Thursday, June 7, 2018

He Don't Got Rhythm, and I Think I Know Why


Last night I heard Roberto Tarenzi an Italian jazz pianist play in a private home, a wonderful house concert. Parenthetically and surprisingly, this being Jerusalem, which sometimes seems like a city of five hundred. I barely knew anyone there, a pleasant change. The pianist was a thoroughgoing professional, knowledgeable about jazz and an imaginative improviser. His main influences were Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner, two giants of jazz piano.

Image result for bill evans imageEverything was there except swing.
If you listen to Bill Evans (this is a picture of him), you'll hear him play a lot of dreamy stuff, but he can also play with swing, and I don't think Tyner can play without swing. However, to my ear, at any rate, Tarenzi doesn't swing.
I think the reason for that is that his native language is Italian. Unlike English, and many other languages, including Hebrew, which have very strong stresses, Italian flows melodiously, as does French, for that matter. Listen to this bombastic clip of Vittorio Gassman talking and then reciting Dante.
There are plenty of stresses in Italian, but they aren't the regular, constant stresses of English. It doesn't quite have a beat.
Rhythm is always an issue in music.
One of my problems in playing flute is failing to get the sixteenth notes up to speed, and, when I play them slowly at a tempo I can manage, I tend to rush and trip over my fingers. My teacher, at my most recent lesson, told me that music is not an extreme sport, that if I feel the adrenaline in my veins, I should snooze. Better yet, I tell myself, I should feel the beat.
Yet, part of the drama of listening to music is feeling that the performer is playing at the upper limits of her ability, that adrenaline is pumping through her. The ultimate goal is to be totally relaxed and confident that the notes will fall into place, and totally intense about making them fall into place. Trying as hard as you can and making it sound as if you don't have to try.
That, as I understand it, is swing, as demonstrated by Fats Waller, who rushes a lot in this clip, but whose swing is fantastic.

1 comment:

Raanan said...

Interesting post.Sometimes our sense of rhythm atrophies like the ability to smell water underneath the ground.Italian being the most legato spoken language might come at the expense of swing although go prove that the 2 are mutually incompatible.As for playing equal 16th notes the solution is a fanatical search for restoring the flexibility we had as children.