An interesting and informative treatise LL. Is most of it you, or is some of it brought forward from research sources?
I'd be particularly interested in your source for this:
Quote:
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What characterizes jazz musically is swing. So we need to define swing. Now we run into an incongruity concerning American history that can be summed in the question, “When did it really start?” We have no clear genesis mapped out for the term “swing” nor its meaning. Per its name, it must have started off as a physical component of music such as the sway of the body to a rhythm. This swaying was caused by a certain timing issue in the music called swing-feel which was linked inherently to syncopated rhythm. Syncopation is a way of emphasizing the unaccented beat. In standard march meter or in classical music, a 1-2 beat was simply counted ONE-two-ONE-two-ONE-two. To syncopate this, we would keep the accent on 1 but emphasize two. One way to do this would be to subdivide 2 into four sub-beats and only play on the fourth sub-beat so it sounds thus: ONE…twoONE…twoONE…twoONE! Each period representing a sub-beat. Notice how 2 gets a certain emphasize that causes the even timing to become sort of ragged. And, yes, that is the origin of the term ragtime…ragged timing…syncopated timing. It causes the body to sway and hence imparts a feeling of swinging the body…swing-feel.
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