Dilla Time in “Chameleon”

Posted byEthan 2 Comments on Dilla Time in “Chameleon”

After reading and re-reading Dan Charnas’ Dilla Time, now I’m listening to music with new attention to rhythmic subtleties. I have especially been digging into the relationship between J Dilla and Herbie Hancock–Dilla sampled Herbie on “Get Dis Money” and “Zen Guitar.” That digging made me go back to my favorite Herbie tune with fresh ears.

This might be the funkiest thing in the history of funk. But what makes it so funky? I wanted to investigate the microtiming of that incredible opening groove to find out.

The track begins with Herbie’s unaccompanied synth bassline. You can see my analysis of it here. According to Steven Pond’s excellent book about Head Hunters, Herbie recorded the entire bass part in isolation several times using different synth sounds. He decided that he liked how two of them sounded in combination, so he layered them together. Then Herbie overdubbed the clav part live along with the rest of the band. On page 140 of Pond’s book, Herbie says he recorded the bassline to a click, which is puzzling since the song’s tempo gradually speeds up. Maybe the click was designed to speed up intentionally? Maybe it was generated by some piece of 1970s analog gear that got faster unintentionally? Maybe Herbie isn’t remembering correctly about the click? I’m not sure.

Anyway, however he recorded it, Herbie plays the intro bassline in straight sixteenth notes, with only very slight timing variations. When Harvey Mason’s drums enter, however, the bassline begins swinging the sixteenth notes, and the drums swing them too. Here’s my transcription of measures five through twelve: 

Here’s a Groove Pizza representation of the drum pattern.

Both notation and the Groove Pizza are necessarily simplified versions of the actual performed rhythms. To get the timing more exactly, I put the track into Ableton and warped it out. I aligned the downbeat kick in every odd-numbered bar to the grid, because those feel like strong hypermetrical accents. I then used Ableton’s audio-to-MIDI function to get the drum timing. I had to correct the MIDI a bit, because sometimes the software hears hi-hats that aren’t there. However, its timing accuracy is excellent. (At least, it’s excellent for onsets; it’s harder to determine the length of the drum hits exactly, because they decay gradually.)

In the annotated screenshots below, the hi-hat is in the top row of drum hits, the snare is in the middle row, and the kick is in the bottom row. Here are measures five and six, the first ones with Harvey Mason’s drums.

The groove gets a lot of its power from the anticipated snare backbeats on the sixteenth note before the second beat of each measure. The hi-hat on beat two in each measure also drags noticeably. To add another layer of complexity, the offbeat kick drum right after beat three in measure six uses lighter swing than the snare.

In measures seven and eight, the drum pattern changes. Now there are hi-hats on every eighth note, and there are off-beat kicks after beat three in both measures:

Harvey Mason audibly drags the hi-hats in measure seven, and also drags them slightly in measure eight. The swing on the snare and kick sixteenth note offbeats in measure seven is wider than it is on those same offbeats in measure eight.

Measures nine and ten continue the pattern from the previous two measures, but with the last snare backbeat replaced by kicks on the last two eighth notes:

The anticipated snare in measure nine is on a perfectly straight sixteenth note. That breaks the general pattern, and I suspect that it wasn’t deliberate. The other offbeat kicks and snares continue to be swung by different amounts. The hi-hats in the first half of measure ten drag conspicuously. 

Measure eleven is much like measures seven and nine, but measure twelve is a new variation on the pattern:

The variable swing and dragged eighth notes continue here. In measure eleven, the kick on the sixteenth note right after beat three isn’t swung at all, whereas the kick after beat four in measure twelve is swung really widely.

I haven’t been talking about the timing of Herbie’s bass notes. This is because they align remarkably closely with the drums, especially on the swung sixteenths. The band had played the tune live several times by the time they recorded it, so Harvey Mason probably knew what to expect before the tape started rolling.

Harvey Mason and Herbie Hancock keep great time. If they wanted to play exactly on the sixteenth note grid, they would have. So, why don’t they? The simple answer is that they are using sixteenth note swing, which consists of delayed offbeats by definition. Matthew Butterfield argues that the point of swinging offbeats is to heighten the listener’s anticipation for the next onbeat. Those offbeat snares before the second beat of each measure are tense! They are syntactically early, a sixteenth note before the backbeats where you’re expecting them. But then they’re swung, so they are unexpectedly late for being early! (Except for in measure nine.) You can practically hear that snare hit teasing you: “Don’t you want me to be on the backbeat? I’m alllllllmost on the backbeat. But not quite.” And then when the snare on beat four does smack solidly and expectedly into place, it is quite a relief.

As an experiment, I used Live’s quantization feature to regularize the timing of the “Chameleon” groove. First, I tried quantizing it to a straight sixteenth note grid. Then I applied a consistent 66% sixteenth note swing. Neither of them sounds bad. The straight sixteenth version is a plausible funk groove. The artificially swung version legitimately gets my head nodding. But they just don’t have that hump that the original performance does. The whole point of the groove is that the timing is not consistent from one measure to the next, or between all the different pieces of the drum kit.

Matthew Butterfield’s analysis of the “Chameleon” groove shows the same variable sixteenth note swing that I describe here. (See also Fernando Benadon’s comments on that analysis.) Butterfield measures how far the drum onsets are from their expected timing in milliseconds. That is good for scholarly objectivity, but I don’t find it to be a good way to capture the subjective experience of hearing the groove. I prefer to analyze in terms of beat subdivisions, because it’s closer to how the musicians were probably thinking.

We need some new words to describe this kind of rhythmic feel, other than just “funky.” There are a lot of different ways to be funky! My fake-swing version is funky, but it’s not the “Chameleon” groove. Musicians will say that Harvey Mason is in the pocket, but then no one can define what the pocket is exactly. I considered using the word “polyswing”, by analogy to polyrhythm and polymeter. The idea is that there are several swing feels juxtaposed, the same way that polyrhythm juxtaposes different subdivisions of the measure. But “polyswing” is still inadequate, because it doesn’t address the eighth note dragging. The best term I know of is the one Dan Charnas coined for his book: Dilla time. I posted some thoughts about all of this on Twitter, and got some good commentary:

https://twitter.com/smithsonmusic/status/1507777588634263562

By the way, a lot of producers have sampled “Chameleon”, which is unsurprising. However, I was surprised to see that they tend to go for the later parts of the track rather than the intro. Maybe that opening groove is too 70s-sounding? There are uncountably many covers of the tune too, but I have never heard a really good one. People play it too fast and too simple. “Chameleon” isn’t just about the notes on the page. It’s about the details of its groove. The notes on the page are easy to reproduce, but the groove is not.

2 replies on “Dilla Time in “Chameleon””

  1. Thanks, Ethan, for digging into these issues of groove in such depth, with both technical precision and feeling. I bought “Dilla Time” as soon as I read your post on the topic, and now you’re touching on a record that’s close to my heart. “Head Hunters” changed my life: Herbie meets Sly (it’s not incidental that one of the tunes is called “Sly”). I wonder whether this is what Miles may have been trying to do from Bitches Brew until his hiatus. We opened many a second set with (our rendition of) “Watermelon Man,” Headhunters style, and “Chameleon” was a jam session staple for decades, usually poorly played. Among other things (many of which you discuss), nobody (including me) touched the contrasting middle section that I would assume gave the song its name.

    The speedup. It made me realize that funk doesn’t require metronomic time, even though it often has it. (I’ve since listened to field recordings of West African traditional music, and there are a number of instances when they tend to speed up once they really get cooking.)

    I can’t imagine how the tune as a whole could be recorded to a click track. Hardware in the olden days could impart a stiff feel (see The Eighties) but I never encountered or heard of a situation when it accelerated as it warmed up, as you charitably suggest. Also, the middle section really sounds jazzily, organically un-click-tracked, and isn’t that where the speedup mostly happens? I think maybe Herbie might have recorded the early parts to a click: that sounds pretty steady to me. Or did you find that it starts speeding up from the git go?

    I’d like to hear your analysis of Paul Jackson’s James Brown-style rhythm guitar part played on Precision bass, how it interlocks with Herbie’s synth bass and the drums, which really makes the groove go, to my ears. Could the presence of that additional contrapuntal line be the reason that later sections of the tune tend to get sampled more?

    I’d also like to hear your thoughts on the group’s feel with different drummers: Harvey Mason vs. Mike Clark, who played on later Herbie records with the Headhunters.

    I look forward to your next post.

    1. It does seem clear that Miles and Herbie were pointed in the same direction in the 70s and 80s, both of them were constantly adapting to what young Black audiences were listening to, both of them revered Sly Stone, both of them understood hip-hop much better than any of their contemporaries. I saw Herbie play live a few years ago and his band included Terrace Martin, a J Dilla disciple and a key collaborator with Kendrick Lamar. They sounded great together.

      The whole thing with the synth bass on “Chameleon” is kind of a mystery. I’m sure the middle section was played live with no click, because Paul Jackson is playing bass rather than Herbie. As for the first and last sections, maybe Herbie did various takes at various tempos, or maybe he is just misremembering that he played to a click. The interview I cited is a recent one, and 1973 was a long time ago! The Pond book has nice transcriptions of all the different parts, but it doesn’t get into the microrhythms. So maybe I will take on Paul Jackson’s “guitar” part, it certainly is a key ingredient. I find Mike Clark to be a less “greasy” player, but is still outrageously funky. I mean, he played on “God Make Me Funky”, and that is one of the nastiest and most-sampled grooves of all time. Comparing those guys is like comparing the world’s most delicious apple to the world’s most delicious orange.

      I have also played “Chameleon” too fast and not very well in various jam sessions. It’s a rite of passage. I love it as jam fodder because anybody can pick up the basic vibe and chord progression in ten seconds but you can also spend your entire life digging into its nuances. Like the twelve-bar blues in that respect.

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