It feels to me as if Take Five has always been in the background, either as the accompaniment to some TV show, laid across a montage or played over a testcard. How do you pinpoint when you first heard one of the most popular jazz hits of all time? Especially one recorded before your parents had even got married.
To introduce melody and harmony into the odd-meter equation, here’s an example of an exercise featuring 2 choruses of a Bb blues in 5/4 with a different repetitive rhythmic subdivision (or “odd-time claves,” as I think of them) used every 2 bars (the melody is a bit boring and repetitive, but it helps to simplify the melody with an exercise like this so you can focus purely on rhythmic concerns).Description: single album track, Time Out Accordingly, it is important to gradually move away from playing the repetitive rhythmic patterns over odd meters and to begin to play with more natural, free, varied, and unpredictable rhythmic phrasing (e.g. Move through each set of odd meter rhythmic patterns one at a time until they become as comfortable and natural to use as more basic rhythmic elements.Įventually, make it your goal to be able to play with the same amount of freedom and creativity in odd meters that you have in duple and triple meters. After you get more comfortable with the rhythms, trying improvising freely or over a jazz standard playing only one rhythmic set at a time until you become comfortable enough with it to start varying it. Take these various odd-meter rhythmic patterns one at a time and repeat them over and over again by tapping, singing, and/or clapping them. Try tapping the bottom line rhythm with your foot and clapping the top line (first with a metronome set to 5/4 time, then eventually without a metronome): Here are some 5/4 rhythmic independence exercises to get you started. You can break 5/4 down even further and think of it as two 5/8 measures for every one 5/4 bar, and you can break down the two component 5/8 bars into a 2 + 3 or 3 + 2 8th-note pattern.įollowing this logic, there are a multitude of ways you can break down any odd meter into more manageable and common/comfortable rhythmic patterns, which will help you digest and conceptualize them more readily. a 2/4 bar followed by a 3/4 bar) or vice versa (3 + 2). In other words, you can break down odd meters into smaller segments based on groupings of two and three.įor example, 5/4 time can be broken down into a two-plus-three (2 + 3) pattern (i.e. is easier than it may seem at first because all odd meters can be subdivided into groupings of the more familiar patterns. Playing in meters based on groupings of five, seven, eleven, thirteen, etc. The goal when practicing and playing using odd meters is to make them feel as natural and easy as the more common and basic triple and duple meters. So how can you practice odd meters effectively and efficiently? I have become more and more aware of the recent profusion of odd-meter music from personal experience, and I can attest that the majority of my original compositions employ odd meters and/or odd/irregular rhythmic phrasing. There is also a rich tradition of odd-meter jazz music stretching back at least to Don Ellis and farther back to Dave Brubeck and Max Roach. Well, as many of you have probably noticed, odd meters are becoming more and more common in modern music, especially within the contexts of modern jazz and “classical” styles.
We spend so much time playing jazz standards in 3/4 and 4/4, so why bother with odd meters? I’ll start by zeroing in on 5/4 time here. In this post, I want to begin to tackle the challenge of playing in odd meters.
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