Jazz is in 12/8 time

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I know I've brought this topic up before, but I find it difficult to understand why jazz influenced music is written in 4/4 time. with "swung" quavers, which are interpreted as crotchet-quaver triplets. When I suggest to jazz musicians that it's really in 12/8 and might be easier in interpret in compound time, they throw up their arms in horror. Is there any sound historical reason for this practice?

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

...er only some jazz is notated, and the sense of time is difficult to pin down so the slackers just use 4/4 .... it is often in an effective 12/8, but if you notated it in 12/8 and played the score it still wouldn't sound right ....

here is a very rare audiovisual treat that might make the point about time being elusive in jass muzik

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uW0S...eature=related

[Sonny's Back]

...er only some jazz is notated, and the sense of time is difficult to pin down so the slackers just use 4/4 .... it is often in an effective 12/8, but if you notated it in 12/8 and played the score it still wouldn't sound right ....

here is a very rare audiovisual treat that might make the point about time being elusive in jass muzik

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uW0S...eature=related

Lovely clip CDJ and eloquently sums up the 'enigma' of jazz timing (or not). Great to see ronnie again too. Thanks for that.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

It may not sound exactly right played from music written in 12/8, but it would be a lot closer than 4/4. I wonder whether it's a form of oneupmanship?

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

(I'll listen to the clip when I get home. YouTube is censored on computers at work, even during breaks.)

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

(I'll listen to the clip when I get home. YouTube is censored on computers at work, even during breaks.)

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Apologies for sending message twice. I'm just getting the hang of editing typos.

[french frank]

You're hogging the jazz bored, EA! - do you want me to remove the unwanted massages? Edit: Oops, I meant m'ssahges, of course.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

You're hogging the jazz bored, EA! - do you want me to remove the unwanted massages? Edit: Oops, I meant m'ssahges, of course.

Yes please. Sorry about causing congestion.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

ah that elusive beat ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQi4jglT0Vo

[John Wright]

I know I've brought this topic up before, but I find it difficult to understand why jazz influenced music is written in 4/4 time.

4/4 time is historical, much of early jazz 1920s was mainly fox-trot tunes.

[Ian Thumwood]

If you explore deep enough, I think you will find that jazz is poly-metric. I can understand where the notion of 12/8 comes from and would tend to agree to an extent. However, I think there are more complex issues involved. In early jazz, the bass may have been only playing 2 beats in the bar with the front line horns offering something more involved. There is a good chapter on this subject in Gunther Schuller's "Early Jazz" which explains how complex rhythm is and the idea of something like 4/4 is just a convenience. I would have to add that Schuller destroyed my understanding of time signatures after I read this book. Essentially, in ensemble playing, the various instruments will almost certainly being playing in different meters but ones where the first beat is always in the same place. It is simply a matter of mathematics with some players fitting triplets over more Common Time. When it comes to orchestrate or arrange a composition, most writers (certainly pre-60's) would have expressed this as 4/4 so that the bars all tie up and there is no confusion. The people reading the score will then interpret the music with a "swing " feeling which may imply a tripley feel or even a dotted rhythm kind of approach with the beats being anticipated marginally earlier.

These days, jazz is more complex and composers regularly write in non-standard time signatures, often in the same piece. Listen to the likes of Pat Metheny, for example, and you will find that they are doing this all the time. You may think they are playing 4/4, but more often than not, the time signature is far, far more complex - paerhpas mpre sophisticated in this fashion than Classical music. Might well be worthy of a new thread- is jazz more rhythmical sophisticated than Classical music?

Cheers

Ian

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Might well be worthy of a new thread- is jazz more rhythmical sophisticated than Classical music?

Cheers

Ian

In general, I would agree that this is the case, though the prevalence of 4 beats in a bar in jazz and pop is extremely limiting.

[MrGongGong]

In general, I would agree that this is the case, though the prevalence of 4 beats in a bar in jazz and pop is extremely limiting.

for whom ?
and not in the "jazz" that I listen to

this is a bit like saying
"the problem with oranges is that they don't have enough bass for my taste"

[Ian Thumwood]

Eine Alpensinfonie

The idea of four beats in the bar is probably prevalent in most jazz from about 1926 through to the mid sixties - roughly a forty year period. Prior to the former date, a lot of jazz was palyed in 2/4 but part of the innovation of Louis Armstrong and soloists of his ilk was to discover that the notion of "modern swing" required a modern 4/4 feel. Even so, I would suggest that this only became fully mastered when the innovations that had been happening in Kansas City in the late twenties started to gain dominance when Count Basie took his band to New York in the next decade. Rather than being limiting, jazz artists had managed to acquire a relaxed feel to ths music that was a mainstay for much of the next 25 years. The fact that jazz achieved so much between 1917 (the date of the first "jass " recording) and 1937 should be seen as a sign how successfully the music was evolving. Similar innovations in Classical music took the best part of the century.

However, this period only represents about 45% of the time jazz has been a serious art form. For most of it's life, jazz has experimented with all kinds of measures. Such is the strnegth of jazz that, in my opinion, much of the earlier 4/4 material still sounds impressive and, as I outlined previously, there is still a poly-metric element in this music even in the 1920's. Listen to something like the Redc Hot Pepper recordings made by Jelly Roll Morton to see how innovative a jazz composer could be with rhythm in a 3-minute recordings. The strains the compose the structure of Morton's music often involve a variety of rhythmic devices the most celebrated of which being the "Spanish tinge." Take a genius like J S Bach and you will not find this level of varity in one composition of similar length although he obviously thoroughly explored a range of meters in compositions like "The Goldberg Variations." Morton was experimenting with a wider range of rhythmic ideas in single compositions at a very early stage in the history of music and I don't think he found the use of 2/4 or 4/4 at all limiting.