Low Tide

Every band's book contains tunes that include those dreaded passages where there's unison playing by the horns while the rhythm section lays out. 'Easy to Love' is a good example. If the band members haven't got a solid internalized sense of the beat, disaster follows.

"Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked." -Warren Buffet

Passages like this are when the tide goes out for the band. We quickly find out that the rhythm section has been compensating for deficiencies in the rest of the band all along. Uh-oh. That means that no amount of rehearsing this musical equivalent of a demilitarized zone (or these days, downtown Detroit) is going to be of much use until the band has a cohesive and internalized sense of time. 

So, getting back to the subject of the very first post of this blog... We have quite a problem achieving this very goal because we use a system of notation that is in no way optimized for the job. Worse yet, it can actually encourage band members to either ignore each other entirely, or form 'factions' that are self-consistent, but not with the rest of the band. 

Enter Alan Raph's Dance Band Reading and Interpretation. Contained within is a simple but comprehensive method to confront these problems head-on by doing exactly what the band is worst at- unison playing of common rhythmic passages without the use of a metronome rhythm section.

Raph starts out by listing five simple rules for interpreting the written music by showing side by side comparisons of 'written' versus 'played'. Common rhythmic figures of increasing length are introduced, followed by etudes that string them together. A big band could play through one or two of these etudes as part of their warm-up. This removes all barriers to the development of internalized time, and provides instant feedback for individuals ('Did I play that right?') and to the whole band ('Did we play that all the same way?').

As an added twist, it might be interesting to rotate the use of a pair of claves among the horn players so one of them could feel what it's like to be the drummer and have the rest of the band push, pull, and respond to (or not) to your own 'drumming'. An especially sadistic person could intentionally speed up or slow down to test the ability of the band to stay on tempo despite a provocation to the contrary. Just for the record,  I would probably never do that. 


For a great example of what I'm aiming at, see the video of Frank Sinatra below. Both Sinatra and the orchestra backing him up have a rock-solid sense of time. Sinatra bends and stretches his own rhythms on top of the orchestra, only to snap back again and again to match the orchestra at the end of phrases, sometimes delaying it even further to the very beginning of the next phrase. You just can't do that willy-nilly. It absolutely requires a constant awareness of where the beat is.