On Two Regimes of Rhythm

Today I found words for something that's probably been bothering me in my playing for forty years -- a tension between two fundamental forces or organizational principles that I've been aware of but found difficult to see: the flexibility of time in jazz and the seemingly similar flexibility in classical music. I don't want to labour the point or be self-indulgent here so I'll try to get right to the point.

Jazz allows for a great deal of rhythmic fluidity but it is what I want to call groove music. What I mean is that, at least until the late 1960s, you could tap your foot to it pretty much no matter how wild it got. As an arbitrary example, here's a track from A Love Supreme by the John Coltrane quartet:

Listen to McCoy Tyner's piano solo in particular. He takes extreme liberties with the rhythm, stretching and compressing it to create waves of tension and release. But all the way through, the pulse is rock solid. In all groove-based musics, there's a rhythmic grid whose roots are in the dance, within which the musicians have more or less freedom. Even if nobody is performing the grid as such, it's there and you can still tap your foot to it. Here's Thelonious Monk, again playing fast and loose with the rhythm but keeping a groove so tight you could set your watch by it:

I've been influenced by jazz, and more broadly by Black American music (soul, funk, R&B, hip hop). Perhaps the origins of all these musics are close enough to dance that the groove is there and the rhythmic flexibility flows around and through it. I will say, though, that Indian classical music seems to me to have a similar structure even though as far as I know it's not used for dancing; so maybe that connection is bogus. Here's an example -- the tabla spends most of its time spelling out a very clear grid within which the soloists are able to operate somewhat freely:

It's easy to understand jazz musicians who heard music like this in the middle of the twentieth century and immediately felt a connection with it: although their approaches to rhythm are extremely different, the same idea of "groove" is there -- the unmoving grid that makes a particular kind of rhythmic fluidity possible.

Contrast this with Western classical music. In the notation a regular pulse is almost always implied but the standard performance practice is very different. Here the grid itself flexes, stretching and squeezing as the music unfolds. It's much harder to tap your foot to Scriabin even when the whole thing is ostensibly in 4:

The reason is not "rhythmic complexity" -- all the music in this post has that in abundance. It's much deeper than that.

These are two completely opposed regimes of rhythm. It seems to me almost logically impossible to play both at once; you're forced to choose. I think I discovered I wasn't a jazz musician when I sensed, at some unconscious level, that I'd always end up siding with the classical regime. It's just where my gut takes me.

Although my musical output is, and always has been, strongly classically-influenced, I've been spending a lot of time getting back into guitar lately. There my roots are a bit different and I feel the tension between the two regimes far more strongly. In fact I don't think I'd have discovered this about my musical identity at all without the guitar, which has always been able to shine a bright light on things that would have been obscure to me otherwise.

I don't know what I'll do with this information exactly, except to understand where my loyalties lie. I'll keep playing and listening and see where it takes me. I appreciate this post didn't have a lot of actionable stuff about chords or scales or tunings or whatnot but maybe one day it'll speak to someone else in a similar position and they'll take less than forty years to figure it out...

[I'm aware this post makes some very broad claims that aren't universally true; it's intended to be a broad-brush, you-get-the-general-idea kind of post rather than a final statement on anything. For example, I know Indian dance traditions exist, I just don't know much about them.]