The Secrets of Authentic Gypsy Jazz Rhythm

DjangoBooks

The Secrets of Authentic Gypsy Jazz Rhythm

By Denis Chang Have you ever wanted to learn how to play authentic Gypsy Jazz rhythm? I can show you the secrets! This is a limited time offer only! Subscribe now! These secrets are so coveted, I’m giving it away for the low, low, LOW price of 19.99$ (Full retail value 499.99$!!!!). Subscribe...

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MichaelHorowitz

Samois is coming, time to brush up on your rhythm. This fantastic lesson from Denis will you show you how....

^:)^ ^:)^ ^:)^ ^:)^ ^:)^ ^:)^ ^:)^ ^:)^ ^:)^ ^:)^ ^:)^ ^:)^ ^:)^ ^:)^

klaatu

MichaelHorowitz wrote: »

Samois is coming

... and Django in June is coming even sooner! Woo-hoo!

Don Price

Utterly fantastic article Denis! Kudos! Thoroughly informative and comprehensive. Required reading for anyone playing this style of music -even if they aren't a guitarist! THANKS!!

harrye

Great article Denis. Very informative and with the spice of humour which is always a treat haha. Great to see the different permutations of gypsy jazz rhythm discussed and articulated. Keep the interesting articles coming!

taylorfusion

Treatise-alert! Nice job Mssr Chang

dennis

oh man , did i send the right version? i thought i had included the links to some other videos, and corrected some mistakes / typos... "said" instead of "sound", and i thought i had included the charlie parker example (where i wrote charlie christian, duuuuh)

oh well...

5$ discount!

Jazzaferri

Insightful and full of great ideas and examples. @Dennis you have set a new standard....the bar is getting very high indeed. Many thanks, now back to the 'nome.

Scoredog

way kewl
thanks Denis for doing this.

spatzo

Hi Dennis! tks for the article!

how would you write the upstroke rhythm in standard notation?

dennis

i'm not sure how i would notate it, you'd probably have to invent your own notation.

I had a conversation with someone recently, i forget who, and he was saying that some styles of music were not meant to be notated. I kinda agree with him.

I also read an article where they talk about improvisation/interpretation in classical music, how nowadays classical musicians have a very strict and narrow minded view of how to read sheet music, but back in the day, composers wrote their music as accurately as they could but encouraged people to take certain liberties.

So much of improvisation involves not just playing notes, but sculpting them in a special way, using bends, slides in a way that would be sometimes be difficult to notate... like django would hold on to a note, and then slide at the last possible moment before switching to another note ,and during that sleed, he'd pick a ghost note... and he might do the same thing but with a different timing of slide, etc... how do you notate that? or the famous django chromatic line where sometimes he purposely omits notes and doesn't really care about the timing, it starts on beat 1 , maybe ends on the next measure beat 1, but he startes out slow, then speeds up. There are so many things like this, the only way to really understand it is to listen to it carefully.

If someone was using sheet music of this stuff without any reference to the original recording, it's bound to sound completely different (which might not be such a bad thing)

So for upstroke rhythm, what if in one section of the song, the upstroke is kinda slow, but for the B section, the upstroke is very quick and dry? what if you only do up stroke on the bass strings for the 1st chorus, but then for the solos, you do upstroke on all the strings, switch back to bass strings only for the B section? Too complicated!

Hence the importance of immersion and ear training!