Jam Session: Rhythm in “Actual Proof”

OK, now we're going to talk a little bit about rhythm. So we're going to take a tune I wrote some years ago with Bennie Maupin called "Actual Proof." And it was originally written to kind of show off to the drums, because it has the use of what years ago used to be called stop time, at least that concept. So again, I have the aid of Luka on electric bass and Anthony on drums. And let's see what happens, OK? One, two, one, two, three. [LAUGHING] Thank you. So there's interactions happening, a lot of rhythm, and things happening in unexpected places, you know, displacement of rhythms. Doesn't really fall where you would expect that to fall. But actually, it was constructed that way on purpose. Actually, we still count one, two, three, four, but we displaced that. We actually moved that over from where that were a figure like that normally falls, just to fool everybody into thinking that we actually changed the beat and we didn't. So a lot of rhythmic things happening. You know, giving yourself a challenge, giving the other musicians you're working with a challenge by writing tunes that have displaced rhythms. And by that what I mean is if you're taking something that normally they hear-- the ear hears that the beat falls in a certain specific place. And if you actually remove half a beat somewhere and move that phrase one-half a beat backwards, that's a displacement of the rhythm. And it can create some very interesting responses from the other musicians, and gives you a challenge of something different to work with. Preparing to perform a piece like this takes a lot of time. I don't know, when you guys learned this, did you have to listen to it a lot? I mean, because I didn't send you sheet music. I didn't even know you. So you learned it from listening to the record, right? Right. Yeah, and the bass line is particularly tricky, because the one is not where, I mean, you might think that it is. Right. You can listen along and try to find the one, if you dare to. But actually, we were never changed from 4:4. You, yourself, rewind this. Rewind the actual performance that we did, and see if you can count it. But you can make compositions yourself. Just play with moving things around. And it's a really good exercise, not only in composition, but for actually improvising, to have to figure out ways of improvising something that makes sense over phrases that are displaced-- either moved backwards or moved forward. So try it and see what you come up with.