Re: OT West African/African Diaspora rhythms: 3/4, 4/4, 6/8, 12/8

[Rick Walker <looppool@cruzio.com>]

  Hi Andy,
Nice points that you make.

My feeling however is that the Western perspective which assigns lesser 
value to rhythm than
melody, harmony or lyric (note:  if you invent an entire genre of music 
based on a single rhythm
like Tony Allen did when he invented the groove for 'AfroBeat' for Fela 
Kuti you can't even
get royalties from the music...........witness the Amen Break that so 
revolutionized a lot of sample based hip
hop)  has a very serious flaw when it comes to notation , and that is 
that it doesn't have the
concept of the 'sub-pulse'

To write African rhythms in 12/8 does not give enough information about 
how the music is felt.
The purpose of writing is to give us information.   The better the map,  
the easier it is to understand
and the more information it gives us.

I also agree with Brian Good's excellent observations and he brings up a 
very important phenomenon
in music, the of 'feel'   or 'mole' (pronounced moe-lay) as my 
Brazillian teacher told me.

It is true that the percentage of swing (how late the second 8th note is 
in every beat) really effects the feel
of things.   In this case,   it can be a more flexible map to write 8th 
notes with 'swing' over the top of them.

However,  having played as much jazz as I have in my life,  I have to 
say that i run into more melodic
musicians who don't even understand the concept of moveable swing and 
because so much jazz is
written without triplet 8th notes, as it actually IS played at medium 
tempos,  they are really not
hip to how much polyrhythmic playing is possible.

I've had a lot of jazz musicians take my Rhythm Intensive course and it 
usually is a revelation to them
all the principles of swing and the polyrhtymic nature of the idiom that 
they've studied for years.

I guess in the end, it's whatever floats your boat, but I'm a stickler 
for rhythmic accuracy as much as is possible
with an obviously imperfect system.  I will say, however, in the same 
breath, that Western Notation is a more accurate system (when 
understood) than any of the half a dozen ethnic rhythmic notation 
systems that I"ve learned..................though it scares the crap out 
of traditional ethnic rhythm students (especially white 
Americans............lol).