Notation to swing

[stevieresh]

Hi all

Please see the attached image. I understand what the notation wants me to do and how to do it. So what's my issue? The curious side of me wants to understand its literal translation.

I am reading it as 2 eighth notes = 1 quarter note and 1 eighth note. This doesn't make sense to me.

I gather that you can count swung eighth notes by saying 1 (trip) let, 2 (trip) let etc (the trip is not played).

Please help :p

[j_tour]

I'm afraid my answer won't satisfy you, but after hundreds of handwritten transcribed solos, I very rarely have attempted to notate swung eighths.

The reason is just it's too dependent on idiom and even players.

For example, a lot of post-bop players tend to even out their lines, rhythmically.  Sometimes Wayne or Herbie or Chick or Miles or a lot of the more avant-garde players really don't swing their notes in the way most people would understand.  At least not unless they want to.

But they still swing!

And, the tied triplet figure, to me, doesn't really capture GENERICALLY the trad jazz swing.  Some of it depends on the metrical scheme:  improvising over time in three is not going to be the same as a common time or cut time, as far as swing.  And some of it depends on the exact line the performer is playing, which would depend from phrase to phrase.

In general, yes, but IMHO it shouldn't be used unthinkingly as a template.

You can get detailed transcribing, but IMHO it ends up looking like capturing a performance via MIDI and looking at the notes:  music should be legible, IMHO.

But I have used it in some very fast passages, where when the music is slowed down, you can see the sort of patterns of subdivided thirty-second notes into sixteenth-note triplets and all kinds of stuff that's probably familiar to readers of "legit music" past a certain date in the early twentieth century.

It looks terrible on the page, generally, but my feeling at those times was, "Well, I spent all this time meticulously notating it, and nobody's going to read it except me, so it's fine!" 

And 5-tuplets and the like abound all over the place in all kinds of jazz playing (I think one of the semi-technical words is "cramming" while improvising:  as in a player just "crams" the notes in the interval of a beat or half a beat...I'm serious, that's the word I've heard used among musicians who transcribe, or even those who don't), not even getting into polyrhythms used by two-fisted pianists.  Those should be notated correctly, IMHO.

I'm not suggesting to dumb it down, but the "swing feel" is really dependent on the (i) era (ii) idiom (iii) performer (iv) tempo (v) meter of the tune.  Chick Corea doesn't exactly swing his eighth notes, in a lot of his most famous recordings, not in the way that earlier performers did, you know.  Just nowhere near the triplet figure or the dotted eighth note.

I will grant that those dotted eighth note or triplet figures  (sorry Brits and Commonwealth people:  I can never remember the quaver/semiquaver terminology) have their place, but I'd use that notation for something like a more gutbucket blues or something kind of churchy in 12/8 time or something like that.

ETA For the OP's actual question:  sure, that kind of notation captures some performances, at least close enough.  Lester Young, or even in the tribute tune on the death of Lester Young, Charles Mingus's album track of "Goodbye Porkpie Hat."  Those are pretty solid examples of that kind of feel, even though Lester Young did a lot of recordings and solos in his productive but brief career, and he can't be fitted into the scheme every time.  Listen to the Mingus track with Horace Parlan on piano.  Good ear-training as well, learn it correctly off the record.  Maybe not a tune you'd play every day, but sometimes it's a good tune to know if you wake up feeling kind of bad and want to swing a bit.

[ted]

I concur with j_tour. In fact the situation is worse in that in or out of jazz, improvised felt rhythms defy notation altogether and any attempt is bound to be an approximation. Dapogny, for instance, in his excellent transcriptions of Morton, uses straight quavers with the written instruction that they are "swung". The awkward side of that is what to do when you really want to indicate straight quavers, as in the last strain of London Blues ? Worse still, how do you get on if a mixture of both is desired in close range or simultaneously ? The whole thing can get very messy. To further complicate matters, a "dotted note" convention grew up in the early twentieth century to indicate triplet rhythm. Brubeck, in his later years, as in Points on Jazz, went the other way and took pains to try to write precisely the rhythms he played. That too has drawbacks because, as j_tour points out, the improvised feeling simply defies notation altogether. David Thomas Roberts, in his folios, writes that certain rhythms are "somewhere between this and that printed form", which is all very well if you have heard the music, in which case you will know about it anyway.

Learning music of this sort purely from a score without hearing a recording is fraught with rhythmic problems. There is also the necessity of preserving your own freedom to play your own rhythms and your own interpretation.

[brogers70]

It's funny how similar this is to Baroque practice, in which straight eighths were sometimes "swung" long-short-long-short, and where dots did not necessarily indicate a 50% increase in the duration of the note, but could be felt as [12][3] rather than [123][4] or even as what we would write as a double dot. Jazz is pretty Baroque.

[stevieresh]

I must admit that i didn't expect responses to go in this direction- so thanks. I cant say that i didn't learn anything :p

[j_tour]

Hi all

Please see the attached image. I understand what the notation wants me to do and how to do it. So what's my issue? The curious side of me wants to understand its literal translation.

I am reading it as 2 eighth notes = 1 quarter note and 1 eighth note. This doesn't make sense to me.

I gather that you can count swung eighth notes by saying 1 (trip) let, 2 (trip) let etc (the trip is not played).

Please help :p

I think I'm guilty of having ignored your original question.

Never ask a Frenchman to talk politics (I am not French), and never ask a musician about notation or theory!  Unless you want lengthy apologetics and a number of digressions.

No, your question is good, and you are right:  it's just like you'd see similar figures in Bach.  I'm not familiar with the method you're using to literally count it off out loud, but the notation in your image file is fine.  If I were to count it off, it would be, in my head having the triplet figure solid and, and just hold the first two notes, as notated. 

It's not really IMO specific to jazz, it's just a regular triplet with the first two notes tied together.

And, yes, the notation is one of the problems I'm currently having with the Scriabin Op. 74, but also in Bach, where sometimes things are implied but not fully notated.

Nice thing about jazz is you don't have to read it!  Trust me, it would be awful to read micro-accurate transcriptions, without various conventions, of even the way various performers play the melody of a tune.  It can be done, but it looks terrible on the page.  Maybe a percussionist can read down to 128th-notes with all kinds of groupings, but they're a special breed of orchestral players.  Impressive, but terrifying!

[stevieresh]

Haha. It's all good my friend. As i said- it was interesting to read. Cheers for the additional info / clarification.