Jazz for aficionados
Still worth keeping up with… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTkzT1UmaT0 I read he works with young musicians now, like Blakey did. Always worth a listen. |
Maybe Donald Byrd said all he had to say in the jazz idiom. The Harpers were just OK, and that's because anything less than outstanding, sounds just OK. After listening to jazz all my life, I'm only impressed by something that's outstanding. Although Donald Byrd produced many outstanding pieces of work over the years in jazz, he felt it was time to change grooves, and while I didn't agree with him at the time, now I understand his motivation and point of view a lot better. As a listener, I feel the need to change grooves from time to time, maybe that's why I can tread lightly into Donald's new groove. Horace Silver is someone who withstood the test of time and never changed grooves completely; his music stayed somewhere in the broad jazz arena, while borrowing from other cultures from time to time; this is what kept his music fresh. With the approval of the rest of the aficionados, I would like to move on to Horace Silver after we have finished with Donald Byrd. Enjoy the music. |
"In the pocket" is an expression used by musicians to describe a player who has a particularly good sense of rhythm; who plays very deep in the groove; this is independent of musical genre. There is good sense of rhythm and then there is GOOD SENSE OF RHYTHM. Sometimes it is a stylistic choice to play around the time, and other times it's just a less developed sense of time which causes a player to sound like he is rushing (too far ahead of the beat) or dragging (too far behind the beat). If you think of a metronome's clicking as being "perfect" rhythm, there is a certain degree of latitude on either side of the beat that would be considered acceptable and part of a player's musical personality. Some musicians have the ability to play/sing with metronomic precision and still make it FEEL good and not sound like a machine. Satchmo had it, Ray Charles, Miles, Sonny Rollins and others. Examples of players who tended to play on the front side of the beat would be Cannonball, Trane. A great example of a player who tended to play on the back side of the beat would be Dexter Gordon. Best example of "in the pocket" that I can think of would be James Brown. Imo. |
