Monday, March 04, 2019

Tuning Slide 4.33- Keep the Rhythm

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music
To live is to be musical, starting with the blood dancing in your veins. Everything living has a rhythm. Do you feel your music?
― Michael Jackson

As I write this I am sitting on a balcony overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. There is a hazy cloudiness, but still some diluted sunlight. The wind is coming at about 10 mph from the southwest. The palm branches sway with the winds rising and falling. I see reflected off my computer screen a kite behind me catching the wind. I hear the call of gulls and children laughing and playing. Later there will be the possibilities of thunderstorms and tomorrow is forecast to be at least 20 degrees colder, so I want to enjoy what I have at the moment.

But more importantly is the constant sound from the waves. The consistent rhythm of the tide and currents is what touches me and depths I have no way of touching in a conscious way. Some will say it’s because of the none months before we are born, hearing the watery amniotic fluid in it’s rhythm. Others will point to the heartbeat and the rhythm of the blood in our brains. Others still will point to the vibrating rhythms of the universe. It doesn’t matter how or why, it is simply to say that we live in a world of rhythm, pulses, movement of sound waves, most of which we cannot even hear.

We all have rhythm! Mickey Hart, percussionist with the Grateful Dead explained it as the movement from chaos to order:

In the beginning, there was noise. Noise begat rhythm, and rhythm begat everything else.

I did a quick Google search on songs with the word rhythm in the title. While there were many versions of some of the classics, here are six:

✓ Fascinating Rhythm
✓ Rhythm of the Falling Rain
✓ Girls Got Rhythm
✓ All God’s Children Got Rhythm
✓ Rhythm Nation
and of course,
✓ I Got Rhythm.

A few years ago I did a post on the idea of rhythm in expanding on rhythm as one of the three things every trumpet player (and musician) needs to have:
There are three characteristics of a great trumpet player:
1. Every time you play you have a great- not a good- sound.
2. You have great- not good- rhythm.
3. You have great- not good- ears to hear the sound. (Link)
In essence you have to have a sound that’s worth playing and listening to, a rhythm that turns the sound from noisy chaos into music, and the ability to hear it all.

This came up in my thinking the other day as I was “drumming” along with a song on the radio. I was attempting a steady beat that wasn’t just single drum beats. I was trying to fit into the style and rhythm of the song. What I discovered again, other than why I am a trumpet player and not a percussionist, is how difficult it really is to keep the beat steady AND interesting. Sooner or later I always miss a beat, come in late, or just generally mess up the whole thing.

Which brought me to the next thought about playing in a jazz big band. The “rhythm section” isn’t just the drummer. It is also the piano, bass, and guitar. Sure, they all get solos from time to time and some of them even get a melody, but they are, together, the rhythm of the band. They keep us moving at the steady and appropriate beat. Rhythm is far more than just keeping good time. It is the entire flow of the music. When we work together at the rhythm, when we get in synch or flow, music truly happens and we, I firmly believe, are in touch with the music of the cosmos.

Our biological rhythms are the symphony of the cosmos, music embedded deep within us to which we dance, even when we can't name the tune.
― Deepak Chopra

For me it is easier to keep rhythm on the trumpet than on the steering wheel of my car or the table I am typing at. It is my way of expressing rhythm. It is part of my “biological rhythm.” This is one of the important things I have discovered (and rediscovered many times) over the years. The music I make has rhythm- and I have to learn to feel, hear, and reproduce it through the horn. Which in both the short- and long-term takes me back to basics- yep, Arban, Clarke, Schlossberg, etc. As I work through those routines I begin to feel rhythm. I begin to know what it feels like to be in the right rhythm for the song. Self 2 just goes there and I work with it. Fortunately it doesn’t matter whether we are jazz, classical, or polka musicians. In those basics we learn what rhythm is. And we discover how it touches us.

Build the ear for rhythm by working the rhythm of the basics, then moving on. Feel the movement of the song. Watch for the unexpected that means the rhythm is changing. It is more than keeping the right tempo. Metronomes don’t provide rhythm, for example. They only give us a guideline for what speed something is to move. That may be helpful sometimes in practice, but it will never help us develop a sense of rhythm. Time in music is a structure on which the rhythm is built. You start with the sound and make sure you have the best sound you can have.

Then you let it flow. The world will change!

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures. It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.
― Rabindranath Tagore

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