Rhythmic Complexity in Jack Teagarden's Early Improvisation
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Rhythmic Complexity in Jack Teagarden’s Early Improvisation Alex W. Rodriguez In his autobiography Really the Blues, early jazz reedman Mezz Mezzrow described a generation of “defiant, music starved kids … who started to play hot music themselves, stuttering towards a language that would let them speak out what was on their whirlpool minds. They got the ingredients a little mixed up, sure; some of their music was spotty and fumbling, reaching out in too many directions at once, each note ready to bust with a dozen different ideas stuffed in it. But they were headed right, and the spirit was in them. That was plenty for a starter.” His characterization of early jazz still resonates in our cultural imagination today: a generation of defiant yet innovative musicians rejecting the “squares” and messily fumbling through music to play how they really felt. But what Mezzrow failed to convey in his sensationalistic retelling of early jazz was that some of these young jazzmen in late-1920s New York had already worked out an extremely sophisticated rhythmic concept for early jazz forms. Trombonist Jack Teagarden, who moved to the Big Apple in 1927 at age 21, is one such example. By the time he arrived in New York, Teagarden was playing the blues like no other trombonist before him. Along with Louis Armstrong and other early pioneers, Teagarden brought blues-inflected improvisation into mainstream jazz. A white man from rural Texas, Teagarden embraced the African American blues aesthetic and complimented it with his own sense of rhythmic nuance. I will focus on Teagarden's rhythmic vocabulary as presented in three early recorded solos: "She's a Great Great Girl," "That's a Serious Thing," and “Knockin’ a Jug”. The two different song forms (two blues, one 32-measure song form) and tempos (two slow, one fast) demonstrate that Teagarden employs intricate rhythmic ideas in both contexts. It also bears mentioning that both solos are improvised; alternate takes of both recordings exist in which Teagarden plays entirely different solos. In their essay Metric Dissonance in Jazz: The Stride Piano Performances of Thelonious Monk and James P. Johnson, Ted Buehrer and Robert Hodson assert that although "this rhythmic complexity is one of the most characteristic features of jazz, this aspect of jazz is often overlooked in jazz theory and analysis; most jazz theory tends to focus on pitch issues such as harmonic progression, voice leading, motivic development, and so on." They effectively adapted the ideas of metric consonance and dissonance developed by music theorist Harald Krebs to a number of jazz examples. I will borrow their technique of rhythmic analysis to shed light on these improvised solos. Briefly, Krebs conceived of certain rhythmic patterns “dissonant” relative to the listener’s established pulse expectation, either when grouped into a separate meter (for example, groups of 3 over an established group of 4) or by displacing the rhythm relative to the established pulse. It is a useful shorthand – a grammar, if you will – for highlighting one aspect of musical rhythm from the perceptual frame of reference. Unlike the solo piano performances analyzed by Buehrer and Hodson, Teagarden created his improvisations in the context of a group of musicians. Fortunately, in this analysis the underscoring remains relatively consistent and unchanging, helping to ground the listener’s expectation of a steady tempo. On "That's a Serious Thing", the tuba emphasizes 1 and 3, the banjo delineates quarter notes, and the percussion gives "two and four." Teagarden creates and resolves metric dissonance on top of this consistent pattern using what I refer to as "micro-level" dissonance. Micro-level dissonances are 3-over-4 grouping dissonances, usually at the sixteenth-note pulse level. Occasionally, simultaneous 3-over-4 metric dissonance exists at the eighth note pulse level as well. I have labeled these instances using Krebs's "G" notation to indicate a grouping dissonance -- the word in parentheses indicates the pulse level. Measures 1-3 provide an excellent example of Teagarden's implementation of micro-level dissonance. The first part of the phrase, played entirely on the pitch of the tonic to highlight its rhythmic aspect, includes simultaneous 3-over-4 grouping dissonances at the eight note and sixteenth note levels. The eighth note grouping begins with the pickup note, while the sixteenth note grouping begins with the downbeat. Note that Teagarden plays the eighth note pairs "straight" as opposed to "swung" – they equal the duration of two sixteenth notes in the 3/4 grouping pattern. Additionally, Teagarden employs what I refer to as "macro-level" dissonance by structuring his phrases in a manner that lie against the regularity of the underscoring. By the time this performance was recorded in 1929, the blues was generally performed in twelve-measure choruses, but this had not always been the case. Irregular phrase length was common in blues performance into the early 20th century; still, the songs usually maintained an "AAB" phrase form. Here, I have mapped Teagarden's solo against the regular phrasing that he employs earlier in the tune, when he sings the melody. Notice that his sung phrases line up with the rhythm section's harmonic shifts in measures 1, 5 and 9: As with the melody, Teagarden's trombone lines fall into a "call and response" format, only he is doing both the calling and the responding. Unlike the melody, however, they do not fit neatly into two- and four-measure groups. As this diagram shows, Teagarden's three phrases fall roughly into 5-measure, 2-measure and 5-measure statements, laid over the regular "fours" in the rhythm section. The first begins with the pickup to measure 1 and stretches halfway into measure 5; the second begins in measure six and lasts two measures; the third takes the rest of the chorus, starting with the pickup to measure 8 and stretching into measure 12 with a four-beat "responsorial" that mimics the phrase in measure 10. The "responsorial" phrase is the most rhythmically consonant and serves to resolve the macro-level rhythmic tension created by the preceding seven- beat phrases. In this paper, I will also demonstrate how Teagarden employs similar rhythmic techniques in two other recordings, “She’s a Great Great Girl,” and “Knockin’ A Jug.” In doing so, I hope to make the case for a closer examination of these micro- and macro- level rhythmic techniques. There is much more to this than simply “playing how you feel”— a sophisticated rhythmic logic underlies the process. In recent articles in Music Theory Spectrum, Fernando Benadon and Matthew Butterfield have each put forward provocative new approaches to understanding rhythm in early jazz, using computers to analyze examples of rhythmic sophistication in improvised solos, aspiring towards empirical evidence of these perceived phenomena. Clearly, Teagarden’s work merits this sort of analysis, as one of the early pioneers of this trend of unique rhythmic interpretation that was foundational in the development of jazz as a unique and globally influential musical style. That a rural white Texas trombonist inserted himself into this musical dialogue is both noteworthy and poorly-represented in most historical accounts. Furthermore, Teagarden’s playing shows that this pervasive stretching of time against the steady beat is one of the characteristic aspects of jazz rhythm—that an intractable element of what we call “swing” has to do with how phrases are grouped together against the pulse, not simply the asymmetrical division of the pulse itself. Of course, Teagarden's skillful application of this concept to the trombone was truly remarkable for its time. References Benadon, Fernando. “Time Warps in Early Jazz.” Music Theory Spectrum 31, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 1-25. Buehrer, Ted, and Hodson, Robert D. “Metric Dissonance in Jazz.” International Association of Jazz Educators Research Proceedings Yearbook (2004): 106-23. Butterfield, Matthew. “Why Do Jazz Musicians Swing Their Eighth Notes?” Music Theory Spectrum 33, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 3-26. .