In jazz Jazz is a music genre that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States from a confluence of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th century American popular music. Its West African pedigree and related musical styles, the term swing is used to describe the sense of propulsive rhythmic Rhythm is a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions." In other words, rhythm is simply the timing of the musical sounds and silences. While rhythm most commonly applies to sound, such as music and spoken language, it may also refer to visual presentation, as " "feel" or "groove Groove is the sense of propulsive rhythmic "feel" or sense of "swing" created by the interaction of the music played by a band's rhythm section . The term is mainly used in the context of genres outside of Western art music, such as funk, rock music, power groove, fusion, and soul" created by the musical interaction between the performers, especially when the music creates a "visceral response" such as feet-tapping or head-nodding. The term "swing" is also used to refer to several other related jazz concepts including the swung note In music, a swung note or shuffle note is a performance practice, mainly in jazz-influenced music, in which some notes with equal written time values are performed with unequal durations, usually as alternating long and short. It follows similar principles to notes inégales of the Baroque and Classical music eras. A swing or shuffle rhythm is the (a "lilting" rhythm of unequal notes) and the genre of swing Swing music, also known as swing jazz or simply swing, is a form of jazz music that developed in the early 1930s and became a distinctive style by 1935 in the United States. Swing uses a strong rhythm section of double bass and drums as the anchor for a lead section of brass instruments such as trumpets and trombones, woodwinds including, a jazz style which originated in the 1930s. Even though there is overlap between these concepts, music from any era of jazz or even from non-jazz music can be said to have "swing" (in the sense of having a strong rhythmic groove or feel).
While some jazz musicians have called the concept of "swing" a subjective and elusive notion, they acknowledge that the concept is well-understood by experienced jazz musicians at a practical, intuitive level. Jazz players refer to "swing" as the sense that a jam session or live performance is really "cooking" or "in the pocket." If a jazz musician states that an ensemble performance is "really swinging", this suggests that the performers are playing with a special degree of rhythmic coherence and "feel". Although referring to a "sense of swing" is often done in the context of ensemble performances (e.g., a jazz combo or band), even an unaccompanied soloist can be said to be performing with "swing".
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Description
Like the term "groove Groove is the sense of propulsive rhythmic "feel" or sense of "swing" created by the interaction of the music played by a band's rhythm section . The term is mainly used in the context of genres outside of Western art music, such as funk, rock music, power groove, fusion, and soul", which is used to describe a cohesive rhythmic "feel" in a funk or rock context, the concept of "swing" can be hard to define. Indeed, some dictionaries use the terms as synonyms: "Groovy...[d]enotes music that really swings."[1] The Jazz in America glossary defines it as "...when an individual player or ensemble performs in such a rhythmically coordinated way as to command a visceral response from the listener (to cause feet to tap and heads to nod); an irresistible gravitational buoyancy that defies mere verbal definition.[2]
As a performance technique, swing has been called "the most debated word in jazz". When jazz performer Cootie Williams Charles Melvin "Cootie" Williams was an American jazz and rhythm and blues trumpeter was asked to define it, he joked that "Define it? I'd rather tackle Einstein Albert Einstein (pronounced /ˈælbərt ˈaɪnstaɪn/; German: [ˈalbɐt ˈaɪnʃtaɪn] ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a theoretical physicist, philosopher and author who is widely regarded as one of the most influential and best known scientists and intellectuals of all time. A German-Swiss Nobel laureate, he is often regarded as the's theory!"[3] Benny Goodman Benjamin David “Benny” Goodman was an American jazz musician, clarinetist and bandleader, known as "King of Swing", "Patriarch of the Clarinet", "The Professor", and "Swing's Senior Statesman", the 1930s-era bandleader nicknamed the "King of Swing" called "swing" "free speech in music", whose most important element is "...the liberty a soloist has to stand and play a chorus in the way he feels it..." His contemporary Tommy Dorsey Thomas Francis Dorsey was an American jazz trombonist, trumpeter, composer, and bandleader of the Big Band era. He was known as "The Sentimental Gentleman of Swing", due to his smooth-toned trombone playing.. He was the younger brother of bandleader Jimmy Dorsey. After Dorsey broke with his brother in the mid thirties, he led an gave a more ambiguous definition when he proposed that "Swing is sweet and hot at the same time and broad enough in its creative conception to meet, every challenge tomorrow may present."[4] Boogie-woogie Boogie-woogie is a style of piano-based blues that became very popular in the late 1930s and early 1940s, but originated much earlier, and was extended from piano, to three pianos at once, guitar, big band, and country and western music, and even gospel. Whilst the blues traditionally depicts a variety of emotions, boogie-woogie is mainly pianist Maurice Rocco argues that the definition of swing "...is just a matter of personal opinion."[5]
Jeff Pressing's 2002 article claims that a "feel" is "a cognitive temporal phenomen emerging from one or more carefully aligned concurrent rhythmic patterns, characterized by...perception of recurring pulses, and subdivision of structure in such pulses,...perception of a cycle of time, of length 2 or more pulses, enabling identification of cycle locations, and...effectiveness of engaging synchronizing body responses (e.g. dance, foot-tapping)".[6]
A sense of "swing" for jazz artists has analogies in the similarly idealised but indefinable notions of "funk Funk is a music genre that originated in the late 1960s when African American musicians blended soul music, soul jazz and R&B into a rhythmic, danceable new form of music. Funk de-emphasizes melody and harmony and brings a strong rhythmic groove of electric bass and drums to the foreground. Funk songs are often based on an extended vamp on a" in funk music, or "flow" in the hip hop Hip hop is an artistic sub-culture that originated in the 1970s in the inner city Jamaican American, African American, and Latino American urban community of New York City. DJ Afrika Bambaataa outlined the four pillars of Hip-Hop Culture: MCing, DJing, b-boying, and graffiti writing. Other elements include beatboxing scene. The notion of a special 'feel' (rather than a set of rules) that defines the musical style is common in non-Western music, especially the African tradition. "Flow is as elemental to hip hop as the concept of swing is to jazz". Just as the jazz concept of "swing" involves performers deliberately playing behind or ahead of the beat, the hip-hop concept of flow is about "funking with one's expectations of time"-that is, the rhythm and pulse of the music.[7] "Flow is not about what is being said so much as how one is saying it".[8]
See also
- Rhythm Rhythm is a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions." In other words, rhythm is simply the timing of the musical sounds and silences. While rhythm most commonly applies to sound, such as music and spoken language, it may also refer to visual presentation, as "
- Swing music Swing music, also known as swing jazz or simply swing, is a form of jazz music that developed in the early 1930s and became a distinctive style by 1935 in the United States. Swing uses a strong rhythm section of double bass and drums as the anchor for a lead section of brass instruments such as trumpets and trombones, woodwinds including
- Swung note In music, a swung note or shuffle note is a performance practice, mainly in jazz-influenced music, in which some notes with equal written time values are performed with unequal durations, usually as alternating long and short. It follows similar principles to notes inégales of the Baroque and Classical music eras. A swing or shuffle rhythm is the
- Groove Groove is the sense of propulsive rhythmic "feel" or sense of "swing" created by the interaction of the music played by a band's rhythm section . The term is mainly used in the context of genres outside of Western art music, such as funk, rock music, power groove, fusion, and soul
References
- ^ Slang Expressions in Popular Music
- ^ Jazz Resource Library - Glossary
- ^ What Is Swing?
- ^ What Is Swing?
- ^ What Is Swing?
- ^ WHAT IS SWING? From Bill Treadwell's "Big Book of Swing" published in 1946. http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:tmrZVsOeXnMJ:www.uni-hamburg.de/Wiss/FB/09/Musik/Dozenten/Pfleiderer/Escom5.pdf+groove+music+definition&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=264&gl=ca&lr=lang_en|lang_fr
- ^ William Jelani Cobb. To the break of dawn: a freestyle on the hip hop aesthetic . 2007. Page 87-88
- ^ Ibid. Page 90
Further reading
- Clark, Mike and Paul Jackson. Rhythm Combination (1992).
- Middleton, Richard (1999). "Form." Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture. Malden, Massachusetts. ISBN 0-631-21263-9.
- Pressing, Jeff (2002): "Black Atlantic Rhythm. Its Computational and Transcultural Foundations." Music Perception, 19, 285-310.
- Prögler, J.A. (1995): "Searching for Swing. Participatory Discrepancies in the Jazz Rhythm Section." Ethnomusicology 39, 21- 54.
Categories: Musical techniques | Jazz techniques | Popular music
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