Beginners’ Lesson

Welcome back! I hope that our improv adventures have given you all some tools for making up new lines for your music. This month we are going to have another look at ‘swing feel’, as used in a lot of jazz.

I appreciate that jazz may not really seem like a beginner concept, and certainly if we were to dig too deeply into the harmonic side of playing music from the genre, we’d get way out of the remit of this column pretty quickly. But the ‘jazz feel’ is one that crops up in a lot of pop songs, and is really useful to understand and be able to employ, whether we’re playing covers or creating our own music.

From ‘Moondance’ and ‘Riders On The Storm’ to hip-hop tracks like Digable Planets’ ‘Rebirth Of Slick’ and even Olly Murs’ ‘Dance With Me Tonight’, jazz crops up as an influence in unexpected places. Getting a handle on the feel will help a lot when someone asks us to make a particular tune ‘more jazzy’.

Let’s recap. Last time we looked at swing and shuffle feels, we noted that the feel is based on triplets, rather than our regular