Re: [ARSCLIST] Rock and roll drumming

[Eric Goldberg <ericgoldie@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> Eric -
>
> Perhaps you or someone else could help elucidate a mysterious 
> passage from Bob Dylan's "Chronicles: Part 1" where he writes about 
> a revolutionary system taught to him by Lonnie Johnson, the great 
> blues and jazz guitarist.
>
> Dylan writes (p. 157) that his guitarmanship was electrified in the 
> 1980s when he learned how to play "based on an odd- instead of 
> even-number system" that he learned from jazzman Lonnie Johnson: a 
> "highly controlled system of playing and relates to the notes of a 
> scale, how they combine numerically, how they form melodies out of 
> triplets..."
>
> "Popular music is usually based on the number 2 [...] If you're 
> using an odd numerical system, things that strengthen a performance 
> begin to happen [...] In a diatonic scale there are eight notes, in 
> a pentatonic scale there are five. If you're using the first scale, 
> and you hit 2, 5 and 7 to the phrase and then repeat it, a melody 
> forms. Or you can use the 2 three times. Or you can use 4 once and 7 
> twice [...] The possibilities are endless [...] I'm not a 
> numerologist. I don't know why the number 3 is more metaphysically 
> powerful than the number 2, but it is. Passion and enthusiasm, which 
> sometimes can be enough to sway a crowd, aren't even necessary. You 
> can manufacture faith out of nothing and there are an infinite 
> number of patterns and lines that connect from key to key..."
>
> Is this a baffling to you as it seems to me?
>
> Russ Hamm

I have never thought of Bob Dylan as one of music's great theorists, 
and now I know why. His technical description is at least as 
confusing as some of his lyrics, which at least had the advantae of 
being obscure in a poetic way.

What I was describing in the drumming discussion was rhythmic, not 
melodic. q  e


Eric