I went to school with Howard Goodall.
Though he was a few years ahead of me and I never actually met him.
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He said WHAATTT??? :rolleyes:
The “dotted-note jazz shuffle rhythm” went out-of-date in the 1920s. Written music still usually shows that old 3+1=4 notation (dotted eighth-note + sixteenth-note), but it wasn’t played like that once swing came in. The written nomenclature was just a convenient shorthand for the actual rhythm, which was based around 2+1=3 against a 2+2=4 beat; the basis of much African music. Western musical notation, with its tradition of even divisions, isn’t very appropriate for showing those rhythms - I’ve seen attempts, and they don’t make for easy reading.
I know what Barretto was getting at, though - Salsa (which I love, by the way) is indeed based on straight eights, and relies heavily on “anticipated” beats, pushing the rhythm forward. I’m just cynical about Goodall’s claim that this Latin-American pushing is any more responsible for, say, Killing Me Softly than jazz is.
Certainly, there was a move away from swing rhythms back to 2/4/8/16 groupings, but it happened earlier, in the 1950s, with the advent of what was called “modern jazz” at that time. Even the bebop players of the 1940s - Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and so on - were playing straight eights, although their contributions to popular conceptions of rhythm was oblique.
For a rather stunning example of the difference between “straight” playing and “swing”, there’s no better example I know of than Blue Rondo a la Turk by the Dave Brubeck Quartet - I think from 1959. Don’t be confused by the odd 9/8 time signature - that’s irrelevant to the point; instead, listen to the way the piece moves between the straight-eight and swing rhythms when Brubeck and (sax player) Paul Desmond trade phrases. It’s a remarkable difference, and I see no evidence of any Latin American influence.
I don’t have much to add other than I agree with pretty much all that Barrington has posted. Dotted shuffles were long dead by the 60s. Triplet groupings were much closer to what the actual feel of “swing” was from the 30s onward, but this was very much an approximation, too. If you see a jazz piece transcription nowadays, it is almost always written in straight eights and it is up to the performers to put in the preferred amount of swing. The general rule is the faster the tempo, the closer to straight eighths it is. Slower tunes are much closer to the dotted shuffle.
But also important in swing is not only the rhythms themselves, but where the accents fall. Swing and jazz music tend to place accents on the off-beats and it is extremely common to end melody lines in between major beats. For example, it’s common to end a phrase on the second half of the fourth beat, instead of the first beat of the next measure (thus anticipating/playing ahead of the beat). I really don’t think this has anything to do with con, although Latin American rhythms certainly became very important in jazz.
Just a coda to what pulykamell said - yes, it’s more usual for transcriptions of jazz to be written in even eighths - I probably gave the incorrect impression that the dotted-eighth+sixteenth was the norm. Both were used, but even values were rightly preferred in notation.
And there was no golden rule in execution, either. For example, the trumpet players Clifford Brown, Clark Terry and Thad Jones (to pick some notable examples) often used an exaggeratedly 3+1=4 articulation, to the point of being more like 7+1=8, a quirk I enjoy very much. But the drummer was still doing the triplets thing.
And pulykamell’s point about getting closer to even eighths the faster you play is valid too, and a good point. It’s worth emphasising that this is usually unconscious on the part of the player - it just feels more natural that way.
If anyone wants to know where Roberta Flack got her rhythm from, and to hear prior examples of female singers leading the beat, look no further than Ella Fitzgerald’s singing in the 1950s. She pulls the beat where she wants, and quite often that’s well ahead. Carmen McRae made that a bit of a trademark later on in a very similar genre, often singing entire phrases an eighth-note ahead of the beat, with a slightly staccato feel … still not Latin in origin.
Lovely music, all. Including Salsa and other Latin-American rhythms, which I adore.
As a British person, I have to convert from terms like ‘quaver’ to terms like ‘eighth-note’, but I don’t mind - it’s a more logical system. If I make mistakes in the conversion, that’s likely to be the cause.
Interesting stuff. Of course it’s not so easy to separate the Afro-Cuban influence from the jazz influence as Afro-Cuban was combining and mixing with ragtime even before 1900. Jelly Roll Morton spoke of the importance to jazz of “the Spanish tinge,” by which he meant Latin syncopation. But to more directly address Goodall’s point we have to jump to 1960 and look at what was going on then. I don’t think Goodall’s wrong to suggest a latinization process accelerating from that moment.
The latin influence was particularly pervasive among America’s vanguard songwriters of the early '60s. Among the names who were certainly latin music afficionados were Doc Pomus, Mort Shuman (who called himself a “mambonik”), Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, Neil Sedaka, Gerry Goffin, Carole King, and Burt Bacharach, who learned Brazilian rhythm in the hills around Rio de Janeiro. The Palladium Ballroom, New York’s mambo central, was only a few blocks up Broadway from the Brill Building. A lot of this stuff comes from the book Always Magic in the Air by Ken Emerson.
Bossa nova was a huge influence on the American scene in the '60s. “Desafinado” (1962) and “The Girl From Ipanema” (1964) were high-charting hits, and then Sergio Mendes had his string of top-selling bossa-flavored records.
Afro-Cuban music never ceased being popular in 1960s New York, with the pachanga craze, followed by the latin bugalu craze, followed by a trend toward rootsier salsa just before 1970. It’s very easy to imagine all of this latin flavor seeping into the recording studios of the time.
It is clear that something happened between the swinginess of “Rock Around the Clock” and the dissimilar Rolling Stones’ recording of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” which features what sounds to me like a latin-style bassline. I would love to have this explained rhythmically, even if Goodall is overstating his case.
I’m quite interested in that as well, from the viewpoint of a dancer. I’m a moderately obsessive swing dancer (lindy hop, primarily), and while we mostly dance to the original swing music from the '30s and '40s, all sorts of other stuff gets thrown into the mix depending on the DJ’s mood. For the most part, '50s rock is readily danceable, while anything from the '60s or later isn’t. For that matter, I’m also curious about what’s going on rhythmically with neo-swing (Big Bad Voodoo Daddy et al.) and how what happened in popular music from the '60s onward affected it. In terms of dancing, very simple East Coast Swing (6-count basic) works really well, while proper lindy hop (an 8-count basic) is generally difficult to do to that music.
“Blue Rondo a la Turk” is the first cut on the majestic Time Out album, the one that is often misremembered as Take Five, after its most famous song.
The title is important, though, because all the tracks are composed, at least partially, in signatures other than 4/4 time.
The liner notes for “Blue Rondo a la Turk” say: