Foreword: This post is going to be shorter/simpler than the quality I’m aspiring towards down the line. Reason being: I want to get consistent with posting every Wednesday at Noon, but I’m still building a system which will help me deliver these posts. In the time being, I’d rather post less than nothing at all. Please bear with me in the meantime! Thank you 🙂
Staying in groove is deceptively hard. But I think I get it. It’s about completely letting go of your part and submitting to Music and Time. Not playing to impress, but communicating as in a stream of consciousness.
My sense of time is starting to change where now I can listen to Thank You Scientist, Dream Theater, and my own playing, and hear how much time is pushed forward. Alongside this, focusing on playing the single part over and over has really made me lean into groove rather than focus on any kind of virtuosity.
It makes more and more sense why the Bembé bell was given to the beginners. I think it’s because it’s the role where you don’t necessarily have to have the ear to know where you fit a place, but it’s also a place that cultivates a deep respect for Time, Music, and Life. It’s about getting to a point of playing that’s completely autonomous. You don’t even have to think about it. You get so in groove that time doesn’t change with your emotions or anything else. You fall in line to the cycle and never lose the groove. Other people can then completely rely on you because they also fall into the groove, and it’s like being in the middle of this meditative trance where everyone is locked in without a thought.
Another thing I’ve realized while playing the bell rhythm is the flexibility of time. When you’re constrained to, and have grown up with, metronomic time it’s easy to get caught up in the idea of a quarter note pulse being exactly where it is and lining up with that, but I think in cyclical time there’s a continuum between the quarter and triplet notes, between 6/8 and 4/4, where the only consistent thing is the beginning/ending of the cycle. Everything else lies in between repetitions of the cycle.
And who dictates the motion of this cycle? The bell pattern!