Dropping a big ol’ stinkbomb in your lap as I prepare to wing off to Europe, here is a thing I’ve been working with, under Jack Dejohnette’s influence. I’ve been working on an extended transcription of his playing to submit to Down Beat magazine, and there’s some of this in there— there are these organic sounding spots, that turn out to be 5s. Nobody really does that, and I think it’s a (very small) part of why Dejohnette sounds so unique.
These odd tuplets are slightly misunderstood creatures— drummers tend to regard them as deliberately mathy items, and they’re used that way in prog-type situations. But they do have a normal, non-mathy musical function. With regular tonal instruments and music, a notated quintuplet/whatevertuplet might just mean there are a given number of notes in the melodic line, and they want you to float them over a certain about space, with a particular metered target. They’re often not asking strictly for perfectly metered odd tuplets for their own sake.
Like this Chopin Nocturne I’ve been learning to play has a 22-tuplet over a measure of 8th notes in 6/4 time:
Oh my goodness, that’s a 22:12 polyrhythm, you say (11:6 twice, if you’re algebraicly minded), which… not really. It really means there are 22 notes here, float them expressively, don’t line it up with the left hand (though you do have to meter the line normally and line it up with the left to first learn the notes).
It’s different with the drums— there’s no normal melodic reason to do a certain number of notes in a given space. For us the source might be a learned pattern— like, a normal tap-5 stroke roll (R-LLRR L-RRLL) can be done in a triplet timing, or an 8th/16ths timing, or as quintuplets (which is often done by accident, actually):
Or there could be a certain desired level of density. The tuplet roll studies in Stick Control are about getting a quality roll at particular tempos— where a 16th pulsation would be too slow, and a sixtuplet pulsation too fast. We also just have individual players’ levels of technique— sixtuplets at the given tempo might be too fast for someone, and they’ll flail in a run of singles that are not 16ths, not sixtuplets. It’s not wrong, it’s a natural reason to do them. Their hands move better at that speed, and the singles might sound better.
Part of the function of our instrument is to create a groove foundation, so we’re generally taking care of our subdivisions, and metering what we play carefully to a straight or triplet feel 8th notes. The odd tuplets tend to undermine that, so we use them sparingly or not at all. In jazz there’s more freedom with that, the space between the beats is handled expressively, and usually not stated exactly the same way by all the players. There can be some room to push things around between beats, which brings us around to the point of all of this.
…a long set up, but extraordinary bullcrap requires extraordinary justification.
This is a work sheet, not quite a fully worked-out system— a slight alteration of the recent 16th note RH lead system, making it a little more dense. As you see there are some options, and other possibilities are bound come up in the course of working on it. Treat it as an experiment.
You can work it out just on the page, or apply it while reading out of Syncopation, pp. 6-7, 10-11, 30-32, 34-45. Notice there are a couple of ways of swinging the 8th notes— putting the & of the rhythm in Syncopation on the 4th quintuplet partial (for a quasi-triplet feel) or 5th partial (for a quasi-double time feel). Think legato, we’re not looking for drum corps/New Breed level articulation. For these purposes it’s not even necessary to execute a perfectly even quintuplet. We’re just looking for a different kind of movement within a familiar framework.
