Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Teachers Forum Swing question for teachers

Thus, my question. There are often 3 or 4 pieces in these student "jazz" collections which indicate "swing." They give students who never come in contact with this part of the music world a taste of it, but it's only superficial at best.

Ben, just a thought on your comments. I'm guessing that most music published these days are using computer generated graphics, and so notation is limited to the offerings of the software. I've never seen what you suggest in teaching pieces anyway. Most, I dare say, 90% - 95%, have a notation at the beginning to either "swing" the piece or the double eighth notes equal quarter & eighth with a slur and 3 above it.

Well, out of the 41 pieces in my Get Set Jazz books, 20 have a swing feel to them, and there are precisely four that are scored in compound time - two use a similar LH pattern that I think of as "cowboy blues" - [C GA G] as [1/4, 1/8, 1/4, 1/8], and the other two have a high incidence of complete triplet figures throughout.

This whole issue was certainly something which I put considerable thought to, when I put the books together. I also consulted other teachers, to find out their preferences, and also to try to address any shortcomings they perceived in this regard in other popular "jazz/blues pieces for classical students" books, such as Norton's "Microjazz" series, and Wedgwood's "Jazzin' About". Consistently, I was hearing requests for clarity - so I tried to ensure that there was no ambiguity, by specifically stating not only when to swing, but also when not to swing.

See, it's all very well for 'proper' jazz players to talk about how swing can't be notated, which may well be the case, but let's face it - most of us here are teaching predominantly classical music, and the kind of books we use for jazz repertoire are, very often, something akin to Microjazz, Jazzin' About, or whatever. I think of this as a kind of "jazz tourism", and the more help I can give to the student by way of layout, the better, and many transcriptions of jazz standards are hardly ideal either.

For instance, in at least one of my pieces, a fast boogie-woogie number scored in straight quavers, I used the repositioning tool to shift some if the LH notes to better align with the notes in a RH triplet figure. This was at the request of more than one of my teacher friends, who find some traditional boogie scores particularly awkward to read when they don't follow this paradigm.

Another point that Exalted Wombat raised was that many jazz/swing pieces use a combination of straight and dotted eighths. Now, in nearly every case where I have encountered this, it seems to be that the straight notation is employed only for the final beat of a syncopated phrase. I have yet to find any treatise on swing that suggests you should play the final pair of quavers as straight, and, to me at least, it never feels natural to do so when the rest of the phrase is swung. Thus, I can only assume that it is done for aesthetic, rather than interpretational purposes.

My personal preference, for beginners, for jazz tourists, is for the music to be written straight with the instruction to swing. The dotted, the compound time, the triplets, I have found all these to confuse. Here's the explanation I give.

A crotchet gets one beat, if there are quavers, each gets half a beat. Like we have a pizza and we share it equally, we cut it down the middle, I get a half, you get a half. That's classical music.

Jazz is different. I walk into the kitchen, there's a pizza there for us to share. But I'm hungry so I eat more than my fair share. I eat about this much. And you only get that much. So when you swing, the first quaver gets a bit more than the second quaver.

Then I demonstrate both strategies.

It helps initially if the phrases start on the beats.

So far, everyone's got it.

There aren't really any limitations in the software these days. William Gillock's "New Orleans Jazz Styles" often use dotted 8th-16th notation to show swing. A new piece of mind for FJH's "In Recital" series just came out and shows the swing rhythm in 6/8.

Ben's four choices are pretty much all that there are - I can't think of any other way to notate swing, and those four ways do the job just fine.

And swing is like anything else - the experience comes before the notation, not from it.

The "Doo-bie doo-bie doo-bie doo-WAH thing I think we're both talking about is often written with the last pair as straight 8s, the first with a tenuto, the second with an accent or staccato dot. As with so many notations, it's a convention rather than something to be mathematically analysed.

We surely owe it to our students to have at least a passing knowledge of this notation, alongside Notes Inégales, double-dots in a French Overture, and all the rest.

Current notation software can cope with everything that's been suggested so far! It can also make a pretty fair job of PLAYING straight 8s with a "Swing" marking, which is as good a reason as any for writing it that way.
I do find an explicit (but, by definition, inaccurate) metric modulation instruction rather ridiculous when one could just write "Swing" or "Swing 8s". Has anyone REALLY been asleep for most of the last 100 years? :-)

John, I see I am VERY late to this discussion.

To me swing is a style, a feel, just like playing a waltz, playing any dance form from the Baroque, and students who seem to have a "feel" for it not only also seem to have an especially good rhythm sense - from the get-go- but they are also often exposed to such music at home.

Most of my students have NO feel for swing, at first, so I start on it as a basic concept within the first six months. It happens all over the place. Most people are familiar with the variation in the last movement of the Beethoven Op. 111 that sounds so much like swing in parts, you swear Beethoven must have been channeling a couple centuries ahead. Then there are the even 8ths that are played unevenly in Romantic music, and you can hear that in Rachmaninov's playing of his own piano concertos.

What is unique to me about swing music is the off-beat accents, and I can't think of that happening anywhere in music until the 20th century. Going way back, "In the Mood" is one of the best example I can think of for 1 uh2 uh uh uh uh uh3 uh4 uh1 uh2 uh 3 uh... etc. And if you attempt to play that simple melody on the piano, without at least a metronome, you can hear how those off-beats start to sound as if they are on the beat, or could be if they went on long enough.

That starts to make the importance of a beat, percussion of some kind, really obvious. It shows why pianists who are soloing (no bass, no drums) find ways to punch enough chords on the beat to make clear what is off-beat.

To me the notes first vs rhythm first is chicken/egg thinking. My students miss the notes, at first, and they miss the counting/rhythm, at first. I have to really exaggerate it, which I both teach and demonstrate, starting with:

uh 1.......................................
uh 2.......................................
uh 3.......................................
uh 4.......................................

And it really sounds rather dreadful, but what doesn't, when it is the very first baby step?

The moment I think they have the idea of exaggerating the length of the "long" 8ths, I reverse the process. Meanwhile, I demonstrate it as it should be, to prove that it is all going to work.

Since I write my own music, I START with dotted 8th followed by 16th, but I also give an overview, that this basic rhythm may use a shorter 16th, in Baroque music, in some instances, but means triplets in OTHER instances, and the concept of long short, APPROXIMATE and sometimes EXAGGERATED in notation is a feel and can never be completely accurately notated.

So what I'm doing is presenting simple, short swing ideas, and I add the swing to it ASAP. I don't care if there is a delay, because once the concept is learned and absorbed, later I can switch to the 2 eighths = quarter eight triplet direction, or simply say "don't play this straight, make it swing".

It's just as simple or just as hard as saying:

Play this with a very steady rhythm. No rubato. Then play THIS with rubato. I mean, what the **** is rubato? It's a "feel", absorbed over a long time, the ability to stretch time incredibly while the listener still senses a beat. Do we think, "Oh no, I can't teach anything without rubato? Everything must be learned WITH rubato, from day one?"

Or course not. But once a good sense of rubato is learned, no good player is going to play something that needs it without it, and playing something that should swing "straight" is like playing a Chopin Nocturne with the rhythm of a fast Bach prelude.

My point: it's not about music without rhythm, or rhythm without music. It's about starting the whole concept/feel EARLY!

Ben & Kreisler - I think we're talking completely different topics here. You make interesting points.

I just came across a swing piece which includes a composer's note that dotted eighth sixteenth is to be played as triplet quarter eighth, and plain eighth notes are to be played straight. Most of the plain eighth notes appear as part of a syncopated figure, either eighth followed by eighth tied to quarter, or (IIRC) eighth quarter eighth.

Thanks, Gary, for that extensive insight. I doesn't help so much with the immediate problem, but lets me know that next year, I'm going to have to start students way earlier if I'm really going to get them into the feel of the music.

First time I played (in an ensemble) a Viennese waltz for a European conductor he stopped me and corrected my timing.

Excuse me? I do a lot of things wrong, but counting is NOT one of them. I was almost offended. <g>

But beat 2 in a Viennese waltz is played early. It is never notated that way, just understood.

John, about "the immediate problem":

Now matter how comfortable it is for me to say, "DabaduBAH", which is close to the way I feel such rhythms and, if FORCED, tend to express it verbally, for my students it has to be:

UH....one, UH....two, uh....(three), where there are 4 8th notes, paired, with the last tied over to the next beat.

And in the beginning, I have to make them say:

UH....one, UH....two, UH....three, UH....four

The problems I run into:

1) With correct syllables, they still play the notes evenly.
2) After setting up the wrong feel in the first measure (or wherever they start), they want to continue that feel for the whole piece.
3) They don't trust that by exaggerating, deliberately distoring the long notes so that they are REALLY long, later it will work.
4) When they stop, they stop on the "uh".

Solutions:

1) Drop the voice, so that "UH" is higher pitch, then glide into the number.
2) Make the numbers long, really long:
UH onnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnneeeeeeee
3) Breathe after each number.
4) Think of each "beat" as a soft sneeze: AH chooooooooooooo [breathe], AH chooooooooooo
5) Insist on out-loud counting (as opposed to "Can I just think it?"). Of course, if the student is not counting but its perfect, there is no need!
6) Ask for just ONE measure, or ONE phrase counted. Stay on it for a week or two until it is absolutely mastered, add a second phrase (or two), then give the student freedom to try to apply it to a whole page, a very large section or the whole thing.

My experience: once the "feel" is mastered, it transfers. It may take a half dozen swing pieces, but when the "groove" is absorbed, it's there. At that point you can take anything yourself and demonstrate it "straight" and "swinging", to really emphasize the huge difference.

Also, once a student has the feel, the notation does not matter too much. Even 8ths, triplets (quarter plus 8th), dotted 8th and 16th, they all fall into the groove. If you do a lot of swing, you may have an opposite problem, trying to get dotted 8ths followed by16ths to stop sounding like triplets.

I hate asking a specific question and getting general answers. Are any of these ideas possibly of use to you?

Gary, my immediate problem now is lack of time with students between now and Festival date. However, parents are generally thrilled if they play the correct notes most of the time, so rhythm issues are secondary - to them, where as we teachers are generally concerned about a thousand and one details. Actually, when I posed the question, I was thinking into the future, not solving the immediate issue, but this may help anyway.

I think I follow you completely. But this is one of the major problems of these forums. If we were standing face to face, we'd be on another topic already! Just to be safe, I'm going to print out your replies and sit down at the piano and make sure I fully grasp/apply what you're saying.

In my teaching, I tend to over-count and not use enough syllabary, if that's such a word. Thanks for the suggestions, they should help both students and myself.

John,

We are on the same page, I think. I was making suggestions for ways to cover this in the future based on MY struggles with teaching it. It's just another one of a zillion things that I don't ever think about, for myself, but have to break down into "bite-sized chunks" for students, especially the slower ones.

Good luck!

Agree with everything you've said here, Peter.

In addition to a broadly similar approach to what Gary D. describes, my current strategy for teaching swing feel involves heart, soul and lots of bananas!

Well, there is also "jazz hands".

One of my students, about eight, was just not getting it, which is typical. I kept emphasizing the long numbers or syllables and exaggerated breathing between two note groups. I even said things like:

Oh no................, Oh no..................,

OR

A gain................, A gain.................,

Finally, he says, "I get it!" He said, uh one, and when he got to the "one", he shook his hands, and he kept doing that on all the numbers.

My immediate reaction was, "What the ****?"

But then he immediately started playing it right. That "solution" may never work for another student, but it is interesting how different people work out the concept!

As a listener, I heard swing, but never really differentiated it from straight, square notation.

As a student, I learned the correct notation and notes first, then learned how to swing the tune. As I gained a better understanding of the groove, my instructor moved from beside the piano bench to the other side of the studio and played drums with my piano playing. This allowed me a better understanding of the swing groove, as well as interaction with a live player.

Hop

If swing is appropriate, it cannot be "correct" to play either straight 8s or accurate dotted-and-16ths.