Living the Groove
The groove produces bodily swing even where the mind cannot follow the sequence intellectually. And so the body stays tuned as the world environment changes.
WHAT GOOD IS MUSIC?
“What good is music if it ain’t got that swing?” said Duke Ellington. Swing is music the body feels when the foot taps and the fingers snap while the hips weave patterns in the air. Not restricted to the Swing Era of the big bands in the 1930s and 40s, swing preserves a highly prized element of spontaneity which, if we look more closely, reveals universal significance in a world increasingly driven by predictability and control.
Swing is movement in a groove. Professional jazz musicians speak of “the groove” as in “I'm deepening the groove” or “We’re losing the groove” or "That's groovy!” Groove is technically a subdivision of rhythmic time. Musical time is a pattern of tones organized into measurable "beats.” Standard musical time (what jazz players call “straight eights”) can be notated using symbols for a basic "time signature" (4/4, 3/4) and tempo ( = 92). Whole notes, half notes, quarter, eighth, and sixteenth notes organize the “beats” of musical time. The jazz musician further “twists” standard time into unique grooves. The standard beats are subdivided into felt pulsations of great subtlety. Straight eighth notes become swing eighth notes, and every note is infected by swing. A groove may be notated by writing out syncopated beats and accents, but the written notes do not fully convey the groove. A groove of swing notes may appear as eighth-note triplets with the first two notes tied together, but, when played literally, notation fails to capture the groove. Written notation loses the jazz. The groove is made of such fine rhythmic subdivisions that it disappears on paper. Musicians learn to swing with a groove by hearing other musicians and synchronizing with them in live performance. The groove resides not in the intellect but is rather felt "in the bones." Like Zen enlightenment, the groove is learned through direct transmission "outside the scriptures." The groove comes through repeated close attention to experience.
Playing in a groove belongs to the culture of improvisation. The groove allows improvisers to produce a consistent rhythmic stream no matter how diverse the harmony - whether playing inside traditional scales or playing "outside" the scales, which is especially common in Bebop. The groove produces bodily swing even where the mind cannot follow the sequence intellectually. When musicians improvise together, their shared groove unites the ensemble as long as every player stays "in the groove." Jazz improvisation relies on an infinite flow of swing eighth notes to carry the groove. The current British college exam guide, which is required by the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music where jazz is taught as systematically as classical music, quotes guitarist Jerome Harris: “A Sousa march should groove. Viennese waltzes should groove. Someone playing a Bach solo violin sonata should be grooving. You should feel from phrase to phrase and within phrases, a forward rhythmic flow.”
With its emphasis on improvisation, early jazz came into conflict with copyright laws in the United States. The spread of jazz from the 1930s to the 1970s relied on bootleg illegal publications that skirted authorized music transcriptions. The first Dixieland players learned their craft directly by playing in New Orleans marching bands, and nomadic blues and boogie players learned from one another while bumming from barrelhouse to juke house in the South, as chronicled in the Martin Scorsese 2003 film series “The Blues” (available from U.S. Public Television at www.pbs.org). The rise of the recording industry in the early 20th century allowed musicians to learn their grooves by listening to recorded vinyl. But besides recordings, there were printed resources that were essential to the spread of improvised performance. The existence of these printed resources – bootleg song sheets, fake books, and real books – elicited a response from the music industry reminiscent of the current litigation around Napster and MP3 file-sharing.
Printed notation for jazz differs in purpose from classical music notation. Jazz begins with a standard popular song, and then twists the well-known melody into new shapes. A fresh melody is improvised over underlying chord sequences which alter the arrangement of notes from the original song by “voicing” the chords in novel ways. So while the key progressions of a standard tune remain the same, the arrangement of chords and the melodic solos vary each time (with each “chorus”) - not unlike the classical model of “theme and variations” but with emphasis on fresh communication in the here-and-now moment. Printed notation for the jazz player, therefore, needs to be far more skeletal than traditional sheet music which nails the details of the entire arrangement. Since the improviser aims to voice chords in fresh ways and to create melodic surprises, there is no need to read the full arrangement by the original songwriter. The jazz player prefers to have only the standard melody line (called "the head") and some general chord progressions (called “the changes”). The full arrangement of notes for bass, harmony, and melody is neither needed nor desirable. A chorus uses the head as a springboard for new ideas, and the changes maintain their harmony with ever-fresh voicings. The jazz player does not "read" music but instead uses paper notation as a "lead sheet" for group improvising. A minimalist paper outline or “chart” allows the group to read “from the same page” while primarily listening and responding to one another. Through a shared response in the moment, the jazz players swing together in a felt groove. Once in a groove, they are “jamming.”
When jazz notation is copied and distributed for sale, it runs into conflict with the authorities. By the 1950s, the distributors of lead sheets in the United States had run afoul of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and during the 1960s there were two widely publicized criminal trials for copyright infringement in the Federal District Court in Manhattan. At issue was the under-the-counter sale of anthologies of lead sheets commonly known by jazz professionals as “fake books” or “real books.” The name “fake book” comes from the cocktail party pianist who receives a request for a tune and says, “I don’t know that tune, but if you hum the melody, I can fake it for you.” “Faking” a tune means improvising an arrangement that does not replicate the authorized version but that nevertheless sounds musical. A bound collection of lead sheets for improvisation came to be known as a “fake book.” Similarly, the “real book” first appeared in the 1970s when students at the Berklee School of Jazz in Boston improved the standard fake book by adding contemporary chord voicings to the crude chords of standard fake books. Because fake and real books present the melodies of copyrighted songs without reproducing the songwriter’s original arrangements, these books were sold “under the counter” to improvising professionals. Both fake and real books are like the Bible to jazz performers. For a half century, nonetheless, the music industry used criminal prosecution to outlaw fake books but eventually absorbed them into its publishing catalog. Today major publishers offer many versions of fake and real books which are sold in mass market bookstores. But it was not always so. The spread of jazz in America owes much to the creative violation of copyright laws.
The subversive aspect of swing arises from its grounding in the body. The body adapts directly to changing environments at a faster rate than the conscious mind. Physical perception of acoustic and spatial changes often occurs below the mind’s radar. The body assimilates events long before the mind can label and evaluate them. The body stays tuned as the world environment changes, even while the mind lives in an imaginary past. The jazz improviser seeks immediate attunement to the shifting environment as the body feels the evolutionary groove at its most modern, accelerated pace. The rapid absorption of world influences marks the most recent history of jazz, which recognizes the era of internetworked global culture. “World music” now belongs to jazz language. Not only have curious jazz players, from Jelly Roll Morton to George Shearing to Mark Levine, picked up patterns from cultures other than their own, but people connected to their own cultures, like Abdullah Ibrahim, Toshiko Akiyoshi, and Gonzalo Rubalcaba have added their respective dialects to the jazz idiom. Other jazz players, like Ran Blake and Joe Zawinul have incorporated diverse styles of folk music from around the world. David Rothenberg even adds trans-migratory bird songs.
The open spontaneity of swinging in a groove points to infinity in the human soul. The international director Wim Wenders named his film contribution to the Martin Scorsese series on the Blues after a 1927 Blind Willie Johnson lyric that speaks of “The Soul of a Man.” The song says: "I'm going to ask a question. / Please answer if you can. / Is there anybody's children can tell me what is the soul of a man?" Blind Willie surely had not read the ancient sage Heraclitus, but both seem to agree: “You could not discover the limits of soul, even if you traveled by every path in order to do so; such is the depth of its meaning.” Music is a primal tool for adapting to transformations of the Lebenswelt, and, as Duke Ellington says, “What good is music if it ain’t got that swing?”