Back in June we went to see the incomparable Reggie Watts perform at Central Park Summerstage.
I think Reggie is one of the most exciting artists of our time, but it’s difficult to verbalize exactly what he does. His performances combine improvisational music and absurdist standup comedy into a free-associative yet oddly coherent and impactful whole. The best way to get an idea of what I’m talking about is just to see the man in action.
When teaching guitar, I find that my students need the most help with groove. Students come to me expecting to learn chords, scales, riffs and ultimately entire tunes. I do teach those things, but after a little guidance, anyone can learn them on their own just as well from books, videos, web sites and so on. The harmonic and melodic aspects of guitar take time to master, but it’s just memorization. I devote most of my in-person time with students to rhythm.
Groove is harder to pin down in text and diagrams than chords and scales, so it doesn’t get as much written about it. That gives some folks the mistaken idea that rhythm isn’t as important as melody and harmony. The reverse is true. You can have a long, rich and satisfying guitar-playing life using nothing but the standard fifteen chords, as long as you can groove. If you can’t groove, you can learn all the chords and scales you want, but you won’t sound good.
Here’s an exercise that worked great for me when I was learning, and that I make all my students do. I call it the One Note Groove. It’s pretty simple, you just put on a repetitive beat and play one note over it. Since you don’t have to think about which notes to play, you’re free to devote your entire attention to your timekeeping, your attack, your whole sound — in other words, your groove.
I’m fascinated by the Stone Age, so Werner Herzog’s 3D documentary about cave paintings was catnip for me.
Computers can only do a few very simple operations consisting of flipping electrical switches on and off. You can represent numbers in patterns of the on-off states of sequences of switches. By flipping switches on and off in particular patterns, you can perform simple mathematical operations on the numbers. You can do more complex mathematical operations by stringing simpler operations together.
Here’s what works for me.
Humans are adaptive and full of surprises. We do stupid, self-destructive, narrow-minded and short-sighted things, but we’re also capable of imagination, optimism, compassion and even self-sacrifice. Which feelings do you want to stir in your audience?
Today is the Fourth of July, and I can’t think of anything more patriotic than a post about our most significant contribution to world musical culture: swing. The title of this post refers to the classic Duke Ellington tune, sung here by Ray Nance. Check out the “yah yah” trombone by Tricky Sam Nanton.
The word “swing,” like the word “blues,” has multiple meanings, depending on context. Swing is both a genre and a technical music term describing a certain rhythm. The two are related, but the rhythm has long outlived the genre.
“Ye-yeah” and “baby” are open-ended expressions of love, enthusiasm and general positive energy. They might be specifically directed at a loved one, but usually they’re directed at everyone and no one and have no particular meaning at all.
Pop lyrics aren’t about conveying specific information. They’re about sound for the sake of sound. The voice in pop is an instrument, a color, a way to convey feeling. Pop music is for social dancing, so it’s about rhythm first and foremost. Everything else is just decoration for the beat. Lyrics that are too specific in their meaning can get in the way. Songs with “intelligent” lyrics are meant to be listened to alone, seated, with full concentration. If you want to dance and socialize, the music should only occupy three-quarters of your focus at most. If you’re in your room listening intently on headphones, the simplicity and generality of, say, KC and the Sunshine Band will be annoying. On the other hand, if you’re at a party and everyone’s dancing, an intricate Leonard Cohen song will be a total buzzkill.
Continue reading “What does “ye-yeah” and “baby” mean in the context of pop songs?”
To answer your immediate question, the best thing to do is to go through a well-established music database and listen to representative tracks from each genre: Amazon, the iTunes store, Pandora, Last.fm, Spotify if you’re in Europe, SoundCloud, take your pick. Figure out who the ten or twenty most popular and influential artists are in each genre and listen to as many of their songs as you can. Once you’ve listened to a wide variety of songs in a given genre, you’ll get a sense of their defining musical characteristics, and you’ll be able to make judgments of your own.
There’s a bigger question behind this one, though. What does a musical genre really mean? Continue reading “What are all the genres of Western music and their typical characteristics?”
I’m mostly glad to see the album go the way of the buggy whip. It’s rare that a band can get two or three decent songs together, much less eleven or twelve sequenced in a thoughtful way. Not everything that gets released is Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band. I’m relieved to be able to cherry-pick. Continue reading “Is the album dead?”
I have a theory that what people find most interesting in music is self-reference, recursion and fractal-like scale-invariance. Rhythms based on powers of two are a great way to get this kind of recursion because they can be compounded or subdivided so easily. A bar of four can be treated as two bars of two, or half of a bar of eight. You can further subdivide your bars into quarter, eighth and sixteenth notes. You can group your bars of four or eight into four or eight or sixteen-bar phrases. Here’s a visual representation of this kind of powers-of-two recursion:
