quantifying swing
Why is swing so slippery? Try to quantify the swing beat, and you'll always come up short.
The easiest way to get swing wrong is to treat it as a dotted rhythm. Dump-dee-dump-dee-dump-de-dump. This is easy because the English and Irish and Scottish music relies on the lilt of the dotted rhythm, so that if you're not careful you just end up there, the way that a lot of non-jazz musicians do. Henry Mancini's music did that a lot in the 60s. Or think of the theme from The Odd Couple, with its loping harpsichord and de-dip-de-dip-de-deee melody. Not to say that it wasn't pleasurable. It just didn't swing.
Jazz charts are notated with the swing beat implied. If you didn't know better you'd just play the rhythms with straight eighths, as if it were by JS Bach. But the jazz player knows that although the eighth notes are written straight, the paper is wavy. Think of Duke Ellington's music, with its hard swinging rhythms. How would you notate those? If straight eighths divide a beat 50-50, and a dotted rhythm divides it 66.6666-33.3333, then Ellington's swing is around a 60-40. So is Benny Goodman's. Maybe even more than that. Then you've got Tony Williams, who at 18 was swinging with Miles Davis, but he was swinging at about 55-45 most of the time. Of course, Miles didn't really swing that hard — he was the avatar of "cool jazz" during his most fertile period.
But merely talking about how the beat is divided sort of misses the point, too. Computers make this easy to see. Just key in a solo, played straight, into a music performance software like Vision or Performer or Cakewalk, then use the Quantize feature. Very handy: it shuffles the notes in line to wherever you want them, even if you played sloppily. So, you can either quantize your performance so it sits all straight like a white picket fence (this is what makes electronic music sound so electronic), or you can get into the options menu and tell it to quantize to 66-34 or 60-40 or 55-45. (Michael Jackson's Black or White used this feature on all its electronic instruments, at a swing of 55-45. That's what gives it that refreshing New Jack-ish feel.) Take your solo, quantize it to swing, and see how it comes out.
It will be technically swingy, but it won't swing. In order to get it to swing, you have to swing when you play it to begin with. There's something about the way that the notes are stressed within the measure, and the way that the rhythm hangs, perhaps a bit unevenly, that's really hard to get right if you're trying to explain it. You just have to feel it. The best map I can give you is the one Jorge Luis Borges had in his remarkable empire where cartography was so advanced that maps were exactly the same size as the areas they described.
That is, listen. Listen to all the jazz you can get your hands on, and soon the concept will emerge, whole, in your mind. Of course, by that time, you'll be thinking about other things, like the pungent Davis tone, or Duke Ellington's lavish sound, wide as a 55 Cadillac, or the dry perfection of Wayne Shorter's annus mirabilis, 1964, in which he released three seminal albums one right after the other.
We're lucky, lucky people.
The easiest way to get swing wrong is to treat it as a dotted rhythm. Dump-dee-dump-dee-dump-de-dump. This is easy because the English and Irish and Scottish music relies on the lilt of the dotted rhythm, so that if you're not careful you just end up there, the way that a lot of non-jazz musicians do. Henry Mancini's music did that a lot in the 60s. Or think of the theme from The Odd Couple, with its loping harpsichord and de-dip-de-dip-de-deee melody. Not to say that it wasn't pleasurable. It just didn't swing.
Jazz charts are notated with the swing beat implied. If you didn't know better you'd just play the rhythms with straight eighths, as if it were by JS Bach. But the jazz player knows that although the eighth notes are written straight, the paper is wavy. Think of Duke Ellington's music, with its hard swinging rhythms. How would you notate those? If straight eighths divide a beat 50-50, and a dotted rhythm divides it 66.6666-33.3333, then Ellington's swing is around a 60-40. So is Benny Goodman's. Maybe even more than that. Then you've got Tony Williams, who at 18 was swinging with Miles Davis, but he was swinging at about 55-45 most of the time. Of course, Miles didn't really swing that hard — he was the avatar of "cool jazz" during his most fertile period.
But merely talking about how the beat is divided sort of misses the point, too. Computers make this easy to see. Just key in a solo, played straight, into a music performance software like Vision or Performer or Cakewalk, then use the Quantize feature. Very handy: it shuffles the notes in line to wherever you want them, even if you played sloppily. So, you can either quantize your performance so it sits all straight like a white picket fence (this is what makes electronic music sound so electronic), or you can get into the options menu and tell it to quantize to 66-34 or 60-40 or 55-45. (Michael Jackson's Black or White used this feature on all its electronic instruments, at a swing of 55-45. That's what gives it that refreshing New Jack-ish feel.) Take your solo, quantize it to swing, and see how it comes out.
It will be technically swingy, but it won't swing. In order to get it to swing, you have to swing when you play it to begin with. There's something about the way that the notes are stressed within the measure, and the way that the rhythm hangs, perhaps a bit unevenly, that's really hard to get right if you're trying to explain it. You just have to feel it. The best map I can give you is the one Jorge Luis Borges had in his remarkable empire where cartography was so advanced that maps were exactly the same size as the areas they described.
That is, listen. Listen to all the jazz you can get your hands on, and soon the concept will emerge, whole, in your mind. Of course, by that time, you'll be thinking about other things, like the pungent Davis tone, or Duke Ellington's lavish sound, wide as a 55 Cadillac, or the dry perfection of Wayne Shorter's annus mirabilis, 1964, in which he released three seminal albums one right after the other.
We're lucky, lucky people.
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