• Home
  • About
    • Doug Ramsey
    • Rifftides
    • Contact
  • Purchase Doug’s Books
    • Poodie James
    • Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond
    • Jazz Matters
    • Other Works
  • AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal
  • rss

Rifftides

Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

And-A-One

September 26, 2006 by Doug Ramsey

A Rifftides reader wrote to say that he did not understand drummer Nick Martinis’s quote in Charlie Shoemake’s anecdote about swinging or not swinging. Martinis said to his bandmates…..”Well cats, do we swing tonight or do we hide ‘one’?” Perhaps there are other readers who don’t get it. Here’s an oversimplified explanation.
“One” is the first beat of the measure. A leader is likely to begin counting off in half time–“One, two,” then double the time to the tempo he wants–“One, two, three, four…”
If “one'” is not expressed–if it is hidden–the band, and quite likely the audience, will be in a rhythmic no-man’s land. Some musicians who adventure on the edges of jazz, beyond the traditional concept of swing, want to be free of what they consider the tyranny of steady time. Others feel that the rhythmic quality we have come to call swing is at the heart of jazz, that “one” is essential.
Among those who believed strongly in the importance of “one” was Gerry Mulligan. Trumpeter John McNeil’s new CD East Coast Cool is influenced by Mulligan, yet McNeil takes liberties with time. He also swings, demonstrating that both things are possible and underlining the warning that my explanation of “one” is oversimplified. After my Rifftides review of the album, McNeil sent a message that included a quote indicating that Mulligan thought jazz that abandons the imperative to swing is an indulgence of interest mainly to the insiders who play it.

I hope Mulligan is smiling somewhere, but he’s probably saying “That cross-the bar hide-the-one shit is just for other cats–nobody else digs it.” (an actual quote) He’d like the sonorities and the counter lines, though.

Apropos of little but proof that McNeil’s turn of mind is as wry as his turns of time are tricky, here’s his latest e-mail gig alert:

Sunday, October 1st

Night and Day Restaurant and Jazz Room
presents the

John McNeil/Bill McHenry Quartet

Applying a cool, damp washcloth of jazz to the fevered brow of Brooklyn’s cultural elite since 2006.

Featuring the music of Russ Freeman, Denzil Best,
Wilbur Harden and a host of other neglected composers.

John McNeil — trumpet

Bill McHenry — tenor

Chris Lightcap — bass

Jochen Rueckert — drums

This week’s intermission pianist — Dred Scott
“I’d really love to go hunting with these guys…” — Dick Cheney

8:30 — 11:00

230 Fifth Avenue (at President) Park Slope, Brooklyn

(718) 399 – 2161 www.nightanddayrestaurant.com/

If I lived in Brooklyn or nearby and didn’t have all this painting to do, I’d be there.

Related

Filed Under: Main

Comments

  1. John Salmon says

    September 26, 2006 at 8:13 pm

    After Dred Scott, Roger Taney will also be sitting in.

  2. John Salmon says

    September 27, 2006 at 11:34 am

    Mulligan was just pissed because he didn’t know how NOT to swing. Complete inept in that regard.

  3. Chuck Mitchell says

    October 1, 2006 at 1:00 pm

    Been away, so I’m just getting caught up on this “swing” thing.
    It might be fun to get a few lists from your readers of jazz music
    that doesn’t fit Mr. Narunsky’s definition. I’ll offer the following:
    Bix Beiderbecke: “In A Mist”
    Bill Evans: “Peace Piece”
    Ornette Coleman: “Lonely Woman”
    Wayne Shorter/Milton Nascimento: “Diana”
    Pat Metheny Group, “San Lorenzo”
    Jazz as a music, I believe, would be severely diminished by the
    exclusion of these performances, and countless others. Mr Narunsky is
    entitled to his taste, of course, reductionist as it is; but
    shouldn’t all the debates about what jazz is have stopped around
    1961? You know, the old Coltrane/Dolphy/John Tynan “anti-jazz” dust-
    up. After that, to my mind, such discussions were irrelevant, not to
    mention silly, because the possibilities of musical expression in the
    genre were truly opened up in credible ways by legitimate artists.
    And continue to be, despite the narrowing of public interest which I
    believe is in no small part due to the attempts to straitjacket the
    field of definition by the more visible and powerful interests who
    share Mr. Narunsky’s point of view and have hammered it into orthodoxy.
    I don’t need to name names here, do I?

Doug Ramsey

Doug is a recipient of the lifetime achievement award of the Jazz Journalists Association. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he settled following a career in print and broadcast journalism in cities including New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, Cleveland and Washington, DC. His writing about jazz has paralleled his life in journalism... [Read More]

Rifftides

A winner of the Blog Of The Year award of the international Jazz Journalists Association. Rifftides is founded on Doug's conviction that musicians and listeners who embrace and understand jazz have interests that run deep, wide and beyond jazz. Music is its principal concern, but the blog reaches past... Read More...

Subscribe to RiffTides by Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Doug’s Books

Doug's most recent book is a novel, Poodie James. Previously, he published Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. He is also the author of Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers. He contributed to The Oxford Companion To Jazz and co-edited Journalism Ethics: Why Change? He is at work on another novel in which, as in Poodie James, music is incidental.

Archives

Recent Comments

  • Rob D on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • W. Royal Stokes on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • Larry on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • Lucille Dolab on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • Donna Birchard on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside

Doug’s Picks

We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside

As Rifftides readers have undoubtedly noticed, it has been a long time since we posted. We are creating a new post in hopes  that it will open the way to resumption of frequent reports as part of the artsjournal.com mission to keep you up to date on jazz and other matters. Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s stunning new trio album […]

Recent Listening: The New David Friesen Trio CD

David Friesen Circle 3 Trio: Interaction (Origin) Among the dozens of recent releases that deserve serious attention, a few will get it. Among those those receiving it here is bassist David Friesen’s new album.  From the Portland, Oregon, sinecure in which he thrives when he’s not touring the world, bassist Friesen has been performing at […]

Monday Recommendation: Dominic Miller

Dominic Miller Absinthe (ECM) Guitarist and composer Miller delivers power and subtlety in equal measure. Abetted by producer Manfred Eicher’s canny guidance and ECM’s flawless sound and studio presence, Miller draws on inspiration from painters of France’s impressionist period. His liner essay emphasizes the importance to his musical conception of works by Cezanne, Renoir, Lautrec, […]

Recent Listening: Dave Young And Friends

Dave Young, Lotus Blossom (Modica Music) Young, the bassist praised by Oscar Peterson for his “harmonic simpatico and unerring sense of time” when he was a member of Peterson’s trio, leads seven gifted fellow Canadians. His beautifully recorded bass is the underpinning of a relaxed session in which his swing is a force even during […]

Recent Listening: Jazz Is Of The World

Paolo Fresu, Richard Galliano, Jan Lundgren, Mare Nostrum III (ACT) This third outing by Mare Nostrum continues the international trio’s close collaboration in a series of albums that has enjoyed considerable success. With three exceptions, the compositions in this installment are by the members of Mare Nostrum. It opens with one the French accordionist Galliano […]

Monday Recommendation: Thelonious Monk’s Works In Full

Kimbrough, Robinson, Reid, Drummond: Monk’s Dreams(Sunnyside) The subtitle of this invaluable 6-CD set is The Complete Compositions Of Thelonious Sphere Monk. By complete, Sunnyside means that the box contains six CDs with 70 tunes that Monk wrote beginning in the early years when his music was generally assumed to be an eccentric offshoot of bebop, […]

More Doug's Picks

Blogroll

All About Jazz
JerryJazzMusician
Carol Sloane: SloaneView
Jazz Beyond Jazz: Howard Mandel
The Gig: Nate Chinen
Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong
Don Heckman: The International Review Of Music
Ted Panken: Today is The Question
George Colligan: jazztruth
Brilliant Corners
Jazz Music Blog: Tom Reney
Brubeck Institute
Darcy James Argue
Jazz Profiles: Steve Cerra
Notes On Jazz: Ralph Miriello
Bob Porter: Jazz Etc.
be.jazz
Marc Myers: Jazz Wax
Night Lights
Jason Crane:The Jazz Session
JazzCorner
I Witness
ArtistShare
Jazzportraits
John Robert Brown
Night After Night
Do The Math/The Bad Plus
Prague Jazz
Russian Jazz
Jazz Quotes
Jazz History Online
Lubricity

Personal Jazz Sites
Chris Albertson: Stomp Off
Armin Buettner: Crownpropeller’s Blog
Cyber Jazz Today, John Birchard
Dick Carr’s Big Bands, Ballads & Blues
Donald Clarke’s Music Box
Noal Cohen’s Jazz History
Bill Crow
Easy Does It: Fernando Ortiz de Urbana
Bill Evans Web Pages
Dave Frishberg
Ronan Guilfoyle: Mostly Music
Bill Kirchner
Mike Longo
Jan Lundgren (Friends of)
Willard Jenkins/The Independent Ear
Ken Joslin: Jazz Paintings
Bruno Leicht
Earl MacDonald
Books and CDs: Bill Reed
Marvin Stamm

Tarik Townsend: It’s A Raggy Waltz
Steve Wallace: Jazz, Baseball, Life and Other Ephemera
Jim Wilke’s Jazz Northwest
Jessica Williams

Other Culture Blogs
Terry Teachout
DevraDoWrite
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise
On An Overgrown Path

Journalism
PressThink: Jay Rosen
Second Draft, Tim Porter
Poynter Online

Related

Return to top of page

an ArtsJournal blog

This blog published under a Creative Commons license

Copyright © 2023 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in