Offbeat topic

Lango-Django

Ever play in a jam session where the bass player gets "turned around"? Instead of that good old reliable "oom-pah" sound, suddenly it's "pah-oom"!

And it gets worse! Because even when everybody in the group says "Uh-oh!", it's not always easy to get that beat turned around forwards again!

That's why I've always been amazed by some of the great early jazz/stride pianists, guys like James P. Johnson and Fats Waller, who could effortlessly turn that bass around for as long as they wanted to… and then once they were finished, could effortlessly return to their regular stride pattern.

(If you're not familiar with stride piano, this is a sort of 20's/30's version of ragtime in which the left hand descends to the deepest regions of the keyboard for beats one and three, and then magically jumps way up to play mid-register chords on beats two and four… meanwhile the right hand is spraying out notes like Django!)

So being the curious fella that I am, I wondered how the hell are these guys doing it?

So that's the topic I plan to get into in my next posting, assuming it is one that anybody around here is interested in…. maybe a few bass players and a few guitarists?

To whet your appetite, here's the great Fats Waller and his Buddies from 1929 (Eddie Condon on banjo) playing one of the hottest tunes in jazz history, "Minor Drag"… listen carefully to the first sixteen bars of the piano solo and you'll hear that turned-around bass thing I'm talking about… but please, keep listening right to the end if you want to hear one of the greatest horn riffs of all time….



My plan, and indeed it is a very cunning one, even though probably nobody here will give a $#%& because it doesn't have anything to do with gypsy jazz, is to analyze what Fats is doing to turn that bass back and then forwards again.

Will

scot

I learned how to fingerpick in the 70s mostly from listening to Gary Davis and Dave Van Ronk who were both very skilled at doing this. One of Gary Davis' most famous pieces was called Soldier's Drill (or United States March), and he used this trick in places throughout this complex tune. He played some versions of Candyman the same way. I eventually learned to play those tunes and it wasn't easy. Soldier's Drill is in F, not the best key for fingerpicking. Blues/ragtime style fingerpicking requires using your thumb (bass) independently from the fingers (melody) to syncopate and to keep the counterpoint moving. Ragtime guitar players always tried hard to get a "pianistic" bass going. I wasn't that good at it, but if I practiced, I could swap the bass when I needed to. And it really takes practice because when you learn Freight Train or Railroad Bill as a beginner, you train your thumb to work a certain way and the backwards bass is opposite.

I don't fingerpick that much anymore, but after reading this I took my old Martin down and tinkered with trying it, then took a shot at Soldier's Drill and played through my old arrangement of The Pearls where I use the backwards bass throughout the trio. I can still do it but not exactly polished...

Over a 1st position C chord, the standard blues alternating bass is C-E-G-E. It's easy enough to swap the C and G if you don't play any melody notes. Swapping the C and G is how you play the bass in Candyman. That tune sounds simple but it's pretty hard to really nail it.

Will is certainly right about this, though - it sounds pretty cool when you can pull it off.

Bones

Pretty cool effect. Thanks for pointing that out Will.

Lango-Django

Scot, I also spent a lot of my mis-spent youth trying to copy Rev. Gary Davis's wonderful fingerpicking, and I know exactly the recording you're talking about.

And Bones, thanks, but I'm not finished yet!

Step two was to trim the recording to just the 16 bar piano solo.

I found even after I did this and listened to it repeatedly I was still having trouble feeling where the "one" beat was. The recording was too fast for my metronome, which only goes up to 250, so I recorded myself counting "One, two, three, four" over it…

I'm posting that here so you can hear it…

Lango-Django

That still wasn't quite enough for me to figure out what was going on, so the next thing I did was try to play along with the bass line with my guitar, even though it was an octave higher…

Lango-Django

…and then using that, I tried my best to trim down the "one, two, three, four" counting so it matched the guitar part

Lango-Django

Anyway, if anyone is still reading this, it turns out that what Waller did was sort of like a magician's sleight of hand… HE still knows exactly where the "one" and the "three" are… but the listener really can't quite tell where they are, because he establishes a substitute rhythm pattern for the bass solo, based upon "One, two, three…….one…. three…. one…. three….one… three…"

And then he complicates it even a bit more by adding some extra notes to the pattern…

*********************

Anyway, I suspect that this same idea could be stolen and used by GJ bands as well as swing/dixieland groups like the one I play in.

I haven't tried it yet, but am hoping to soon. I'll report back with the results.

Will

Bones

It sounds like he switches to a (semi) walking bass line (descending) and at the same time starts doing chords (presumably with the right hand, I'm no piano player) on the 'and' of the beats (starting on the 'and' of beat four of the preceding measure). Kind of gives it a shuffle feel sort of like the way Django comps sometimes (that people have called 'shuffle').

Jazzaferri

Two words. Art Tatum

klaatu

Here's something similar. Harry Connick Jr. playing before a French audience that is clapping on the 1-3 beats. As he starts the piano solo, at about the 0:40 mark he inserts an extra beat to shift them to the 2-4, where they stay for the rest of the song, probably totally unaware of what just happened. At 0:44 you can see the drummer raise his arms as if to say "Thanks, Harry!" Brilliant.

Bones

:-) funny so I guess white American audiences don't have a monopoly on clapping on the 1 and 3. So obnoxious when they do that.