>But Winslow, regarding transcribing Poppers dizzying >licks, whether or not he played with or without >"rhythmic intention", he still played a certain >number of notes in a measure, and those notes have a >proportional relationship to one another, right?
It isn't that cut and dried.
The notes' relationships to *each *other may or may not submit to easy or precise measurement, and their relationship to the underlying beat of the accompaniment may be elusive in the extreme.
I have done painstaking transcriptions of John Popper, Toots Thielemans and Django Reinhardt (mostly his unaccompanied solo pieces). All of them exhibit this fluidity at times. Sometimes this is on the too-fast-to-think basis I mentioned earlier, and some of it is very clearly intentional (Toots, especially, comes up with complete counter-rhythmic microcosms that sound perfectly logical yet are devilishly difficult to relate to the underlying beat).
A certain number of notes in a measure? Again, it's not always that simple. Let's say the player begins a passage with a note that starts somewhere in the last half of the second beat (in the cracks between the 16th notes), carrying it over into the next beat, then continues over the next three measures to play notes that never touch down on the beat or on any discernible division of the beat, and ends it somewhere in the first half of the first beat of the next measure. This phrase straddles a total of four measures. The notes *among *themselves seem to have an internal rhythmic consistency, even though some are shorter and some longer. Over the course of 14 beats, we hear 19 notes - and remember, none touches down on an identifiable part of the beat.
Ugly, huh? Yet stuff like that comes up frequently in the stuff I transcribe. This ain't Walter Horton slammin' magisterially on all three parts of a triplet shuffle beat.
I could bracket the whole mess with a 19:14 tuplet (i.e. play 19 notes of equal value in the space of 14) but what human performer can accurately reproduce that?
Maybe I could define the shorter notes with a smaller value relative to the other notes and get the ratio down to 18:14? 17:14? Even if I could finagle 16 in the space of 14, that still boils down to 8 in the space of 7 - not exactly intuitive.
Or, I could just put a bunch of noteheads without defined values in the space (Matt Glaser did this in his Jazz Fiddle book, with transcriptions of people like Grappelli, Stuff Smith and Jean-Luc Ponty). This is easy on the transcriber and leaves the reader undisturbed to hear the recorded rhythms intuitively while seeing the sequence of notes involved and the region in which they occur. But it misses details and clues that even in "adapted" form may be valuable.
The best I can do is try to find something that
1) is performable by a reading musician
2) sounds as close as possible to the original
and
3) warn the reader (as I did in the Popper book) that the quirks of the soloist's autonomic nervous system may not be easily mapped on the graph paper-like system we use to describe rhythms (the Popper book and the accompanying album, by the way, were reviewed in print by Howard Levy and found to be a credible representation of what Popper played).
>So >it ought to be transcribable, then.
See above.
>I'm just asking >because I had to transcribe Sugar Blue's "Little Red >Rooster" for Masters of Blues Harp, and it was >insanely difficult because Blue does similar things >to Popper's style in this cut and I wouldn't let >myself fudge the rhythms on paper. Now maybe there's >enough of a difference here to render my point >invalid, but I was able to get it all notated after >several nights of sheer hell. Do you think there's >really no way to break down Popper's rhythms?
I can't comment on Blue as I've never transcribed him or listened with an ear to do so. But I can say that for Popper, Toots,and Django (and I suspect, even for Charlie Parker, from the way some of his work is transcribed and from a few cursory listens at half-speed), that the notes sometimes fall neatly and sweetly within the bar, the beat and the beat division, while at other times they float in a tangential but separate universe.
>As for pork chops, Popper the Whopper is now Popper >the Weight Dropper at 180 lbs lighter. The word is he >hit something like 400 lbs, but got a wee bit scared >when his bandmate died. He then had his stomach >stapled to treat morbid obesity. So he's probably >having a tofu burger as we write. I laud his efforts >to take care of himself and look foward to trashing >his playing for many years to come :-)
I'm glad to see that. The few times I hung with him he commented on his weight in such a way that he seemed to be clear about the health risks yet at peace with it. But then, he was in his "immortal" early 20's. After a little heavy weather you start coming in out of the rain . . .
Winslow
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