Meshell Ndegeocello at Tonic

In my twenties, I forced myself to experience a lot of very highbrow avant-garde music: free jazz, experimental electronica, and various combinations thereof. One such experience was a show at Tonic. I forget who was on the bill exactly, but it included Susie Ibarra and various other downtown luminaries. The group was ad hoc and clearly had never played together before. Their freeform improvisation was colorful and interesting, but tough to get an emotional hold on.

During the second set, Meshell Ndegeocello showed up, and the band invited her to sit in. She sat onstage with her bass for a minute or two, just listening to all the atonal noise swirling around her. Then she started playing a simple G minor funk groove, quietly but insistently. One by one, the other musicians locked into it, until the whole group was actually playing together, not just at the same time, but together. It was the best show I ever saw at Tonic. It also made me realize that the best musicians play stuff that makes sense.

Ira Newborn and BB King

My favorite class at NYU this semester is Scoring For Film and Multimedia with Ira Newborn. Ira is a cynical curmudgeon — think Larry David with a beard — but he’s really passionate about music. He came up in the blues and funk world before moving into orchestral music. A student in the class had written something really far out and atonal, and it reminded Ira of a story. He had written an atonal piece, and he wanted BB King to play on it for some reason. So he brought BB in and didn’t explain the piece at all or show him a chart, just had him just play whatever he felt like. BB laid down straightforward blues on A7, and Ira said that it tied the whole piece together.

Miles Davis and Bitches Brew

About seventeen minutes into “Pharoah’s Dance,” Miles enters with a short repetitive funk theme. You can hear the swirling chaos gradually coalesce around him into a nice groove.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, if you’re an adventurous and avant garde musician or composer, don’t be afraid to feel the funk. Leave hostility to wards the listener back in the fifties where it belongs. Your music is stronger when you take the risk of inviting the audience in to feel your feelings.

Miles Davis was at his wildest and most experimental in his forties. That decade of his life starts with the Miles Smiles band (Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter and Tony Williams) and extends into his electric funk period. The music that he was playing at age 49 on Agharta and Pangaea is the most intense he ever made, though it’s not to everyone’s taste.

I saw Max Roach perform a couple of times when he was in his seventies, and he was tremendous. At one of the shows, he did an encore solo piece on just a hi-hat, and you wouldn’t believe how much music he got out of it.

Original post on Quora

Manu Dibango released “Soul Makossa” in 1972. He wrote it as the B-side to “Mouvement Ewondo,” a praise song for the Cameroonian football team on the occasion of the 1972 Tropics Cup. Language Log explains the chant-like lyrics:

The story behind these seemingly nonsensical syllables is a fascinating one, originating in the Cameroonian language Duala.

Duala is spoken in Douala, Cameroon’s largest city, which has long been a musical hotbed. Since the 1960s, Cameroonian pop music has been dominated by a rhythmic style of dance music from Douala known as makossa. The Duala word makossa is often glossed as “(I) dance” (as in this article by Cameroonian linguist George Echu). The entry for makossa in the Oxford English Dictionary further explains that makossa is “derivative of kosa ‘to peel or remove the skin of (a fruit or vegetable)’; the name refers to the twisting and shaking movements of the dancer.”

Language Log quotes this excerpt of Dibango’s autobiography, Three Kilos of Coffee:

On one side of the 45 I recorded the hymn [praise song]; on the other I recorded “Soul Makossa,” written using a traditional makossa rhythm with a little soul thrown in. In my Douala neighborhood, at my parents’ house, I rehearsed this second piece. The house had no air-conditioning, and the windows were wide open. All the kids flocked around. Hearing me rehearse, they fell over laughing. Unbelievable — how on earth had I concocted that mishmash? Poor makossa really took a blow. My father was astonished: “Can’t you pronounce ‘makossa’ like everyone else? You stutter: ‘mamako mamasa.’ You think they’re going to accept that in Yaoundé?” The Cup organizing committee reacted the same way. The march on side one they found “impeccable.” But the other side… “Really, Manu has gone nuts. What possesses him to stutter like that?”

The New York DJ and party promoter David Mancuso got his hands on “Soul Makossa” and played it incessantly at his loft parties. The song became an underground hit, especially when it started getting airplay on WBLS. The few copies floating around New York were quickly snapped up by other DJs. Several bands rushed out their own covers to fill the gap, most notably Baba Olatunji and the Lafayette Afro-Rock Band. Their versions are fun, but nowhere near as funky as the original. Finally, Atlantic Records released Manu Dibango’s version on one of their sub-labels, and it went so far as to crack the top 40 in 1973.

Soul Makossa quotes, samples and remixes

Quoting “Soul Makossa” became something of a trope in the early eighties, ranging from subtle references to the beat or bassline or horn line to full-blown quotation. My favorite example is by Nairobi featuring the Awesome Foursome.

This song just screams 1982, especially with those 808 cowbells. This song was itself sampled in many other songs, including Schoolly D’s “Mama Feel Good.”

Kool Moe Dee’s “Pump Your Fist” draws on “Soul Makossa” for percussion, the wah guitar stab and part of the main sax riff.

A more recent example: “Latinhead” by Dirty Beatniks.

Soul Makossa has also been sampled by Jay-Z, Geto Boys, Poor Righteous Teachers and A Tribe Called Quest, among many others. See a full list of samples.

Michael Jackson and “Wanna Be Startin’ Something”

By far the most famous musical descendant of “Soul Makossa” is Michael Jackson’s first single from Thriller, the best song on that album and a strong contender for the best song of the eighties, period.

I was at a hippie-ish wedding this past summer. People were having a good time, but not really dancing. Then “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” came up on the iPod and the party suddenly jumped off. Little kids, old folks, everyone in between, people were getting down. Say what you want about Michael Jackson as a human being, but there’s no denying the power of this song. It never fails to get people shaking their butts, across all ages, races, classes and cultural backgrounds.

The copyright-minded among you might well ask: did MJ steal the Makossa chant? Manu Dibango certainly thought so, and sued MJ, eventually reaching an out-of-court settlement. The issue isn’t a cut-and-dried one for me, though. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the two chants:

The most obvious difference is in the syllables, but there are musical differences too. Manu Dibango’s chant is a two-bar phrase sung/chanted entirely on the note G, over an unchanging G7 chord. Michael Jackson’s chant is a four-bar phrase with a call and response structure. He adds a two-note melody harmonized in thirds and a chord progression alternating between D/E and E7. MJ also uses a little more syncopation. I’d say that MJ’s chant is more of an adaptation than a direct theft.

“Wanna Be Startin’ Something” quotes, samples and remixes

Pop and hip-hop musicians quote MJ’s version of the Makossa chant incessantly. Some high-profile examples:

• “No Clause 28” by Boy George
• “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” by Will Smith
• “Cowboys” by the Fugees
• “Brooklyn Girls” by Charles Hamilton
• “Lost In The World” by Kanye West

People love to shout out the chant during live performances, too, everyone from Zap Mama to Jamie Foxx. Rihanna goes further than quoting MJ’s chant; she builds an entire dance track around a reharmonized sample of it. MJ’s song is in the key of E, but Rihanna’s producers put it in the key of F# minor. This is hip stuff; the same notes in MJ’s sunny and uplifting coda become melancholy in Rihanna’s track.

People quote other parts of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” too. Big Daddy Kane quotes the “Yeah yeah” part in “Warm It Up Kane,” listen at 1:32.

Other tracks quoting this phrase include “Vibin’ (The New Flava Remix)” by Boyz II Men and Busta Rhymes featuring Treach, Craig Mack and Method Man, and “Feels So Good” by Mase.

Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz adapt big swaths of MJ’s song in “Startin’ Something.”

Björk has to be different, of course, so she (mis)quotes the opening line of MJ’s song in live versions of “I Go Humble.” And by the way, her MJ fandom was apparently reciprocal, if this radio show transcript is to be believed.

Visualizing the Makossa diaspora

Here’s a complete map of the genealogy of the Makossa chant; click to enlarge.

Putting it all together

Here’s a mashup I made combining several of the tracks mentioned above so you can get your makossa on.

Wanna Be Startin’ Something megamix by ethanhein

Any noteworthy sightings of the Makossa meme that I missed? Let me know in the comments.

Hat tip to Mike Devlin for coining the phrase “Makossa diaspora.”

Here are my favorite basslines of the last fifty years, across genres.

John Coltrane – “My Favorite Things”

Simple, hypnotic, effective. Read more.

John Coltrane – “Equinox”

Another devastatingly simple groove.

Duke Ellington – “Half The Fun”

Paired with an incredible Sam Woodyard drum part. I love sampling it:

Nature Boy megamix by ethanhein

Duke Ellington – “Fleurette Africaine”

Charles Mingus’ strumming on the intro might be the most beautiful few bars he ever played. Hear a mashup I did of this tune and some other jazz classics:

Autumn Leaves by ethanhein

The Beatles – “Dear Prudence”

I could have chosen any of a dozen Beatles tunes here, I love those McCartney lines. But this one has the most emotional power for me. Here’s a blog post about it, and here’s a mashup I did of “Dear Prudence” with “Never Can Say Goodbye” by the Jackson 5:

Prudence Never Can Say Goodbye by ethanhein

Miles Davis – “It’s About That Time”

From my favorite of Miles’ funk albums. Read a blog post about it.

James Brown – “There Was A Time (I Got To Move)”

Pretty sure that’s Bootsy Collins playing bass, and he kills it.

Herbie Hancock – “Chameleon”

Here’s a visualization I made of this loop.

Talking Heads – “Once In A Lifetime”

Read more about this track, and check out the megamix:

Once In A Lifetime megamix by ethanhein

Michael Jackson – “Billie Jean”

Of course.

Janet Jackson – “What Have You Done For Me Lately”

The song that made the Latelybass sound famous.

Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo – “Diamonds On The Souls Of Her Shoes”

Bakithi Kumalo on the fretless makes this tune for me.

Michael Jackson – “Remember The Time”

Love those Teddy Riley sequenced lines.

Digable Planets – “Rebirth Of Slick”

The bassline is sampled from “Searchin’” by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, but the Digables flipped it into something new.

Black Sheep – “The Choice Is Yours”

Another creative flip of a jazz sample, from McCoy Tyner’s recording of “Impressions.”

Morphine – “Buena”

No embedding; click the image to hear the song:

Two-string slide bass and baritone sax!

Daft Punk – “Around The World”

Never get tired of this one.

Kanye West – “Love Lockdown”

Kanye has been using tuned 808 kick drums to play his basslines lately, which is a dazzlingly hip idea. The kick and the bass are supposed to be in tight sync anyway; why not just fuse them into a single part? I know he’s a ridiculous human being in a lot of ways but the man knows how to put a track together.

Let me know if I missed anything critical, I’m sure I did.

Original post on Quora

And here’s the full song — contains much explicit language.

The hook samples the line “Biggie Smalls is the illest” from “The What” on the same album. It’s twenty-three seconds in.

Sampling is a severely underappreciated songwriting tool. Even if you have moral or legal issues with sampling from others, sampling from yourself is still a good idea. Biggie’s line about himself being the illest is just part of a verse in “The What.” The producer on “Unbelievable,” the great DJ Premier, was smart enough to recognize that Biggie’s line could stand on its own as a hook. DJ Premier also produced “Nas Is Like,” and built its chorus through similar means.

The word “Unbelievable” itself comes from R Kelly, sped up a little and raised in pitch to sound female. Listen at 0:58.

Sampled vocals aside, the chopped-up keyboard part is the most musically sophisticated aspect of the track. Its original source is “Remind Me” by Patrice Rushen — I’m pretty sure it comes from the end of the solo section around 4:10.

Premier chopped up this little keyboard phrase and resequenced it beyond recognition. The result is a hip angularity that a normal keyboard player would probably not have arrived at organically.

The beat in “Unbelievable” is an old standby, “Impeach The President.”

The string ambiance in the background comes from the very odd Quincy Jones song “Kitty With The Bent Frame.” Listen at 1:08.

Quincy’s record is a favorite for hip-hop producers looking for an uneasy mood.

Here’s a diagram showing the sample genealogy of “Unbelievable.”

The meaning of self-sampling

Like I said above, self-sampling is so interesting to me because it’s recursive, self-referential. Most of the music we like is full of self-reference, and generally, the more self-referential it is, the more structured and meaningful it feels. Even simple-seeming nursery rhymes can be recursive and self-similar. Here’s a visualization by Lee Byron showing self-similarity in the nursery rhyme “Hickory Dickory Dock.”

Self-similarity makes for compelling visual art, too. One reason we find nature attractive is its rich fractal self-similarity. Here’s a leaf I photographed in my neighborhood; notice how the same veiny structure repeats itself at different size scales:

Even very simple recursive mathematical equations can produce stunningly complex, biological-looking forms, like the classic fractal known as the Mandelbrot set.

Recursion isn’t just attractive. It’s fundamental to computer science — self-reference is a key programming technique. Recursion may be essential to the very nature of consciousness itself. Some neuroscientists think that your entire sense of self emerges out of recursive self-referential loops as your brain represents different parts of itself to itself.

No wonder recursive music is so fascinating. Keep on sampling yourselves, musicians; let’s see what other recursive truths we can uncover.

I learned the answer from Creative License: The Law And Culture Of Digital Sampling by Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola. It’s a companion book to the invaluable documentary Copyright Criminals. The story of Jay-Z and Alan Lomax isn’t quite as epic a copyright fail as the Biz Markie lawsuit or the story of “Bitter Sweet Symphony” but it’s still pretty absurd.

So here’s Jay-Z’s “Takeover.” As you might expect, it contains salty language.

For my tastes, “Takeover” isn’t one of the better Jay-Z songs, since all it does is make fun of Nas. It’s depressing when an artist of Jay’s caliber devotes his  considerable creativity to a diss track. Still, the production is pretty powerful. The main samples come from the Doors’ “Five To One.” Jay also quotes David Bowie’s “Fame,” along with various other rap songs. Finally, the sampled line “Watch out, we run New York!” comes from “Sound Of Da Police” by KRS-One.

KRS-One samples a riff from “Inside Looking Out” by Grand Funk Railroad — listen at 6:28.

Grand Funk didn’t write the song. It’s a cover of The Animals.

The Animals didn’t really write the song either. As was a common practice among their British rock peers at the time, they took a folk melody and wrote somewhat different lyrics. The tune they used is called “Rosie,” which they learned from a recording made by Alan Lomax of a chain gang at Parchman Farm.

“Rosie” can’t be said to have any particular author. But Lomax was the first person to record and publish it, so according to the peculiar norms of America’s property laws, he was able to copyright it. Not only does Lomax hold the copyright for “Rosie,” he’s also listed as a co-author of both versions of “Inside Looking Out.”

Here’s where the story gets truly silly. When KRS-One sampled Grand Funk Railroad’s cover of “Inside Looking Out,” he needed the permission of both the owner of the recording and the underlying composition. This is in spite of the fact that the sample is from an instrumental section that Grand Funk added, and that doesn’t reference the original melody at all. And even though Jay-Z sampled KRS-One’s unaccompanied vocal, he also needed to get copyright permission from everyone sampled in KRS-One’s track. Including Alan Lomax.

So that’s how a folk song collector wound up as the legal co-author of a Jay-Z diss track. I can’t think of a better illustration of the copyright system’s dysfunction than that.

The copyright maze is no obstacle to Jay-Z — he has the money, lawyers and connections to clear whatever he wants. But what about up-and-coming or unheard-of artists? What if they want to use samples? Should the most vital art form of our time be the exclusive province of forty-year-old multimillionaires? And grateful as I am to Alan Lomax for recording and disseminating so much great folk music, I remain baffled as to why he was allowed to copyright it. Our creative heritage deserves better stewardship than our current laws provide.

Update: I seem to have touched a nerve with this post. Jesse Walker posted it on the Reason Magazine blog, and since then it’s also been on Andrew Sullivan’s blog, Metafilter and Techdirt. There are some interesting discussions happening in the comments to those posts. Thanks for linking, everybody!

The tune has no chord changes, just a straight-ahead funk groove in B flat. The angular melody is mostly fourths jumping up and down by whole steps or half steps. It’s tough to memorize, but then once you get it down, it can stay stuck in your head for weeks.

As befits such an eccentric yet popular song, Eddie Harris was an eccentric yet popular guy.

Harris had the first gold jazz record, an arrangement of the theme from the movie Exodus. He also had a hit with Swiss Movement, led by Les McCann. Harris invented a variety of odd instruments, and in 1975 he even released a standup comedy album, The Reason Why I’m Talkin’ S**t. He also subconsciously impacted my entire generation by writing a lot of the music on the Cosby Show.

“Freedom Jazz Dance” has been performed and recorded many times, but Miles Davis basically owns the tune after the rendition he did on Miles Smiles.

Here’s a chart of Miles’ solo; click to see it bigger. Check out how much space he leaves between phrases.

Miles’ version has been sampled by a few hip-hop artists. You can hear fragments of the solos throughout “I Thought Ya Knew” by Ed OG and Da Bulldogs.

Miles’ recording was also sampled by Fu-Schnickens in their Bugs-Bunny-referencing track “Creepin’ Up On Ya.”

Miles’ estate has been fumbling with attempts to keep the man relevant. So they released a strange remix EP that includes a frenetic couple of minutes of snippets of “Freedom Jazz Dance” along with Miles’ verbal instructions to the band from the studio outtakes, and then a quick, slightly awkward rap by Nas. It’s not a totally successful experiment, but it’s pointed in the right direction. It’s especially amazing to hear Miles sing parts of the melody.

Here’s a mashup of all the tracks mentioned above.

Freedom Jazz Dance megamix by ethanhein

Any recommendations for more recordings, samples or references to “Freedom Jazz Dance” that I should know about? Hit me in the comments.

Groove is harder to pin down in text and diagrams than chords and scales, so it doesn’t get as much written about it. That gives some folks the mistaken idea that rhythm isn’t as important as melody and harmony. The reverse is true. You can have a long, rich and satisfying guitar-playing life using nothing but the standard fifteen chords, as long as you can groove. If you can’t groove, you can learn all the chords and scales you want, but you won’t sound good.

Here’s an exercise that worked great for me when I was learning, and that I make all my students do. I call it the One Note Groove. It’s pretty simple, you just put on a repetitive beat and play one note over it. Since you don’t have to think about which notes to play, you’re free to devote your entire attention to your timekeeping, your attack, your whole sound — in other words, your groove.

Get some beats lined up

The ideal scenario for practicing groove is to have an excellent drummer or bassist handy. This isn’t too practical for most beginners, who tend to attract other beginners as jam partners. I’m all in favor of hacking it out with other newbies, but you want to develop good timekeeping habits too. Technology is the best solution for most of us.

I dislike metronomes intensely. They’re too cold and artificial, and they can be a disincentive to practicing. The only good thing about metronomes is that they prepare you to play to a click in studio situations. But then, I don’t like using click tracks while recording either. Both for practicing and recording, I prefer drum or percussion loops. They do the same job of keeping your time steady, but they also impart a feeling of groove and energy, and they result in something that sounds a lot more like music.

So where do you get good loops?

I programmed these, feel free to download and use them:

Swung/Shuffle 8th notes 90 bpm by ethanhein

Straight 8th notes 90 bpm by ethanhein

Programs like Garageband and Fruityloops come loaded with plenty of good loops. Using Ableton Live or similar software, it’s easy to make loops out of any song in your record collection. With a drum machine or any of the aforementioned programs, you can program your own loops. Learning how to program drums is a great way to get inside of the beat — it did wonders for my timekeeping.

I also recommend getting a bunch of hip-hop instrumentals. The internet is full of them. I’m particularly fond of the instrumentals from Ready To Die by Notorious B.I.G., which you can download here.

I don’t recommend doing the one-note groove over complete songs. You don’t want chord or key changes, lyrics, sections or any other musical information to distract you from the groove. The less “interesting” your loops or instrumental tracks are, the better.

Which single note do you play?

If you’re using a loop with pitched instruments in it, you’re going to have to figure out what key it’s in so your one note can be the root (or fifth, or some other note that fits well.) And how, you may ask, do you find out what the key is? Trial and error works fine. There are only twelve possible notes, and you can just systematically work your way up the low E string until you find one that sounds good. In fact, this exercise is tremendously valuable ear training in its own right.

If you’re playing to drums or percussion, you can play whatever note you want. After you get deep enough into loop playing, you might notice that even drum loops usually have a characteristic pitch to them, especially in the kick and snare drum. Try to find a note that blends well with the percussion tuning.

Getting the most from your one-note groove

Put your loop or instrumental on infinite repeat, and start playing your note. Find a simple pattern, nothing challenging. Focus on getting it in the pocket. Make it really sound smooth. Don’t push, just relax into it. See how long you can keep it steady.

Once you’ve really nailed your pattern down, try adding or removing a note, and see how long you can keep that going. Shift the pattern a beat earlier or a beat later. Try finding a pattern with an odd length and let it cycle in and out of sync with the beat.

Try to play only the downbeats. Then try playing any beat but the downbeat. Play long sustained notes and pay attention to the way they decay. Play short, staccato notes and see how percussive you can sound. Play louder and softer.

Focus on the drums. Try playing the same pattern as the kick drum, as the snare, as the hi-hats. You can learn a lot about rhythm by focusing on specific drum instruments.

If you’re struggling to keep up, slow the tempo down until it’s comfortable. In general, you should play as slow as you can stand. Focus on sounding better, not playing faster.

Make sure you aren’t rushing ahead of the beat — beginners always rush like crazy as soon as they start getting a little mastery. Try leaving a lot of space between your notes and hear how your silences interact with the groove. If your loop swings, make sure to match its feel.

The one-note groove is a highly meditative exercise. For the first few minutes, you might struggle a little to settle into your groove. Then you probably get bored. But if you keep going through the boredom, you can suddenly break free into previously unexplored regions of musical inspiration. The longer you stay focused on your groove, the more pleasurable it gets. Listen to Fela Kuti or John Coltrane stretch out on single-chord grooves for fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes, and try to emulate their relaxed intensity.

Example: the Funky Drummer Bonus Beat Reprise

One of the best tracks you can use to do the one-chord groove exercise over is the this remix of “The Funky Drummer Parts One and Two” by James Brown.

Play on the open A string. Use your left hand and the heel of your right hand to mute the string to control your notes’ duration. Get ready to feel the funk!

Repetition is a great teacher, not just of music, but of everything. Let the loop ride and see where it takes you.

The word “swing,” like the word “blues,” has multiple meanings, depending on context. Swing is both a genre and a technical music term describing a certain rhythm. The two are related, but the rhythm has long outlived the genre.

Swing, the genre

In addition to Duke Ellington, the usual reference points are Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and Django Reinhardt. People sometimes use swing to mean big band jazz, but there are plenty of small groups who play swing. Also, there some noteworthy big bands that play non-swing styles, like the one led by Dizzy Gillespie, and the ones on the Miles Davis/Gil Evans albums.

As for singers in the swing genre, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald are the two leading lights, though Ella absorbed a lot of bebop into her style as she went along. Louis Armstrong made his name in Dixieland but sang plenty of devastating swing-style music later on. The albums he made with Ella Fitzgerald are, well, words fail me, just listen.

In the late 80s and early 90s, there was a style of hip-hop-inflected R&B called New Jack Swing. It has nothing to do with jazz except for a shared affinity for swung eighth notes — more on that in a second. Think Janet Jackson, Michael Jackson from Dangerous onwards, Prince, Teddy Riley, Babyface, basically everything I liked on the radio in junior high school.

Swing, the technical music term

When musicians talk about swing, they’re referring to something specific: alternately making eighth notes longer and shorter. The idea is related to (or possibly descended from) notes inégales in classical music. To swing, you make the first eighth note in a given pair longer, and make the other one shorter. The further you stretch the eighth notes away from their metronomic values, the more you swing.

We popularly associate swing with soul and feeling, so it may come as a surprise to you to learn that drum machines can swing. All drum machines (and their software equivalents) have a setting labeled “swing” or “shuffle.” When the knob is at 0%, you get straight (metronomically even) eighth notes. If you set the knob to 100%, you get a swing feel so exaggerated that the first eighth note in each pair is twice as long as the second. If the swing knob is at 50%, the first eighth note in the pair is one and a half times as long as the second.

This all may seem abstract when described verbally, but it jumps right out when you hear it. First, listen to a hip-hop pattern with the swing set to zero:

Now, here’s the same beat with the swing knob set to 70%.

The difference becomes even more clear when you see a side-by-side comparison of the two drum patterns as they appear in the MIDI sequencer. Each red box is a drum hit. The top row is the kick drum, the middle row is the snare, and the bottom row is the hi-hat. Because the hi-hats play on every eighth note, their swing is especially obvious.

Notating swing

Classical music notates swing like this:

This notation shows the sound of the swing knob on the drum machine set to 100%, so the first eighth note is twice as long as the second. That’s the most extreme form of swing, and in real life, you rarely use that much. Even the 70% swing I used in my example is a little over the top for my tastes. But classical music notation has no formal method of acknowledging different levels of swing.

Since swing is critical for most jazz styles, you’d think that its practitioners would have developed a more sophisticated notation for it. Instead, jazz handles the problem by just not notating swing at all. Swung eighth notes are written exactly the same as straight eighth notes. The chart might have a direction written on it like “light swing” or “medium swing,” but more likely it just won’t say anything. You’re expected to be able to apply the right amount of swing by ear. The notational ambiguity in jazz can be an advantage, since different musicians swing by different amounts, even when playing the same material. Historically, the trend since the 1930s has been to use less and less swing. Count Basie used more swing on his rendition of “April In Paris” than Thelonious Monk did.

Some jazz styles don’t use swing. Latin and bossa use straight eighth notes just about exclusively. There are a lot of straight eighth notes in funk too.

The emotional meaning of swing

Musicians don’t just stretch their eighth notes for no reason. Swing has a specific emotional effect. It’s hard to put into words, so here’s an example. First, check out “Dance Of The Sugar Plum Fairy” from The Nutcracker.

This is as straight as music gets. Now here’s Duke Ellington’s version, swung heavily.

What’s going on in Ellington’s version that isn’t in Tchaikovsky? Duke is more soulful, but that word won’t help you if you don’t already know what it means. Duke’s version is also sexier, but while sexiness and soul are closely related concepts, they aren’t identical. Duke’s version feels more “African-American,” but that isn’t very edifying either. Plenty of white people swing just fine — country music uses just as much swing as jazz does. There’s even a whole subgenre of country called Western swing, as exemplified by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys.

So why do I like Duke’s music so much better than Tchaikovsky’s? I think the answer has to do with the rubberiness and stretchiness of swing. Listen to the drums at the beginning of Duke’s tune. They sound like a heartbeat. This is no accident. Your pulse swings, especially when it’s slower — in its “lub-dub” rhythm, the “lub” is longer than the “dub.” Perfectly straight eighth notes sound mechanical. Nothing biological keeps time steadily and accurately. Swing feels more like the rhythm of life.

This is not to say that only swinging music is good. I did feel that way during certain points in my jazz education, but am past it. I like plenty of mechanical-sounding music exactly because it’s mechanical-sounding. And good jazz musicians keep tight metronomic time while they swing — the eighth notes might be stretchy, but the quarters are usually right on the grid.

Or are they? My buddy and sometime jazz collaborator Leo Ferguson maintains that the best jazz musicians swing their quarter notes too. He says that Charles Mingus sounds so much better playing walking quarter notes than your average bassist because Mingus subtly alters their timing to produce a kind of meta-swing. I’m sure Leo will weigh in with some thoughts on this in the comments.

Swing is not syncopation

Non-musicians sometimes use the words swing and syncopation interchangeably, but they’re totally different concepts. Syncopation means accenting surprising beats within the bar. For example, you expect to hear accents on the downbeat; you can syncopate by playing accents an eighth note before or after the downbeat. Swing is something you apply to every beat in the bar, not certain specific ones.

People mix the two concepts up because musicians who use the one will frequently use the other. Ellington, Basie and the rest of the musicians mentioned above all use syncopation heavily. But you can have swing without syncopation and vice versa. Freddie Green, the guitarist in Basie’s band, hardly ever used syncopation — he played a steady “chunk chunk chunk chunk” on every quarter note — but he swung like crazy. Meanwhile, if you go see an Afro-Cuban band, you’ll hear wall-to-wall syncopation but probably no swing at all.

Future swing

The big band sound is mostly relegated to history, but swing is alive and well in electronic music. House music is defined in part by its swing. Old-school hip-hop used a lot of heavy swing –  an example is “The Show” by Doug E Fresh and Slick Rick. Hip-hop producers have been dialing back the swing since the mid-90s, and the eighth notes are mostly straight now.. But even when the drum machine is set to 0% swing, rappers will frequently swing a little in their flow anyway.

I’ll close with “Swing Set” by Cut Chemist of Jurassic 5.

Swing it!

The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire
We don’t need no water, let the motherf***er burn

The chant made its first appearance in the hip-hop canon in “The Roof Is On Fire” by Rock Master Scott & The Dynamic Three, the B-side to their 1984 single “Request Line.” “The Roof Is On Fire” ended up being way more popular.

The recorded version of “The Roof Is On Fire” leaves out the mofo line. In 1984 people mostly weren’t using curses in hip-hop recordings, which now seems charmingly quaint. In live shows, Rock Master Scott and the Dynamic Three were less demure, and when they led the crowd in the chant, the mofo was included.

I don’t know what specifically Rock Master Scott and the Dynamic Three were referring to in the chant. I’ve seen it associated with the 1985 firebombing of MOVE’s headquarters by the Philadelphia police department, though the Dynamic Three song was written a year earlier. The chant probably got attached to the MOVE bombing after the fact. It wouldn’t be the first time that hip-hop has channeled political anger into a semi-ironic party slogan.

MC Serch is on fire

I first heard the chant in “Here It Comes Again” by my favorite white rapper, MC Serch. Listen at 1:21.

Someone much cooler than me in high school used this song in a dance performance. It’s the mark of a truly powerful meme that the chant has been stuck in my head for more than half my life. The other line that jumps out of my memory after eighteen years is “J-E-L-L-O, ya know?” – listen at 2:15. I love this kind of nerdy, cerebral, reference-heavy emceeing. I also love early 90s sample-heavy production. Serch is the kind of geek who samples the Mahavishnu Orchestra, on his tune “Hits The Head.”

Anyway. For a lot of people, the strongest association with “the roof is on fire” is P-funk, who like to chant it during performances of “Tear The Roof Off The Sucker.” P-funk’s chant inspired Talking Heads to write “Burning Down The House.” It also inspired many techno DJs to work the chant into their own work, including The Orb and Westbam.

The Bloodhound Gang is on fire

When you Google the phrase “the roof is on fire,” the results are dominated by Bloodhound Gang’s song “Fire Water Burn,” which I had never heard of before researching this post. I find mopey rock interpretations of hip-hop tedious in the extreme. I don’t have any problem with rock musicians borrowing ideas from black music; all the good ones do that. I just don’t like the sullen tone. Music should be fun.

Anyway, there are plenty more rock songs that quote the chant:

• “Sway” by Coal Chamber
• “Polaroid Baby” by Bratmobile
• Songs by Slipknot and Cake — I haven’t identified which specific ones because their music makes me sad; knock yourself out

Other sightings of the roof meme

Tweet named her track “We Don’t Need No Water” after the chant. The track is produced by Missy Elliot, using a sample of “Mango Meat” by Mandrill. Hip!

“In Da Club” by 50 Cent quotes the chant too — listen at 2:54:

In “The Roof Is On Fire” Bizzy Bone refers to the chant amusingly as “the old negro spiritual.”

Any others I missed? Hit the comments.