Smart person, or contrarian? Or flat out giant pain in the ass? What is the difference between a contrarian and FOGPITA, anyway? I don’t know. I find myself disagreeing with a lot of things said online, about this instrument, and about music. Though rarely with people who basically do what I do— with them I mostly agree with everything they say.
The disagreements don’t matter, the thought process behind them is instructive though. These have all come up recently:
Exhibit A: What time signature?
Someone asked about this piece, apparently written in a fast 5/4, but not real easy to hear as such.
Listen:
First, the question is not just what is it? It’s how do we understand it, how do we process it so we can play it? For everything we play there’s a negotiation, between the piece of music and our own ability to make sense of it. And we’re going to be challenged by some things, it’s part of the deal.
So what do we hear? Listen until you can hear and understand each of these points.
1. There’s a vamp, a repeating bass line. If you count through it at the rate of the stick clicks at the beginning (about 188 bpm), it’s ten beats long.
2. Listening to the bass player, it’s fairly easy to hear this rhythm at the beginning of the vamp, with the accents on the first and fifth beats, followed by some other stuff we haven’t figured out yet:
3. After that we hear some notes on the &s, and some 8th notes leading into the repeat. In fact, here, this is the actual rhythm of the bass line:
4. We hear the drummer give five stick clicks at the beginning, let’s assume it’s meant to be in 5/4:
It takes a lot of focus to count it in 5, at first. The accents that catch our ear— on the 1, the 5, and on an & near the end— don’t really line up with that. In fact nobody’s playing the 1 of the second measure, it’s extremely weak to our ear. When the drummer plays the 1 (when the horns are playing, sometimes) it sounds like a filler note, it doesn’t sound like a 1.
5. It’s easier to make sense of it if we put those first two accents on the 1s of each measure, dividing the rhythm into 4+6 beats:
The thing about syncopations is, they exist in tension with the context, they need for the underlying meter to be stated. Especially with odd meters. Otherwise the syncopations become the rhythm, the irregular rhythm becomes the context, which is what is happening here. There’s no great need to think of it in 5, because no one is playing 5/4 time, they’re playing off of the actual rhythm of the vamp, like a clave.
The thing to take care with is, thinking 4+6— or thinking 5/4— are going to cause you to play a certain way, which may just be a wrong interpretation of the piece, and not helpful to the other players. Playing a straight Mission Impossible 5/4 on this would be a nightmare. Our goal is to understand the material and stay oriented so we can play it with some freedom. There’s no prize for doing it a way that’s hard for you, that demands more focus than is necessary, and will invite a lot of mistakes.
6. I have had to play this kind of music, but I’m not great at it, I have to work a little bit to get ready for it. If I were learning this tune, I would also spend some time working on it as an additive 8th note rhythm, in groups of two and three 8th notes, which would be:
If you’ve come this far, take a minute and tap that out— RH on the accents / LH on unaccented notes.
Exhibit B: Which technique is fastest?
It was asked: is wrist technique faster, or finger technique?
It’s a normal, seemingly simple question, but just answering X is faster isn’t actually helpful. There are things to consider:
1. Both maybe
Either one is faster, if you practiced it.
2. Faster at what?
The techniques are good for different things, and not necessarily good for everything. Either one is going to be faster for the things it’s good for. For things it’s not good for, it will be not as fast, and maybe downright ill-suited. Finger technique would be very bad for, say, a complex rudimental flam passage played mp.
3. The world is not just singles
Kind of implicit in the question, though, is which is faster for playing singles. At sort of a medium practice pad volume. You know you’re all thinking it. But we do a lot of other things in music, which have their own speed considerations.
4. Absolute vs. practical speed
As players we want to keep developing our technique, of course, but there is a practical speed limit on singles— above a certain rate they just sound like a long tone, and that rate varies by the instrument.
I can’t really do anything in terms of absolute speed, it’s always in relation to a musical application— normal musical content as it is played on a percussion instrument, in standard tempos, in standard rhythm values.
5. Yes, but which one is faster?
No yes, but— you can’t separate those things. It’s like saying can a man run faster than a woman? (You mean like Rush Limbaugh vs. Florence Joyner?) Is a Formula 1 car faster than a rally car? (On a Formula 1 track or rally course?) Does a halibut taste better than a cod.
Exhibit C: Why is this written like this?
A lead sheet for an arrangement of a Christmas song was shared, questioning why it wouldn’t be written in a different meter:
There was discussion of a lot of widely varying interpretations of what is intended, here is what I think looking at it:
- It’s written in the style of a jazz lead sheet, it’s clearly a jazz lead sheet.
- Unless it’s indicated or stated otherwise, a 3/4 time signature, in such a setting, suggests a certain time feel— a jazz waltz.
- That would be the reason to put it in 3, that that time feel, played by the rhythm section, is desired. The running dotted 8ths could be more easily expressed as plain 8th notes in 2/4, but that would suggest a different feel.
- The dotted quarter notes suggest a certain interpretation of that feel, an Elvin Jones-type of feel, leaning into the & of 2.
- The dotted 8ths are not at all an uncommon rhythm in 3, though we don’t often see them as the main rhythm, in running form like this. More often they’re used for variety, and written as quarter note 4tuplet, which is exactly equivalent to the dotted 8ths.
- Putting them in running form is a strange choice to me, I’m skeptical that this is a good arrangement, I would have to play it with some good players to decide.
This is another case of, you can’t just look at things in isolation. You can’t analyze strictly based on the ink, with no context, just because you were given no context. We’re not unfrozen cavemen looking at a jazz lead sheet for the first time. There is a clear playing context for this, for which the answers above— or something close to them— are correct.
A few things there. I write all this not to win an online disagreement, or to get in the last word unchallenged. It’s to follow through on my own thinking, and talk about the questions in a way that really wouldn’t be appropriate in an online discussion. Because it’s semi-tangential, and people interpret it as adversarial, and think you’re doing it to “win”, to be right and prove them wrong, which I don’t care about.