Mark Lew used an interesting pair of examples to indicate how he experiences "swing" performances of popular music: "I've Found a Million Dollar Baby", the title of which "swings" when spoken in normal American English, and "Polka Dots and Moonbeams", whose words would be emotionally unintelligible spoken with the same rhythmic proportions. Hmmmn.
Gunther Schuller once told me that "bebop" eighths were usually played as a quintuplet, divided in 3/2 proportion. Maybe so, but would it be useful to notate that? Whom would it inform? Maybe some meticulous, highly trained musicians especially in tune with complex contemporary notation, would respond with understanding of this notation, but the jazz musicians I know would rebel at the idea that they would be constrained from interpreting the eighths the way they like and would consider this notation pretentious nit picking.
Those same musicians, who want the freedom to interpret eighths the way they like, might well be wrong from the point of view of people like me, to whom the feel of the eight notes defines so much of the idiom. I've a hard time with many players when I play Oscar Pettiford's "Tricrotism" with them. The bouncy way they interpret the lines is different enough from my way of hearing them that it often takes 5 or 6 times through the same passage to get it coordinated (with good players!), and then the feel can slip away any time the musicians fail to pay attention to this. Attentive listening to Pettiford's recording of the piece (with Lucky Thompson, another remarkable player whose eighth notes are noticeably straight) will quickly dispel the illusion that a 12/8 feel is uniformly applied to this music.
(Another aspect of this is that the inclusion of more or less straight eighths is to enrich the rhythmic palette, so that the shift between the straight and triplet feel becomes another element of expression. Bill Evans' playing is full of this back and forth balance.)
As Darcy poignantly points out, this problem is a direct result of "institutionalized" jazz education - often taught by 2nd and 3rd generation "student" musicians who have gone from school to teaching with little more jazz experience than playing in a show band with a jazz singer. (I know, there are numerous exceptions to this, for which I am deeply grateful.) It may be that the idiomatic, to me perfectly balanced, swing feel expressed by the players I listened to as I was learning this music is doomed to disappear. I hope not.
All of this discussion relates to the blessing/curse issue too. Notation is inadequate. Humans are imperfect. Nevertheless, some of us choose to write "scripts" for musician/"actors" and would not trade the contributions made by those people to our musical conceptions for any idealized, robotic, version. It's a choice.
Chuck
-- Chuck Israels 230 North Garden Terrace Bellingham WA 98225-5836 (360) 671-3402 fax (360) 676-6055 http://www.chuckisraels.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
