Define "Swing". . .

[Dr Teeth]

What is it in jazz? is there something like " that guy has a great swing", or "this pianist has no swing"?. Do you practice swing?

[Mark Zeger]

The Festrunk brothers really knew how to swing.

 

I was recently trying to explain "swing" to my trumpet playing 11 year old. The best I could do was to play her some marches, and then play Ellington. "Swing" is one of those hard to define "but I know it when I hear it" subjects.

 

It's all about loosening the rigid timekeeping relationship between "beat" and "rhythm". With "swing", the beat is constant, but rhythm is often played behind or ahead of the beat, to give a laid back or pushed rhythmic feel.

 

Last night, I saw Ray Charles backed by the Roch. Pops. Before Ray came out, the Pops played a jazz tune during which the orchestra musicians did handclaps. You could tell immediately which ones could swing and which couldn't.

[Botch.]

Back in my college jazz band days, if we got a chart that said "with Swing" written on the top, you would play, say, two eighth-notes not as straight eighth-notes but as a dotted-eighth-sixteenth-note pair; just thinking about it you can see how it will change the whole "feel" of the piece. In contrast, rock music almost always plays a "straight-eighth-note" feel. You can really hear it by concentrating on what the drummer is doing on his ride cymbal.

[schmoron13]

Originally posted by Botchenstein:

Back in my college jazz band days, if we got a chart that said "with Swing" written on the top, you would play, say, two eighth-notes not as straight eighth-notes but as a dotted-eighth-sixteenth-note pair; just thinking about it you can see how it will change the whole "feel" of the piece. In contrast, rock music almost always plays a "straight-eighth-note" feel. You can really hear it by concentrating on what the drummer is doing on his ride cymbal.

Technically, notes swung refers to how the eighth notes are played: as a triplet with a quarter note and an eighth note, where the accent falls on the eithgth note...

[henryrobinett]

Originally posted by schmoron13:

Technically, notes swung refers to how the eighth notes are played: as a triplet with a quarter note and an eighth note, where the accent falls on the eithgth note...

What he said.

[george costanza]

I think that, while both definitions [(1)quarter note=dotted eighth+sixteenth & (2)triplet of quarter note+eighth] are correct, the essence is how these are played, which may not be as strict as the definitions. That is, the feel (depending on the players) may lie between either end of that spectrum ...or perhaps even beyond it.

 

Some early rhythm machines even had a variable knob to dial in such variations.

[coyote]

Ahhh, but it's sooooo much more than a mere technical description. Anyone with rudimentary reading skills and an explanation of how to play it can play in a swing style. But man, within that style some people really swing and others just dont!And it's not even really that beat pattern.... listen to Ray Brown comping a fast groove. Playing just quarter notes, he swings ferociously! Other bassists doing the same thing don't even begin to approach his swing.

[henryrobinett]

Coyote or Eschew, absolutely right. What you said. I differ greatly with the dotted 8th plus 16th note interpretation. There's triplet feel to swing. But it's still not accurate. It has to be felt. The 16th note subdivision don't cut it. It sounds "wrong"; that's how I'll say it. Stiff is another way of saying it. But some people play that note WIDE enough to almost be a 16th. But when you try to subdivide that swing 8th note into 16ths it comes out all wrong. Like Paul Whiteman or something.

[Dave Pierce]

Originally posted by coyote:

Ahhh, but it's sooooo much more than a mere technical description.

Well, yeah, but what style of music isn't? I mean, in *any* style, there are those who are technically proficient, and those who really . Right?

 

--Dave

[Superbobus]

Do you practice swing?

Actually, I never "practiced swing" but I've practiced phrasing a lot. Playing eighth note lines, recording them, listening back and thinking about what I just did. Did that feel good and what could be better? Listening to swinging records and singing (parts of) solos with it also helps. Remember, keep it loose and relaxed, but in the pocket.

[EZB]

Agreed that analysis via music theory only goes so far. (There's some old Louis Armstrong quote on the subject I think that goes something like "If you gots to ask, you'll never know.") But how else can we talk about it?

 

A couple of variables come to mind:

 

1) Beat subdivision.

2) Accent.

3) Variation.

 

Beat subdivision is the first thing most people think of when they think of swing, and I agree that it's the most obvious factor to most people's ears. Putting straight eighths on one end of the continuum, triplet eighths at the midpoint and dotted eighth on the other end, I've heard great players all along that spectrum. A lot of it has to do with the instrument, in my opinion. Taking a drum ride pattern as an example, triplet eighths tend to sound a little Lowrey organ--ish. Tony Williams always said that a swinging drummer needs to play a very rigid dotted eighth ride pattern, which is easy to hear in his playing. And to my ears, Tony Williams definitely swings. But in those same recordings, other players are closer to a triplet feel. And then sometimes you'll hear a melodic instrument play somewhere between straight eighths and triplets on top of that. Everyone's swinging, but they're subdividing differently. Maybe that heterogeneity is a part of it--I dunno.

 

Accent. I've found that overly-deliberate swing feels tend to differentiate volume too much between the two note of the subdivision. Playing at or near an even volume seems--at least to my ears--an important aspect.

 

Variation. Errol Garner's left hand is a great example of this. He plays straight quarters (i.e., no implied subdivision at all), yet still has a very cool feel. That's because he plays the quarter a little behind the beat sometimes, and then brings it back on top of the beat every so often.

 

There's plenty of music in rock outside of straight-eighth feel--think of any shuffle. There's eighth-note shuffles (the Beatle's "Penny Lane", Van Halen's "Hot For Teacher", etc.) and straight-eighth feels where the triplet happens at the sixteenth note (Toto's "Rosanna", Neviille Brothers' "Brother Jake", etc.) Whether these "swing" or not I don't know, but they sound good to me.

[Addix Metzatricity]

Two words...

 

Grace Notes!