The underrated elements of rhythm
Hi all!
First off, thank you to everyone who made it out to the Art Institute Saturday. It was tremendously uplifting to have the chance to share space and sound with you all. I feel like we all went on a journey together, and that's a huge testament to having both great musicians and a great audience. I met and reconnected with so many people and just wish I had had even more time to talk with everyone.
With my new album The Harmony of Rhythm nearing the end of post production, I wanted to share some more of my thoughts on rhythm and sound. While this weekend's event focused on sound's relationship with emotion, time, and storytelling, I want to focus in now on pure sound and how it leads to what we perceive as rhythmic content.
The underrated elements of rhythm
When analyzing music, whe have a tendancy to understand rhythm as a binary. Fast or slow, right or wrong, tight or loose.
We also tend to appreciate rhythmic accomplishment along only a couple of very specific lines.
The first, and most common, way to appreciate rhythm is worshipping the pocket. This is for good reason. Most beloved songs are anchored by unwavering drums and bass that keep the music feeling good without getting in the way of the melody and words.
The other slightly less popular yet still quite common mode of rhythmic appreciation is the reverence of complexity. Fast and highly precise beats, mind-boggling changes in time signature and tempo, and mathmatically maddening but musically "correct" subdivisions all fall into this high-octane camp of disciplined mastery.
I've spent thousands of hours digging into each of these mindsets to improve on my instrument and accomplish various musical goals. They can both be infinitely demanding and satisfying.
However, throughout my invistigation into the world of groove I've found there are more subtle aspects of rhythm that are fundemental to transmitting emotions through music. Digging into these elements of rhythm makes listening to and anlyzing music more interesting, and it also helps make greater strides in the pursuit of both pocket and complexity.
These are just a few of what I consider to be the underrated aspects of rhythm.
Density and space
When coming up with a rhythmic concept, the first powerful choice you make is deciding whether there's a lot going on, or if there's lots of space between the notes. Even when playing a single genre like funk, you've got to make this decision. Are you laying wide beats to make room for a dense bassline? Are you setting up a dizzingly syncopated beat that seems to hit every 16th note, but still slides through the horn arrangement seamlessly? Or are you doing something in between, alternating bars of circuotous rhythm with a heavy back beat to push the song or a soloist forward?
Texture
No matter how or what you're playing, the nature of the sound produced by the object you're playing on effects the way your rhythm is perceived. You can play the bass drum part "perfectly" on the snare, but it's not going to have the same impact it would have had coming from a massive cylinder with drum skin stretched across it. The tight and dry sounds of small muffled drums generate rhythmic content significantly different from that produced by the wet round tones of larger unmuffled drums. The way you tune your instrument effects the emotional impact of your beat.
Push and pull
When learning music, we're taught to evaluate our progress based on our beats' relationship to a static metranome or the tempo of a conductor. While a necesary step, this is far from the full picture. The right tempo is the one collectively set by the band, and the way collective beats are achieved have a wide variety of emotional outcomes. If you listen to West African or Afro Cuban drumming, you hear an immense of push in pull creating a beat that feels a mile wide. In a lot of modern hip hop and neo soul, the relative distance on the grid between the bass and drums make it like the air is being sucked out of your ears. On the other side of the coin you have the relatively nonchalant rhythmic approach of a lot of indie rock that forms a gentle wall of sound seemingly without beginning or end.
Conversation
In my opinion, groove is what happens when the rhythms of individuals come together to form a whole. Everybody has a rhythm. You can groove in music, on a team at a company, or throughout your daily life. The conversation of contrasting elements builds the surprise and delight in rhythm. It's important to know your part and play the right beat, but once we're comfortable, it's the subtle improvised fills back and forth, the minute adjustments to who reaches the beat first, and the careful listening to each other to fill the music with just the right am ount of sound that makes something rhythmically great.