all been recorded multiple times in different versions with different names on different labels. “I Got To Move” is a case in point.

It was first released on In The Jungle Groove in 1986, but was recorded back in 1970. The strangely tacked-on intro is an excerpt from a different song, “Give It Up Or Turnit a-Loose.” Except that the specific version of “Give It Up Or Turnit a-Loose” they took the excerpt from was titled “In The Jungle Groove,” which is where they got the name of this compilation. Except that the full song “In The Jungle Groove” was not on this compilation, and has actually never been released. Like I said: confusing! Anyway, the point is, once “I Got To Move” proper starts at 0:29, it’s unbelievably funky.

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Led Zeppelin and the folkloric integrity of the blues

There is a fascinating moment in “When The Levee Breaks” by Led Zeppelin where Robert Plant plays a very flat ninth on the harmonica. I love this note, because there is so much music theory and history encoded within it. Listen at 0:41.

Before we can get into the details of this note and what makes it so, um, noteworthy, you need some background. “When The Levee Breaks” is heavily adapted from a song of the same name by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy. It tells the story of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which left hundreds of thousands of mostly Black people in horrific refugee camps. Kansas Joe sings and plays rhythm guitar, and Minnie plays lead.

Led Zeppelin’s song is a word salad of the original over a different instrumental backing. The lyrics don’t make any particular sense, and they don’t try to; Robert Plant is going for more of a vibe. When I was a teenaged Zeppelin fan, I didn’t know what a levee was, and my understanding of Black history was vague at best. I certainly didn’t know anything about the Great Mississippi Flood. The same was probably true of Robert Plant when he wrote his lyrics. Continue reading

Dilla Time in “Chameleon”

After reading and re-reading Dan Charnas’ Dilla Time, now I’m listening to music with new attention to rhythmic subtleties. I have especially been digging into the relationship between J Dilla and Herbie Hancock–Dilla sampled Herbie on “Get Dis Money” and “Zen Guitar.” That digging made me go back to my favorite Herbie tune with fresh ears.

This might be the funkiest thing in the history of funk. But what makes it so funky? I wanted to investigate the microtiming of that incredible opening groove to find out.

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The best guitar solo ever recorded

The best guitar solo ever recorded is in Prince’s 1986 classic “Kiss.” Don’t be fooled by Wendy Melvoin’s mimed guitar playing in the video; Prince himself played the solo.

It might seem unfair that one of the best singers, songwriters, dancers, bandleaders and producers in history should also have played history’s best guitar solo, but, well, facts are facts.

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Let’s ditch “The Star-Spangled Banner” and make “Lean On Me” our national anthem instead

Over the summer, with the BLM protests raging, my fellow music educators were doing a lot of soul-searching about the more problematic items in the traditional repertoire. The conversation inevitably turned toward “The Star-Spangled Banner,” with some questions about its appropriateness as a national anthem. Francis Scott Key owned slaves, and the third verse of the song belittles the British soldiers as “hireling and slave.”

Is the SSB racist? Maybe, but that isn’t the main reason to ditch it as our anthem. For me, the big issue is that the SSB is a bad song: an awkward and unsingable melody with incomprehensible lyrics. Also, the War of 1812 is a weird hook to hang our national identity on. It’s stirring to imagine America overcoming tremendous odds against a better-armed attacker, I guess, but when was the last time you could accurately describe us this way? Probably 1812? Now it’s just tone-deaf. Another problem is that both the music and lyrics sound more like the cultural heritage of our opponents in that war, the British, because it’s a British melody using archaic British phrases.

So how about we make America’s national anthem sound more like, you know, America? Jody Rosen considers various alternatives to the SSB before arriving at the only correct answer: “Lean on Me” by Bill Withers. I learned the song as a kid from Club Nouveau’s synth-heavy version, but nothing compares to the original recording:

Now we’re talking: the song is unpretentious, communitarian, easy to sing but with room for bluesy embellishment, and gently but insistently funky. This is a song that I would sing with pride, and it represents a vision of a national community that I would want to be a part of.

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Children of Production

My four-year-old daughter is currently super into “Children of Production” from Parliament’s classic 1976 album The Clones of Dr Funkenstein, their followup to Mothership Connection. If that album called down the holy mothership, this one introduces you to its occupants. This is the kind of groove that sounds effortless until you try playing it.

Here’s a live version, a bit more spaced-out:

On the studio version, the groove announces its subtle strangeness in the very first half second of the track. It begins with Jerome Brailey’s drums, Bootsy Collins’ bass, and (I assume) Bernie Worrell’s electric piano bumping together on the downbeat. Except they aren’t playing the downbeat, they’re playing the sixteenth note before the downbeat. The downbeat itself is silent! Then the rest of the band kicks in on the eighth note after the downbeat. That is a lot of rhythmic information to pack into a single beat’s worth of musical time! Let’s unpack.

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Live scoring with No Country for Old Men: update

This week in Fundamentals of Western Music class at the New School, we did an in-class improvisation exercise, where students created spur-of-the-moment scores to scenes from No Country for Old Men. I did this in response to being told by a faculty evaluator that I should have more music-making during class, a suggestion I strongly agree with. Students could choose between bringing their own instruments, playing synths from my computer, or using the piano in the classroom.

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The Groove Pizzeria

For his NYU music technology masters thesis, Tyler Bisson created a web app called Groove Pizzeria, a polyrhythmic/polymetric extension of the Groove Pizza. Click the image to try it for yourself.

Note that the Groove Pizzeria is still a prototype, and it doesn’t yet have the full feature set that the Groove Pizza does. As of this writing, there are no presets, saving, or exporting of audio or MIDI. However, you can send MIDI via the IAC bus to the DAW of your choice (Mac OS Chrome only). You can also record the Groove Pizzeria’s output using Audio Hijack.

Like the Groove Pizza, the Groove Pizzeria is based on the idea of the rhythm necklace, a circular representation of musical rhythm. The Groove Pizza is a set of three concentric rhythm necklaces, each of which controls one drum sound, e.g. kick, snare and hi-hat. The Groove Pizzeria gives you two sets of concentric rhythm necklaces, each of which can have its own time duration and subdivisions. This means that you can use the Groove Pizzeria to make polyrhythm and polymeter.

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The fake and the real in Chance the Rapper’s “All We Got”

[I wrote this before Kanye went full MAGA; I have since lost some enthusiasm for him.]

Every semester in Intro to Music Tech, we have Kanye West Day, when we listen analytically to some of Yeezy’s most sonically adventurous tracks (there are many to choose from.) The past few semesters, Kanye West Day has centered on “Ultralight Beam,” especially Chance The Rapper’s devastating verse. That has naturally led to a look at Chance’s “All We Got.”

All the themes of the class are here: the creative process in the studio, “fake” versus “real” sounds, structure versus improvisation, predictability versus surprise, and the way that soundscape and groove do much more expressive work than melody or harmony.

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