Episode 2: The Rhythm

Musical labels and definitions are notoriously imprecise and often contested. But a particular sense of rhythm has been central to most jazz music from its earliest beginnings to the present day. That rhythm comes from the unique origins of the music: the mingling of European and African traditions, the blending of four-square Western beats. and African polyrhythms.

Music is essentially a collection of sounds arranged in time. Rhythm—you find it in Bach or an Indian raga or “Happy Birthday”—is built on notes of different duration. Some notes whiz by in fast scales. Others are held for long dramatic chords.

If you are a musician, you probably can read a score, and you know that written music tells you how fast the notes go by, or—more precisely—how many notes there are in each beat. Quarter notes like the ones picture below are played one-to-a-beat. Other notes are played faster (two-, three- or four-to-a-beat). Or more slowly (one note held for two, three or four beats).

When classical musicians play, they can play phrases in particular ways, shaping the rhythms to make a melody “sing.” You might have heard someone talk about a musician’s exquisite “phrasing.” An experienced musician doesn’t play the notes and rhythms in a mathematically precise way. If he or she did, every recording of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” would sound exactly the same. But musicians put a personal stamp on everything they play, interpreting melodies through their own sense of artistry. But the starting point for playing a phrase is to give notes an equal rhythmic value.

The music that West Africans brought to New Orleans had a very different tradition and rhythmic foundation. African music is built on complex, overlapping rhythms that nonetheless have a strong, propulsive drive. Listen to the rhythm Butour Ngale creates using only their hands, bodies and voices:

This music urges you to move in a different way than a European waltz or polka. If your ear is tuned in to the beat, you can hear the “poly” in the rhythm. Unlike most Western music, in which the rhythm is counted in groups of four (ONE-two-Three-four, ONE-two-Three-four ) or threes (ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three). African polyrhythms stack these two rhythms on top of each other. Listen closely to the rhythms in the video. At first, you’ll probably count the beat in threes (ONE-two-three), but as the quartet goes on, you’ll be able to hear a rhythm that in fours, too (ONE-two-Three-four). As the song goes on, you’ll hear the musicians play around the steady beat with little bursts of different rhythms.

This isn’t just obscure ethnomusicology. Rhythms like this drive a lot of today’s music, whether it’s pop or hip-hop, American or world-music. Go to the Spotify playlist and listen to “Okra” by Olu Dara and his group and try counting in either threes or fours:

This overlapping of threes and fours is behind the unique feeling of jazz melody lines. It worked its way into the jazz style in the New Orleans melting pot in the late 1800s, and has been with us ever since.

When a jazz musician plays a string of notes in a certain style, the default feeling isn’t the steady, equal rhythm of a classical musician. When a player swings, she pushes the rhythm of her melodic lines to a place “in between” the steady beat of a classical player, and more toward a “triplet” feeling in which the first note gets two counts and the second note gets one count: 1-2-3—1-2-3. The feeling of swing in jazz is a rhythm “in between” those two feelings, as if someone counted three beats against the two beats, and used that to define the rhythm. That feeling of three against two comes from the African tradition of polyrhythms.

 So what does that sound like, exactly?

When someone plays a melody in jazz, the rhythmic feeling is somewhere between the equal rhythm of eighth notes and what musicians call “dotted triplets.” Listen to the start opening melody of Charlie Parker’s “Ornithology” played with different “feels.” First, with even eighth notes...

That sounds sort of staid and boring.

And now with the so-called dotted rhythm of triplets, where the first note gets two counts and the second note gets one count.

Now it sounds sort of “cute,” like a child’s nursery song.

But play in-between those two rhythms, and you get this:

When a melody “swings,” it falls somewhere in between the even rhythm and a "dotted” rhythm. It’s something “felt” rather than calculated. When I played piano in my college big band, our director spent a lot of rehearsal time helping the players get the “feel” of a melody line. It’s not an easy thing to master, but when you hear a great player at work, you know when he or she “swings.”

Listen to “Bird” himself, and you’ll get the idea. Listen to Charlie Parker’s recording of “Ornithology” from 1946.

Classical vs. Jazz—A matter of phrasing.

“Ornithology” is a classic jazz “standard,” written by Parker. But you can play any kind of melody with a jazz feel. When any good musician plays a melody, they don’t play the rhythm exactly as written. They add life to the melody by making subtle adjustments in rhythm and volume. Musicians call it phrasing, and it’s one of the reasons that one pianist’s “Moonlight” Sonata doesn’t sound like another’s.

If you “jazz something up,” a melody will sound really different. In fact, you can really hear the signature feel of jazz when you hear a jazz musician play a classical melody. 

For example, listen to this orchestra recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s well-known melody from the cantata, “Wachet Auf.” played by a full orchestra:

The melody lines are sensitively phrased so that the music “breathes” in a beautiful, warm way.

Now compare that to the same music played by John Lewis, the keyboard player with the Modern Jazz Quartet. Here, he plays the harpsichord on the 1973 album, Blues on Bach:

In the orchestra version, the notes are smooth and mostly even. In the jazz version, the notes are essentially the same, but the two versions of the same melody have entirely different qualities. Lewis “swings” the melody, and even if you can’t identify the exact rhythms, you probably can sense that the two versions feel different.

Something about Bach’s sinuous melody lines draws jazz musicians. Just for kicks, here’s another version of “Wachtet Auf,” performed by The Swingle Singers:

And here’s another familiar Bach melody, first played traditionally on organ:

And here it is “jazzed up” by The Swingle Singers:

The Swingle Singers play it much faster, but you can also hear the “swing” in the music. And you can certainly feel it.

And feeling it is the most essential thing. You may not have known before about African polyrhythms, the cultural life of 19th-century New Orleans, or the difference between triplets and eighth notes. But now, when you hear a player really swinging, driving a song in a way that makes you want to move, you’ll have a little better idea of where that urge comes from. It’s part of the history of the music, a history that sounds loud and clear with every saxophone riff and piano chord.