Groove Is an Agreement the Players Keep Revising

There is a reason two people can reproduce a drum pattern and sound less alike than a notation of the pattern suggests. One player leaves the attack late against the low pulse and gets the note out of the way quickly. Another lands the attack cleanly and lets the sound persist. A bass player can hear those as different requests about where the next event ought to go. The relationship can change the apparent weight of a beat even when a chart shows the same positions.

A useful account of groove begins with the people who can hear each other. The musician who lays back can create a wonderful tension against another part that remains clear about where the time is. If everybody is late in the same way, there may be little left against which to hear the lateness. The phrase can still have a character. It may be doing something different from the elastic quality we tell one another it has. Making time feel wide requires some ability to locate it.

When a machine establishes the agreement

An unwavering drum machine can give players an extraordinarily clear object to lean against. Someone returning to a machine pattern again and again can become capable of highly specific forms of hesitation. A human drummer might answer such a hesitation and carry the band into a new pocket. Both possibilities are valuable. The authority that holds the time is located somewhere different in each. It matters whether the arrangement gives anybody the power to make a new agreement.

One misunderstanding of expressive timing is the notion that arbitrary variation will put humanity into an otherwise accurate sequence. The samples can move without the listener acquiring a reason to hear them as a relationship. A phrase that takes longer at a particular place becomes intelligible partly because someone can tell what it is making time for. Perhaps the vocal needs to finish a thought. Perhaps a drummer is offering space to a bass note whose weight now matters. The variation has a cause in something we can hear the others considering.

I want rhythm players to have that cause available to them. Sometimes the least helpful thing a performer can do is impress the room with how firmly they can continue while the work has moved somewhere they are refusing to hear. Time can be stable enough for a group to trust and loose enough that one musician can reveal something about it. The difficult achievement is making both conditions audible at once.