Polymeter vs polyrhythm

As I continue to build groove pedagogy resources, I want to clear up some persistent confusion about polymeter and polyrhythm. If you don’t feel like reading the whole post, it can be summed up in this image:

The most concisely I can put this into words: in polymeter, the grid lines are aligned, but the downbeats aren’t. In polyrhythm, the downbeats are aligned, but the grid lines aren’t.

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Lil’ Darlin’

I finally got around to watching Tár. Early in the movie, Lydia helps her wife Sharon through a panic attack by dancing with her to one of my favorite jazz recordings, Neal Hefti’s tune”Lil’ Darlin'” as recorded by Count Basie. Lydia says, “Let’s bring this down to sixty beats per minute.” Sharon corrects her: “Sixty-four.”

That is incredibly slow! Neal Hefti intended the tune to be played at more of a medium swing tempo, but Basie was right to play it as a ballad. A guy on this trumpet forum thread describes it as “grown folks tempo.” A less skilled jazz ensemble would find it hard to resist the urge to speed up, but the Basie band actually slows down slightly over the course of the performance. That is incredible control.

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I made a new track for teaching swing

I just finished my Groove Theories book proposal and sent it out, that was about twenty years of very slow work followed by two weeks of very fast work. So fingers crossed on that. I included two sample chapters, one on blues tonality, and one on swing. For the swing chapter, I wanted to find examples of the same piece of music played with and without swing for ease of comparison. In class, I usually play “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” from the Nutcracker Suite and “Sugar Rum Cherry” by Duke Ellington. This isn’t an exact comparison, though, because Ellington does more than change the time feel; he also changes the instrumentation and structure. I wanted to find an example where the same music repeated identically with and without swing. The problem is that so far as I can tell, no such piece of music exists. But then I realized that it would be easy to make this piece of music myself, by warping something out in Ableton Live and applying different groove settings.

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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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Erroll Garner meets the Carpenters

When I teach remixes in music tech class, I like to make the analogy to radical jazz arrangements of standards. Technically, John Coltrane’s version of “My Favorite Things” is not a remix of the version from The Sound of Music, but it occupies the same cultural role as a remix. (In fact, I just accidentally typed it as, John Coltrane’s remix of “My Favorite Things” is not a remix. There you have it.) One of my favorite ever jazz “remixes” is Erroll Garner’s version of “(They Long To Be) Close To You” by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, which the Carpenters had a number one hit with in 1970.

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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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Dilla Time

I recently finished reading Dan Charnas’ book Dilla Time. It’s a good one! If you are interested in how hip-hop works, you should read it. The book’s major musicological insight is elegantly summed up by this image:

“Straight time” means that the rhythms are evenly spaced and metronomic, like a clock ticking. (Think of a Kraftwerk song.) “Swing time” means that the halves of each beat are alternately stretched and shrunk. (Think of a Duke Ellington tune.) “Dilla time” means that there are multiple rhythmic feels simultaneously, some straight, some swung, some on the grid, some ahead of or behind the grid. (Think of, well, a J Dilla track, like the ones discussed below.)

You frequently see Dilla time described as “unquantized” or “drunk.” My favorite description is from the intro to Kendrick Lamar’s song “Momma.” As its heavily Dilla-influenced beat plays, producer Taz Arnold says, “I need that, I need that sloppy, that sloppy, like a Chevy in quicksand, yeah, that sloppy.” Poetic though it is, though, this is not accurate. Dan Charnas makes clear that Dilla was never sloppy in his rhythms, that their deviation from the grid was intended and meticulously executed. Dilla “misaligned” his beats because it sounds good. But why does it sound so good? I am trying to figure that out.

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