Reflections on Rhythm

Musicians spend a lot of time working on rhythm. Jazz musicians especially - we call it ‘time’. Almost as if time is not something we experience but something that we do. It’s as if time is not a thing that happens TO US, but a way in which WE happen TO THINGS. When jazz musicians say we play ‘with good time’ or that we ‘have good time’, we mean that we have a strong sense of rhythm, a secure control of the specific timing of the sounds that we make.

What does it mean to have ‘good time’, a strong sense of rhythm? A person who does not have a strong sense of rhythm will play notes on their instrument that come out haphazardly and out of control timing-wise. But how can we tell that their timing is out of control? Most people have a sense of it whether they are musicians or not. For example, if you listen to a beginner at the drums who hasn’t quite figured it out yet - in which case you are listening almost entirely to rhythm - something about it might feel wrong. When new drummers are still learning, their playing often won’t meet our expectations of what the timing of that sound is supposed to be like. And there’s something about expectation that I think is at the heart of rhythm.

Expectation feels like a negative word nowadays. We hate having expectations laid upon our shoulders when we didn’t ask for them, and most of the time we did not ask for them. I think that’s a symptom of an exploitative society. We are built to respond to expectation in some way, otherwise we wouldn’t ever be bothered by hearing that word. The exploitative part is, since we are built that way, the external systems around us are designed to push that mechanism to its maximum capacity, overloading us with expectations that we have to respond to, which puts all of our other internal systems out of balance, and makes the idea of additional expectations sound absolutely awful. But when they are in balance, expectations are not a bad thing.

We like people to be reliable. It’s a good thing if we can say our friends, our families, our coworkers have the quality of being reliable. And what does it mean for someone to be reliable, for someone to be a person we can rely on? It means that, to a reasonable extent within a relationship between two humans, they are someone from whom we can EXPECT support, responsiveness, or contact in some way. A reliable person is someone who is responsive to expectations. Does that mean they just do whatever we want whenever we want them to? Not at all. A reliable person is (ideally) not someone whose behaviour we control, but instead they are someone who we can generally EXPECT to control their own behaviour in reciprocity to ours, to a reasonable extent. Expectation is one of the essential mechanisms that allow us to experience relationships with anything at all.

Coming back to rhythm, a good sense of time is therefore a responsiveness to musical expectation. And musical expectation is in fact, physical expectation, because sound is a physical phenomenon. In order to create a sound that meets rhythmic expectations, a musician must physically move their body and their instrument in a specific way. Music that has rhythm can generally be broken down into individual beats, and within one performance of a song of only a few minutes, a person will play hundreds or thousands of beats. Singing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” in four-beat time requires responding to about 192 beats - that’s 192 internal signals of musical expectation with regards to timing. Not all children sing such songs perfectly every time, but if you do hear that happening, then that child has learned to respond to rhythmic expectations 192 times in a row. That’s not counting the micro-expectations of physically moving their face to pronounce the lyrics.

So coming back to the question, what does it mean to have ‘good time’? It means to be a musically, and therefore physically, reliable person. And a person who can be relied on to respond physically, is a person who can be relied on socially, or at least a person who has developed the physical capacity to respond socially. Because social behaviour does require physical activity to enact. If you can’t create verbal signals in some way, you can’t have a conversation.

Zooming in a little bit - when a person is learning to develop their sense of rhythm, they are first learning to become reliable to THEMSELVES. They are learning, when I play this song, or when I play this note, I expect the sound to come out at this specific time. In order for that to happen, I must conduct myself in a way that allows me to meet my own rhythmic expectations. I must conduct MYSELF in a way that I can RELY on.

And when people play music together, a significant portion of the issues that must be navigated are rhythmic. A group of people who each have a strong sense of rhythm will generally fare much better than a group who do not. Within the act of playing music, they are able to RELY ON EACH OTHER over hundreds, thousands, potentially millions of points of coordination.

One of my current themes on social media is: ‘Good Music Is The Sound Of People Doing Good Things For Each Other’ – when I hear someone who plays with ‘good time’, I hear a person who doing something good for people by being musically, physically, and (at least possessing the prerequisite skills to be) socially reliable. I hear a person who values putting effort into responding to (reasonable) expectations, and is therefore open to and capable of sustaining interaction, relationships, and collaboration with other humans. In this way, a person who is equipped with ‘good time’ is also a person who is equipped to make a contribution to their community. We really need and would benefit from everybody being that kind of person – along with the counterbalance of protecting their responsiveness from being exploited, of course.

In our capacity as listeners, this idea can help us to connect and relate to the musicians we are listening to. We can focus on how secure we feel in their reliability, their efforts in looking out for our musical expectations - our rhythmic needs! We can appreciate and be more widely and deeply aware of the access we can have to rhythmic and emotional support and responsiveness by pursuing musical experiences.

In our capacity as musicians, let this motivate and inspire our drive to continue studying and developing our sense of rhythm. Our sense of time is a declaration to the world of how much the people around us are supported by our responsiveness and our reliability on a physical and social level, and there is always more to learn about how we can make our world and our communities feel safer, more loved, more supported, more inspired, and even more productive when that is what we truly want.

I still have hope for a better world tomorrow because I still see people getting better at music all the time. And that is one of the most precious lessons that Music Teaches Me.