Canadian Musician - September/October 2020 | Page 27

BASS
Alex Fournier is a double bassist from Toronto. He has studied with Dave Young, Andrew Downing, Jim Vivian, and, most recently, Michael Formanek.
He’s available for lessons and remote sessions: www.alexfournierplaysbass.com.
By Alex Fournier
Internalization Via
Externalization
I’m
going to go out on a
limb and say everyone
reading this column
has had this experience:
You’re jamming and you have a great idea to
contribute, already fully realized in your mind’s
ear. You play it just to fall off somewhere in
the middle for reasons unbeknownst to you,
and you have to return to your original stream,
left to ponder what happened. You knew the
notes you were going to play, you knew the
rhythm, and yet something subtle put you off.
From my own experience I would suggest
that an aspect of the rhythm was off, likely
the placement of the beat within the metre.
Metric division of time is common to
many genres of music around the world, and
Western music is no exception. Our language
features a synchronous approach to ensemble
playing, where the relative placement of
rhythms goes to support the harmonic structure
and propulsion of the music. Hence why
developing a firm internal understanding of
the interaction between metre, rhythm, and
placement is critical to clarity of harmonic and
melodic expression.
We’re often advised by our mentors to utilize
a metronome if we’re going to work on
our time and placement. This is a great tool
of course, as having an objective time keeper
to play against is critical for developing an understanding
of the beat. There’s even a ton of
creative ways one can use the metronome to
further challenge oneself by changing how
the beat is indicated or perceived.
I have noticed over time though that even
with these creative uses of the metronome,
all roads lead to the uploading of responsibility
for the beat to the musician. After all, the
metronome remains an external tool. If you’re
looking to get the most out of your rhythmic/
vocabulary studies, I would like to suggest an
exercise that directly examines the efficacy
of one’s own internal clock. While it sounds
simple on paper, in practice, it can be much
more challenging to perform.
A Fresh Exercise
This exercise revolves around projecting your
internal clock outside of yourself and playing
against that, ensuring that the notes you
play cede authority to your internal clock at
all times. Simply put, all you have to do is vocalize
a click-track or some other stand-in for
your metronome and play against that without
bending the beat to fit what you are playing.
Chances are you’ve done this at some point
by counting a time signature out loud while
playing a tricky passage. Doing this can become
pedantic if you’re applying it to a whole
piece/tune/improvisation, though, since the
metre itself remains in abstraction; instead, I
recommend two approaches that would relate
the timekeeping to our own experiences and
expectations. We’re going further out there to
get more at the core of things.
One suggestion would be for you to sing
your own click track, or (if you’re feeling brave)
a cymbal/percussion pattern to play against.
This has the benefit of not only replicating a
real-world situation that you will often find
yourself in, but also of revealing your own expectations
for the role of the drummer/timekeeper.
Plus, it adds an element of creativity
to your practice.
The other approach I would suggest would
be to use language as a stand-in for a click.
When I was shown this exercise by pianist Jacob
Sacks, he used the word “li-ttle” as a representation
of binary metres (2/4, 4/4, etc.) This
works as well because language has its own
rhythm and cadence that will be personalized
to your own body. You can use any words you
like, so long as they have shorter, percussive
syllables, as longer syllables tend to be a stumbling
block.
The next element of this exercise comes
from the escalation of what is applied to it. As
someone who plays a lot of improvised music,
I started by making sure I could alternate a
dry two feel and a walking line without any
wobble between the rhythmic values. Eventually,
I brought in skip beats and ornaments to
bring things to a more natural feel. Once that
was comfortable, I brought in Charleston figures
and all their relevant displacements, then
I began filling them in with 1/8 th notes. Next
was beat figures (3s, 5s, 7s), then basic tuplets
and polyrhythms, etc. But we don’t have to
stop just at technical vocabulary though. We
can use this exercise to practice “rushing” and
“dragging” against our internal clock to better
understand our own tendencies and preferential
placements of the beat. Whatever you
can imagine, you can apply to this exercise.
When we talk to another person, we’re not expected
to do so in such specifically discrete
packets of time – never mind having to do so
with such specific rhythms. We’re free to bend
and flow with language to change our meaning
and emphasis and, so as long as we keep a
relative pace and familiar accents, we are well
understood. Music adds a degree of synchronicity
to this communication. Since we are all
speaking at once, we need to have a common
ground to speak with. To me, this exercise is the
equivalent of learning public speaking skills
– removing the superlatives, hesitations, and
passive language in our speech to make our
ideas more to the point. Even a dead-simple
idea stated with command will make a deep
impression on the listener.
Ð CANADIAN MUSICIAN 27