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Looper's Delight
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On 2/5/2013 7:51 AM, Buzap Buzap wrote:
Yeah, I'm thinking also of The Meters and Sun Ra recordings. You have a chaotic wobbing madness - yet it's grooving like hell!
One of the best examples of this was a lecture that I heard Earl Campbell,the legendary drummer who played with Little Richards and Fats Domino and who was also credited as being the first person to ever play the 'backbeat' on snare drum loudly,
a phenomenon that would change all pop music history after it.He said that when they cut their tracks that they became aware that a lot of keyboard players would play straight 8th notes (a la Jerry Lee Lewis's music) while that a lot of bass players
would prefer shuffled grooves (a la the Blues at the time).He realized that by playing with either one of them perfectly sounded horrible, but if he played exactly in the middle of the swing of the bassist and the straight approach of the keyboardist that a very loose feel would be created that was NOT perfectly in one time or the other.
He called it the "Wiggly Area".Later on, after having million selling regional hits with Richards and Domino, he said that whenever a band would come in to record at Cosimos' Studio, all the black guys would try to emulate their 'million dollar sound' by playing triplet 8th note shuffled grooves and all the white guys would try
to emulate the same sound by playing 'straight 8ths' in their groove.He said they used to laugh and laugh that no one could figure out what they were actually doing.
Go back and listen to all of the most seminal of rock and roll grooves. It all swings, but only slightly.... .....somewhere, loosely and polyrhtymically between shuffled triplet 8th notes and straight 8 notes.
All of the great New Orleans music is played this way..........in the 'wiggly' area.
A great example of it is also to be found in James Brown's first instrumental hit, "Night Train" (1958). Go listen to it. Listen to the rhythm section and then listen to the horn section. They are juxtaposing
shuffles against straight grooves and it has the best 'wiggly' feel.