Rhythms are quickly wearisome, unless refreshed by a countervailing foreground which groups the tones against the metre. The ever‐so‐slight rubato of a solo instrument playing in front of the beat is familiar to jazzlovers. To play jazz properly it is not enough to move with the beat: you must also enter the ‘groove’ of it, which means riding alongside it with those playful gestures that ruffle the rhythmic surface and fill it with light. The distinction between beat and groove is a special case of the general distinction between foreground and background rhythm.

GROOVE

WRITTEN RHYTHM AND PERCEIVED RHYTHM

The symbiotic relationship between the bass guitar and drum set in mbaqanga is not always an obvious one. In the examples of mbaqanga the drum set usually plays the same groove for the duration of the song

This groove creates a more relaxed or open feel which allows for it to be performed at faster tempos

MbaqangaAllen suggests that the term “mbaqanga”, which refers to the staple maize-meal diet of manyof the working-class musicians who played the music to earn a living wage, stems from “theneed to define and express an independent and valuable black South African urban identity”by renaming what had become generally referred to as African Jazz (Allen 1993, 26).Although the terms are sometimes used interchangeably by musicians and musicologists,Allen arguest that the style of mbaqanga developed in the 1960s is markedly different fromAfrican Jazz (Allen 1993, 26). As the name suggests, mbaqanga is viewed as a morecommercially appealing style than African Jazz and has been popularised in South Africa byartists such as Simon ‘Mahlatini’ Nkabinde and internationally by Paul Simon’s heavilymbaqanga influenced Graceland album. The roots of mbaqanga lie in traditional Zulu musicmixed with influences of marabi and kwela. Rhythmically, mbaqanga is, like tsaba tsaba,generally based on a straight-eighth note feel with a driving bass drum on all four downbeatsof the bar. This quarter note bass drum pattern, commonly referred to as “four on the floor”,is complemented by the hands performing various orchestrations of the rhythm below. Thisuniversal rhythm is known as the Charleston in American jazz, the Habanera in Cuban Latinmusic, and the Ghoema in South Africa.Figure 1.2 Charleston/ Habanera/ Ghoema rhythm

Groove

In looking at time in jazz

Grooveindrumpatternsasa functionofbothrhythmicpropertiesandlisteners’attitudes

GrooveA Phenomenology of Rhythmic Nuance

These jazz and fusion influences were especially instrumental in generating theclimax waves in my symphony. All of them are achieved by means of setting a metric groove withthe help of syncopation and cross-rhythms.

If

Groove Aesthetics in Afro-Cuban Jazz

What is ‘groove’? 18Four Elements of Groove 241Metronomic Time 242Syncopation 313‘Deep metricality’ or Multi-levelled Meter 424Back-beat 49

JACOB COLLIER: A GROOVE EXPLAINED | EFG LONDON JAZZ FESTIVAL PREVIEW

This rhythm is typically played with brushes on the snare drum. The first of the three notes is omitted on the snare drum as it is played by the bass drum in the four-note note “four-on-the-floor” pattern. This creates the feel of the groove as a heavyemphasis is placed on the eighth note after beat two and beat four of the bar. An additional snare accent is consistently placed on the last sixteenth note before beat two and beat four of the bar to set up the anticipations before beat three and beat one of each bar. The bass guitar generally phrases around this same three-note rhythmic pattern and plays an important role in defining many of the stylistic features of the music. This will be elaboratedon in the following chapter.

Groove

Musicpsychologydefinesgrooveashumans’pleasureableurgeto movetheirbodyin syn-chronywithmusic.Pastresearchhasfoundthatrhythmicsyncopation,eventdensity,beatsalience,andrhythmicvariabilityarepositivelyassociatedwithgroove

here's an old model from the 19th century of memory which actually in the 21st century has come 00:13:03 back as a pretty good one as a metaphor anyway so the idea is that rain comes down on the ground and there's a little regularities randomly there and at some point those regularities will be a 00:13:17 little more responsive to the rain and a little channel will form the channel acts as an amplifier and so wherever that channel got started it starts funneling lots more water through it other water is draining into 00:13:31 it and all of a sudden it starts cutting deeper and you get these gullies and you get down into these gullies you have to remember to look up because everything 00:13:44 down there in this gully is kind of pink you can think that the world is pink and in fact if you get into a real gully one of my favorites is Grand Canyon by the 00:13:57 way that's only a hundred million years of erosion to get the Grand Canyon it's relatively recent get into one of these things and the enormity of what you see 00:14:08 outwards Dwarfs what you can see if you look up if you've ever been on one of these things you're just in a different world it's a pink world you don't think 00:14:23 about climbing out of it you think about moving along in it