Tap Dancing & the Jazz Band
So, back to jazz; this technique of rhythms simultaneous rhythms, playing
against
each other, is, of course, not limited to the jazz break. It also happens within
the smaller patterns of
rhythm in "hot rhythm." The break is just a bigger block of
syncopation.
In "hot" improvisation the
flow of the musical form is likely to be the same.
Some extreme forms of hot jazz is in effect just along
series of breaks. An example of this in a somewhat different form, that of
dance, is tap dancing, (a sort of dancing you can see demonstrated brilliantly
in the old black-and-white Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire forms, if ever watch
that sort of thing when they come on TV. When I was younger, these old films are
shown quite regularly on television, but I can't say I've seen any answer some
years now which is a great pity.) Tap dancing is a great example
because it is purely percussive, and therefore relatively
simple. The tap dancer is typically accompanied with what is termed
"stop time." The orchestra, or instruments,
accompanying them play, quietly, the bare skeleton of a jazz tune. This skeletal
outline
consists of a series of short, clipped chords marking
the main melodic features of the tune, which are normally coincident
with the pulses of the fundamental rhythm.
"Stop time" rarely involves a syncopation; only, in fact, when the
syncopation is so characteristic a feature of the original melody
that it can't be missed out. The tunes used to accompany tap dancing
are usually slow ones that offer relatively few melodic complexities
per phrase, and their "stop time" versions often contain
an average of only one or two chords, or notes, per
part.
The
tap dancer embroiders a rhythmic improvisation on top of this framework. The
chords of the "stop
time" accompaniment provide points of reference for the dancing;
in other words with a widely spaced series of pulses representing
the fundamental rhythm. The tap dancer's improvisation interacts with
this rhythm, filling up the intervals between the "stop
time" chords with percussive patterns and poly rhythmic cycles
that impose a different set of accidents from that given
by the fundamental rhythm. (And in the case of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire,
there are two sets of rhythmic patterns, one from each dancer, which sometimes
are in unison and sometimes move apart to generate complex rhythmic patterns.
Brilliant stuff! You can get something similar to this effect with an
Irish ceilidh band, where
the bodhran player will interact with the musicians playing the bones producing
similar rhythms to the tap dancers, and playing those against the rhythm of the
musicians who are playing the basic tune. It's something that can make
Irish ceilidh music so
exciting.)
As in the case of the
"break," the tap dancer's phrase represents a leap into rhythmically wild
improvisation, followed by a relieving return to the normality of the
fundamental rhythm. There is a juxtaposition of two conflicting
rhythms . Each time interval between the
chords of the "stop time" accompaniment is a small
percussive "break." The listener's sense of rhythmic orientation is disturbed by
the syncopation of the dancer's feet producing a sense of disquiet which is
later resolved by the reintroduction of the fundamental
pulse which appears just where his had continued in their mind. This device is
used in Irish step dancing, which is a form of tap dancing. This kind of dancing
is really done it ceilidhs, as it takes many years of practice to learn to do
it, but sometimes it is a ceilidh when there are a lot of Irish present one will
find there are a few people who are experts this kind of dancing. The
Irish ceilidh band will
then play for them to perform a demonstration dance. Typically the ceilidh band
would play music that they also play the general grouped dancing, but when
played for the tap dancers it reaches a completely new level of excitement, the
rhythms that they are producing adding to the excitement, certainties and
uncertainties of the rhythm interest the same way as the tap dancing described
above. This is what has made groups like Riverdance so popular.
In hot jazz there is much more involved
but the principle is the same in that there is a constant fight between the
unexpected, restless, challenging
rhythm of the hot melody and the regularity of the fundamental
pulse that has come to be known as
as "swing." The best examples of swing are in improvised
jazz when
even the musicians themselves are not quite sure what is going to happen next
and the music takes on the aspect of a tussle in
which individual players may actually try to mess each
other up, as well as the audience. Remember some years ago when I was teaching
violin from the Worcestershire and Herefordshire education authorities (I never
got to work for Gloucestershire, which is a pity because I could have called
myself the three choirs violin teacher) remember going to a workshop given by a
jazz bass player. He was talking about improvisation in hot jazz, and the fact
that sometimes you haven't a clue what's going to happen next or where it's
going. He said his technique was simply to play what seemed to be appropriate
and to fit, as soon as it stopped working to shut up for a moment then diving
again. All sounds a bit like a barroom brawl when you're fighting, but suddenly
might find yourself chucked out of the brawling group. The pub brawl enthusiast
will sway around momentarily on the outskirts of the fighting mass, then roll up
their sleeves and dive back in again to enjoy a good punch-up. One of my sons is
in the Warwickshire police, so I hear plenty of stories about bar room brawls -
I have an expert in the family! Jazz is a more civilised version of this,
though sometimes when it gets really exciting, perhaps it isn't any more
civilised).
When you get a situation where the musicians, dancers and audience are all
desperately trying to hang on
to their sense of rhythmic orientation on the one
hand but are violently disturbing it (or listening to it being
violently disturbed) on the other, the result is jazz in its purest and best
form.
Of course, jazz isn't the only kind of music where this happens.
For example, the Hindus have built an elaborate and subtle musical art, whose
rhythms are infinitely
more complex than any so far dreamed of in jazz. (I think I've mentioned before
in my ramblings that I once played ceilidh fiddle music with an Indian tabla
playing friend of mine, who regrettably doesn't live anywhere near where I play
with my ceilidh band, and it was an amazing and eye-opening experience, with
rhythms and tonality coming from that tiny drop that I just couldn't get my head
round but had an immediate enlivening and enriching effect on the music.) It's
well worth comparing jazz with Western music because of what it says about its
origins, and some aspects of jazz have nothing at all to do with Western music.
In some ways jazz is one of those gifts that the great American nation has given
to the rest of the world. It is rather similar to the Internet, which was
originally developed as an American military system to allow continued
communications in the case of a nuclear attack, with distributed systems meaning
that communication would automatically be rerouted elsewhere if a part of the
systems destroyed. America gave this to the world as a free gift, and although
the rest of the world use it for peaceful purposes, America and other nations
also use of military purposes. So out of that things have come good. And jazz
music has similar explained later.
Another gift given by the Americans to the world is GPS satellite navigation,
again developed for military purposes and then given freely to the world and now
an everyday part of life with in car navigation, mobile phones and all sorts of
things using GPS. Another example of good things coming out of bad.
So how does this relate to jazz? If it wasn't for slavery in the southern states
of America, there wouldn't have been a high concentration of Africans with their
traditional music living in a part of a country that interfaced with European
immigrants. If it wasn't for this interface between Africans and Europeans, the
music that came out of the African slaves folk music under been modified into
jazz, with the availability of western European instruments, and the subsequent
influencing of that original African folk music and religious music to develop
the big bands of the 1940s. And having developed this, basically as a result of
the slave trade, America has given it to the rest the world. Jazz is everywhere.
So jazz and the jazz band can be
considered American gifts in the same way as the Internet and GPS, products of
American generosity (that was pre-Donald Trump of course!). I also guess that
the British can take some credit for the development of jazz as they were major
slave traders in the past. More.........