Eddie Floyd's Knock on Wood - an un-replicable classic

There is no better Soul-R&B recording that Eddie Floyd singing Knock on Wood - it has been covered many times, but all cover versions are hoplessly inferior - why?

The reason is quite simple: the rhythm section - bass and rhythm guitars and drums (the keyboards can only be heard in the 'middle eight' from 1:46).

Eddie Floyd's singing is great, the brass section is great, the main introducing riff is one of the best ever and supplemented by a superb second riff in the verses... But it is the rhythm playing which cannot be replicated, and that is due to its syncopation.

Syncopation is the hardest thing to do well (as a broad generalisation!) - and the Stax-label house-band (aka Booker T and the MGs) that played with Eddie Floyd was a group of first rate musicians that played together A Lot.

Also they were mostly black (an exception was the genius rhythm guitarist Steve Cropper, who co-wrote and played on Knock on Wood); and most of the best players of syncopation-based music are 'American' blacks (who invented it, with ragtime - and several other forms including ska/ reggae).

This probably means that this music has become essentially un-replicable in modern times - since 'rap' displaced singing among blacks, synthesiser replaced real-instruments, and house-bands are a thing of the past...

Still, we have the recordings: what I said about Knock on Wood also applies in essence to Hold on I'm Coming, by Sam and Dave - although the vocals in KoW are another major reason why it is de facto un-replicable.

Three 1969 Reggae Classics

*
I liked this music very much as a kid! I still find the beat almost irresistible.

The basis of the reggae beat is a 4/4 rhythm.

1. Rhythm guitar (or something) chopping chords on the off-beats - 2 and 4.

2. Snare drum hard on the third beat of the bar.

3. Bass guitar syncopated across the bars.

These early reggae (or rocksteady) groups had a simply wonderful loose-limbed quality to the way they played.

Perhaps my favourite - The Liquidator; featuring the ultra-attacking sound of a Hammond organ. I love syncopation - and the Hammond solo work is like a demonstration answer to the question 'what is syncopation?' :

Long Shot (kick de bucket) always sounded very amusing - I only now realize it is about a horse dying during a race (lyrics provided):

And this - having forgotten the title I have been looking for it on you tube for many years - only found it this evening, and listened for the first time in... 35 years? Called The Return of Django

*

What is swing music? A personal view

Swing is a particular rhythm which is very simple - yet not really.

The rhythm is this:

The Quintet of the Hot Club of Paris - Sweet Georgia Brown

So it's not really very difficult to understand, to play, to appreciate swing. 

But the fact is it wasn't used until the twentieth century - wasn't popular until less than 100 years ago. Which I find interesting - swing seems to be one of the those inventions that is so simple and obvious that it needs a genius to discover. But once it was discovered, that rhythm tore through mass popular music and was dominant for a couple of decades.

One place I see it is in the transition from the solid foursquare left hand rhythm of ragtime piano to the swinging left hand part on stride piano: here is Fats Waller:

Still a lot of syncopation (and now improvisation) in the right hand but this new rhythm. Indeed, my own definition of swing proper is that it is an evolution of ragtime that retains the use of syncopation (triplets) in the treble part, but uses this differently-stressed version of 4/4 rhythm in the bass part.

Indeed, listening to Waller, I thing swing should perhaps have been called 'spring' - because there is a sense of springing-off from the first beat of the bar: 

Anyway, swing sounds simple - it is simple - but it is almost impossible to write down using using musical notation. Which I presume is why it took so long to discover. 

You just have to hear it, then do it.

But this means that it was also fiendishly difficult to program into a synthesised drum machine. I had a drum machine, back in the early 1980s, and it could do almost anything - but not swing. 

Swing rhythm only really began to work in electronic music when sampled, instead of synthesised, sounds became usual.

The rhythm is still reasonably popular - and has its own genre Electro-Swing. 

And here is Caravan Palace - a French band consciously revisiting The Hot Club of Paris Quintet sound:

Gladiolus Rag by Scott Joplin (performed by Joshua Rifkin)

It is difficult to choose; but Gladiolus Rag may be my favourite of all Scott Joplin's pieces - and this performance by Rifkin is just wonderful.

If you really want to appreciate Joplin, and his unique mood combinations of wistfulness with joy, you need to listen with attention. 

Gladiolus follows the usual structure of Joplin's rags; which is that there are four themes - each of them repeated. The first theme also returns once (without a repeat) after the second theme and repeat. So we get: AABBACCDD. 

Joplin's best work always has an integrated and overarching mood structure. In this case, Gladiolus has a generally sweet, quiet, lyrical mood; and the bass line tends to wander unusually, compared with the typically solid bass-chord alternations of most ragtime. 

(The usual syncopation of ragtime is between a marching 4/4 in the bass throughout, against the 'ragged' syncopated triplets in the treble - like Maple Leaf Rag, or The Entertainer. But here the solid and typical ragtime marching feel is held-back until the end.) 

The emotional climax of Gladiolus comes in the third theme, which becomes complex in terms of harmony and syncopations, building up-and-up over an (it seems) endlessly descending bass... 

And then the piece ends with a simple forthright theme, as simple in essence as Maple Leaf Rag - yet, in its context, and with its subtly lyrical colourations of the harmony; there is a kind of bursting happiness that is, somehow, also aware of its own fragility. 

Such is the genius of Joplin.

Close-harmony jazz - Boswell Sisters

Today's discovery - although they are apparently well-known: wonderful stuff:

Great singing, great musicality, great arrangement - humour and syncopation!

And it's real jazz.

Here is some more virtuosity:

And some swing...

Northumbrian slip jigs

Need to go to 37:58 on the first video:

Notes: Wallington is (lovely) place in Northumberland, 'Fairly shot of' means 'well rid of'

Slip jig is the term for jigs with a 9/8 time signature (diddly diddly diddly) instead of the more usual 6/8 jig (diddly diddly). Northumberland has developed its own variant of these tunes, based on the distinctive characteristics of the Northumbrian Pipes - tunes with an emphasis on arpeggios (broken chords), and a tendency to staccato articulation.

Also distinctive is that these slip jigs 'end' on the dominant chord; which means they don't really end but either stop abruptly, need an additional tonic chord, or else they seem to want to go on and on, round and round, forever.

These (especially Drops of Brandy) are the favourite tunes to play at the end of the 'ceilidhs' (barn dances) which are popular here, since they accompany the traditional final dance of the evening - 'Strip the Willow'. Which may be so vigorous that (when over-excited or unskilled men are involved) it can be dangerous; my daughter was at such a dance when two of the girls were taken to hospital afterwards having suffered significant injuries from being swung too hard, fast and often.

The dance has a hop-step movement, which means that it syncopates across the bar lines for a 9/8; each 'diddly' being either a hop or a step, making two diddlys per bar which has three diddlys - and therefore the order of hopping and stepping within the bar is different for each adjacent bar.

That's how it 'works' musically; but, anyway, in practice such syncopation probably accounts for some of the almost magical, elated feeling when dancing Strip the Willow to slip jigs.

Steeleye Span - The Weaver and the Factory Maid

From Steeleye Span - electric folk music of the early 1970s at its wonderful best.

The first part is a composite Luddite social history/ protest ballad about the impact of factories on the lives of handloom weavers, and of love among the weavers - and remarkable for its fiddle 'obbligato' and top-notch singing (and word-pointing), also an astonishing and irregular time signature and syncopation using electric guitars, bass and dulcimer.

(There was a vogue for unconventional time signatures in early 70s rock - the most famous is perhaps the 5/4 rhythm used in Jethro Tull's Living in the Past.)

The second part (starting at 4:25) is a lament for the old days, done by Maddy Prior as a multi-track unaccompanied harmonization - And if you can concentrate and listen to this in stereo, without your eyes welling and neck hairs prickling... well, you must have a heart of stone or a tin ear, or both!

Concerto for Double String Orchestra by Michael Tippett

As I've said before, there are only four of Tippett's works that I really like, all from his brief, early and 'lyrical' period - but these I like a lot! The others are A Child of our Time, the Corelli Fantasia and The Midsummer Marriage - and the Double String concerto (1938-9) is the first of this quartet that he composed. 

It is quite readily enjoyable even on the first hearing - especially the sumptuous slow movement; being in the English tradition of pastoral music that links back to Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Butterworth and the like. 

But it is immediately obvious that Tippett's music is distinctive in being highly contrapuntal; with a tremendous busyness of entwining independent lines in all the voices. There is also a lot of syncopation - which is something I particularly appreciate. The impression is one of great fertility of both imagination and sheer energy. 

Once begun, the movements seldom 'settle' until they have finished - even the soaring and unwinding long melody of the slow movement is underpinned by counter-melodic activity in the lower voices, which keeps the harmonies 'off balance' until the final resolution. 

I first heard this more than forty years ago as the flip-side of Vaughan Williams's Tallis fantasy; but I have been listening to it more frequently than ever before over the past several weeks, and just finding it more and more to my liking. 

For me the concerto starts well, then keeps getting better and better - until the very end. The final movement combines the contrapuntal energy of the first with the lyrical melodiousness of the second in a completely satisfying way.   

Saturday music: Some Irish reels on flute, by Kevin Crawford

I have a particular fondness for Irish reels* and jigs played on the flute; and this is an exceptionally good example of the genre - played by Kevin Crawford and backed by Bodhran (drum) and Guitar: the tunes are Dillon's Fancy, Maids in the Meadow & Toss the Feathers. 

I find Crawford's playing here to be irresistible; almost miraculous in its rapidity and accuracy, the decorations and emphasis - and the way that the necessary breathing is integrated into the rhythm - usually as off-beats which add a kind of syncopation. 

The flute tone is also rich and pleasing - especially the low notes.  

*A reel is a fast folk tune, in 4/4 time with lots of quavers, originally for dancing - but nowadays more often for listening (hence played even faster than when for dancing).