Call it “Rhythm Prejudice,” and blame it on Bach.
His genius with harmony and forms like canon and fugue set the foundation of modern Western music and established the keyboard as the basis for both composition and analysis. That has meant that vertical harmony—chords—has been privileged across the board, from garage band rock to academic musicology.
It wasn’t always this way, and it isn’t always that way. Music in the West through the Renaissance used modes (essentially scales as opposed to chords) and had a much more flowing and horizontal way with harmony, preserved and revived at times by geniuses like Gustav Mahler and Miles Davis. But that’s still harmony, and the use of harmony has come to signify musical sophistication across genres. Knowledge of and skill with harmony is also how one gets into advanced composition or analysis/musicology programs—harmony is the gatekeeper.
While harmony can be a true and clear expression of the sophistication of musical thinking, it’s not always. Can anyone seriously say that harmonically simple music like Steve Reich’s isn’t sophisticated? Arvo Pärt’s? The blues? That would be an ignorant claim best left to Twitter. There are other elements that can show equal, if not greater, sophistication: melody and rhythm. Structuring all these together in time, whether composing it on paper of playing it live, is the true measure of sophistication.
For some reason neither is given equal weight as harmony when it comes to musical analysis, even though crafting a great melody or constructing a complex rhythm that has a somatic impact is much, much harder than building a complex harmony (Pärt’s incredible Passio Domini Nostri Jesu Christi secundum Joannem is harmonically static, essentially confined to E-minor for an hour, an imposing challenge that few composers could pull off). It’s as if melody and rhythm are too enjoyable—essentially too popular, i.e. too simplistic—to be seen as sophisticated by theorists and musicologists. What that prejudice misses is so much fantastic music, like that from Swiss musician Nik Bärtsch and his band Ronin.
On paper, Ronin is a standard quartet of reeds, keyboards, bass, and drums. What they play though is both unique and universal. On paper, Bärtsch’s compositions seem like math-rock, with shifting odd-numbered meters and multiple syncopated lines. When the band sits down to play though—like at a blistering live set at Nublu in the middle of March, a few days before they were to appear at the Big Ears festival—what you hear is astonishingly funky and hip. The music uses harmonies so lean they’ree barely there and often eschews melody for nothing but rhythm, rhythms, polyrhythms; multiple rhythms moving in parallel, defining a pulse that goes directly to the body. It’s not an equation, it’s a groove. You can dance to it once you unstick your mind from being boggled by it.
And it’s harder to build a rhythmic structure like this, not just the pure sophistication but the deeply flowing, funk feeling of it, than it is to write complex harmonies that have the same pure somatic appeal. Not even Steely Dan, great as they were, hit the mark. Beethoven did, maybe 19th century composer Anton Bruckner did. The privileging of harmony above all other things in analysis is also anti-democratic. Harmony establishes a hierarchic musical form, and there’s nothing wrong with that per se, it’s what songs are, but putting harmony above the other elements, implicitly saying it has the most intellectual importance, is hierarchical thinking.
Rhythm is democratic, everyone has to work together to make it happen, and rhythm is the language with which improvising musicians can respond to each other most immediately. Rhythm is also dramatic. Harmony is obviously a great tool for expressing drama, it’s very function is to establish a tonal home, then build tension through dissonance and modulation before resolving it by return home—tension in harmony is literally suspended. Rhythm does this too, especially in a band like Ronin, where you can hear individual lines move against and toward each other under a universal pulse, and the fleeting moments when everyone is on the same beat are satisfying in the way of watching a superstar gymnast tumble and spin in the air before landing on their feet.
Rhythm is also democratic writ large. Ronin brings together musical ideas that can be heard in Reich’s music, György Ligeti’s Etudes, gamelan music, West African music, and more—Bärtsch has talked about his love of Bill Withers and the rhythmic complexity and funk from that great artist. But Bärtsch isn’t borrowing from these traditions (well maybe once or twice from Reich) but making something organic and original that, because the idea is rhythm, connects with music around the world that also has always used rhythm as not just a foundation but the primary means and purpose. Some of this music has a specific national or traditional style, some of it doesn’t but it shares the same values so fits together seamlessly.
It also fits seamlessly into the human experience. Music, specifically rhythm, is how both dance and military drills work, rhythm is the way humans organize themselves in groups in space and time. Bärtsch alludes to this in his new book, Listening: Music, Movement, Mind (a useless guide to everything), where he weaves together composing and playing with zen ritual (there is a mantra-like quality to his music) and martial arts practice, itself a kind of ritual and absolutely the organization of people in space and time. This grounds the source of music making in basic human movement, which is a profound thing. Although it may not seem, after a Western education, that the body is as complex as the mind, Nik Bärtsch and his rhythms prove it is.
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Record Store Day is not usually a big deal for jazz heads. As a promotional opportunity for vinyl enthusiasts the special releases (the idea is that they are first available on vinyl, only in person at record shops, before a wider distribution) are heavy on the popular music genres, and light on jazz. But this next one, April 20, is different because of the efforts of Zev Feldman and his associated labels. Called the “Jazz Detective” because of his excellent work in uncovering never-before-heard archival recordings, mostly live ones, he works with the Resonance and Elemental labels, and has his own new Jazz Detective/Deep Digs label and imprint.
Feldman is part of an amazing ten archival releases available on vinyl that day (CD editions will be available April 26), and I’m already looking hard at Mal Waldron & Steve Lacy: The Mighty Warriors Live in Antwerp (Elemental Music), a 1995 concert from one of the greatest pairings in the history of jazz. On Resonance, there’s Freedom Weaver: The 1959 European Tour Recordings of Sonny Rollins, which is exhilarating, and Jewels in the Treasure Box, Art Tatum live at the Blue Note jazz club in Chicago in March of 1953 with guitarist Everett Barksdale and bassist Slam Stewart. And if you need even more riches, Feldman has them on Jazz Detective: Sun Ra at the Showcase: Live in Chicago 1976-1977; Chet Baker & Jack Sheldon – In Perfect Harmony: The Lost Album; and Sister Rosetta Tharpe – Live in France: The 1966 Concert in Limoges. Save your pennies.
