Jazz may be all about the elasticity of time, about syncopation and the louche indolence of swing, but, to paraphrase George Gershwin, it don\u2019t mean a thing if it ain\u2019t got a regular pulse. (I can see why Ira changed the lyrics\u2026)<\/p>\n
You can\u2019t pull against something if it\u2019s not firmly fixed: in jazz, that\u2019s the hi-hat. The crisp snap of the hi-hat on the second and fourth beat of a swing tune in 4\/4 represents the twin pillars of the piece\u2019s rhythm, around which swing can loll and flounce, secure in the knowledge that it is underpinned by a rock-solid rhythmic foundation. Music is often about the suspension of time, or what the American composer Elliot Carter has called the debate between \u2018chronometric time versus psychological time,\u2019 the regular pulse of the daily passage of life pitted against a time-scale imposed by the piece of music itself. Time, in jazz, slips and slides like a novice ice-skater, but one clinging firmly to the hoarding lining the rink: the security of the drum-kit.<\/p>\n
Listen to the opening of Milestones<\/em>, where the crisp homophony of the\u00a0sideways triadic motion in the saxes and trumpet only works because the percussion defines exactly where the beats against which they are pulling lie: the driving ride cymbal and crisp rim-shot\u00a0anchoring the beats.<\/p>\n