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Posts: 14801
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
RE: Beginner - help with palmas + fe... (in reply to devilhand)
quote:
I think it should remain as it is. The 8th note rest after the 16th note gives tresillo more character.
Not much logic to putting a rest after the 2nd of 3 accents only. I would accept a 16th, two 16th rests, another 16th, an 8th rest, last 16th, and 16th note rest. So the pattern is percussive or staccato. But if you want for example a sustaining bass note doing the pattern, the tie I described is the proper way.
quote:
I'm not sure what you mean there.
That was your statement regarding when I said “3 tresillos are allowed”. What I mean is in all music I have encountered that uses this pattern at various tempos, there might occur a single or odd groupings of the pattern based on a melodic phrase. There is no hard rule about always using tresillos patterns in EVEN Groupings. 2,4,6,8 etc. examples are too numerous to mention. Listen to Gipsy kings.
quote:
As for the video, tresillo is played exactly in which part? At 4:33-4:38 McLaughlin plays normal 8th note triplets.
The entire damn song is tresillo man!!! Except for the two spots I pointed out. Holy smokes, really?
You can work with mastering tresillos with rhythm dog (also son clave once you’ve got the tresillo down.)
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
RE: Beginner - help with palmas + fe... (in reply to devilhand)
quote:
ORIGINAL: devilhand
I think these tiny details are barely recognizable to the listener even at the slower tempo. Even the player who can feel the difference, I doubt he/she can transform this difference into his/her playing. If it gets fast both will sound the same anyway.
Have you ever been to a rehearsal of a latin group?
Ever danced mambo or salsa?
Think these guys can't perceive a few milliseconds, or that their regular listeners or dancers could not?
RE: Beginner - help with palmas + fe... (in reply to Richard Jernigan)
quote:
Think these guys can't perceive a few milliseconds, or that their regular listeners or dancers could not?
These guys and dancers are professionals specialized in that type of music. Their regular listener's ear is qualified enough to perceive what's going on there. On the other hand, I bet many of the (casual) listeners don't even know what a triplet is.
Even professional musicians seem to have trouble distinguishing between a quarter note triplet and tresillo. For example, in a book about rhythm the autor wrote the main riff of this song has a good example of a quarter note triplet. I just looked at the sheetmusic. It's notated as tresillo there.
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RE: Beginner - help with palmas + fe... (in reply to mark indigo)
I like it down there. Nice breeze in the summer, lots of shade. The peaks and high plateaus are overrated (not that I've ever been to the plateaus ^^).
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RE: Beginner - help with palmas + fe... (in reply to Ricardo)
Could anyone else (please, not devilhand, enough already) clarify a few points for me as I am a total novice with Cuban music, other than what I play in flamenco, ie. flamenco guajíra and flamenco rumba. Although I have played flamenco for 25+ years, a lot of the rhythmic side of things I have picked up intuitively playing for dance and/or listening, and I don't always have names (or necessarily the "right" names) for things.
I have always understood the term "hemiola" as the alternating 2 long and 3 short beats in guajíra, siguiriya and other 12 beat palos often transcribed as alternating bars of 6/8 and 3/4. I had never heard it used as both together ie. 3-over-2 or 2-over-3, although I play lots of stuff that has that in too (i just didn't have that name for it). But that clave video posted upthread, is there any way that can be called hemiola?
The first half of the clave, with the 3+3+2 rhythm, that is what I think of as the base for the flamenco rumba I know, which is why i posted the video of Mario Escudero playing Rumba upthread, is that correct?
I understand a "triplet" as the EQUAL subdivision of ANY 2 beats into 3 - so could be 3 quarter notes in place of 2 quarter notes , or 3 eighth notes in place of 2 eighth notes etc. So, eighth note and quarter note triplets effectively sound the same relative to eighth note and quarter notes respectively, is that right?
RE: Beginner - help with palmas + fe... (in reply to mark indigo)
Mark I think you're correct on all counts.
The top google result defines a hemiola as "a musical figure in which, typically, two groups of three beats are replaced by three groups of two beats, giving the effect of a shift between triple and duple meter.". If you're familiar with the musical "West Side Story", the tune/line "I want to be in America" is a classic example of a hemiola.
As far as triples. I understand it as a group of three notes that are equal in length. Your explanation of two beats into three notes sounds accurate. TBH I never thought of it like that (I just "knew" that 8th note triples fit into one quarter note and quarter note triplets fit into two quarters) but the way you put it makes perfect sense.
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
RE: Beginner - help with palmas + fe... (in reply to devilhand)
quote:
ORIGINAL: devilhand
These guys and dancers are professionals specialized in that type of music. Their regular listener's ear is qualified enough to perceive what's going on there. On the other hand, I bet many of the (casual) listeners don't even know what a triplet is.
It occurred to me last night that a sizable part of my concept of "dancer" is obsolete. Today "amateur dancer" calls up images of people standing up, swaying a bit, maybe waving their hands around, or shuffling their feet more or less in time with a steady beat. There are no rules, no standard of skill. Some people are interesting, most are utterly inept, and display no self consciousness about it.
When I wrote "dancers" previously, I was thinking of the amateur dancers of mambo, meringue, cha-cha-cha etc. of the 1950s-1960s. Any night of the week at the Palladium in New York City there would be hundreds of people who had completely mastered a complex skill, demonstrating their virtuosity and competing with others.
These days there is a niche community of salsa dancers, today's heirs of the mamberos of the 1940s-60s. To dance these styles requires detailed knowledge of the clave. Dance teachers don't usually teach from music notation, since the clave tells the dancer not only when to step, but which foot and where.
The dance notation makes it perfectly clear that the clave is composed of subunits of equal duration--the 8ths or 16ths of musical notation--no quarter-note triplets.
To get a whiff of the amateur dancers of the 1940s-1960s this video history of the Palladium Ballroom devotes some time to them and to their importance in the scene.
Eddie Palmieri says, "Every crowd that came there were great dancers. It was one-on-one between the orchestra and the dancer. The only way you could hold a job at the Palladium when you played there was if you had the acknowledgement and the OK of the dancers."
Rene Lopez the producer says, "If you didn't play right, you had a problem. They'd let you know right away."
I only got to the Palladium a couple of times in the summer and fall of 1954. I was 16, but I was over 6 feet tall, had a fake Maryland driver's license and an illegal Musicians' Union card. Plus I went with some of the other players in Armando Collazo's band.
I went to Cuba for two weeks that winter with my uncle. I never could figure out why my mother held still for it. My uncle was a world class pigeon shooter. The shooter sets up at a line. The thrower takes a pigeon out of the cage, bends or pulls a feather so it will fly crazily and throws it. A good thrower can throw all day with no two birds flying the same way. The shooter waits until the bird crosses a semicircular distance line and takes his shot. Bets are placed. Good sized bets in my uncle's case. He won consistently. I shot against kids my age. I think some were impressed because I was with my uncle, because I wasn't that much better, if any, than the Cuban kids. We didn't bet very big. I came out maybe $75 ahead over six matches in a couple of weeks, which was fairly good money for a kid in 1954.
Perez Prado was there during his brief exile from Mexico. He blew the roof off the room all night long. The dancers were not all virtuosos like the Palladium crowd, but some were, and they all could move.
The rumberos at the beach fascinated me. They were reputed to support themselves by petty crime. They were fantastic drummers. I persuaded my uncle to let me go listen with the teen-age son of one of his pigeon shooting Cuban friends. Mongo Santamaria, Julito Collazo and many others got their start as street kids hanging out with the rumberos. We put a few dollars in the pot, got some serious stink eye. We put in more until the big guy by the pot nodded and smiled. Walking away, my companion said, "From a block away they spotted you as a Yanqui."
"How?"
"La camisa, los zapatos. What do you call those shoes, anyhow?"
"Penny loafers."
"They've got dimes in them, not pennies."
"People started out with pennies, years ago."
"They don't wear them even in Miami."
"Lot of people wear them in Washington."
Summer of 1957, on the way to Spain I passed through New York, spent a few days and made it to the Palladium a couple of nights. I was utterly useless at mambo and didn't even try, but I could do a serviceable cha-cha-cha. Not many girls wanted to dance with me because my tailored 3-button suit with narrow lapels and no shoulder pads, pale blue button-down shirt and skinny tie was OK on Fifth Avenue, but looked really weird at the Palladium.
Posts: 2526
Joined: Jan. 30 2007
From: London (the South of it), England
RE: Beginner - help with palmas + fe... (in reply to devilhand)
cool graphs!!
Richard I love your posts! honestly you must be a natural story teller. And well travelled and full of experience! thanks for always sharing these anecdotes.
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
RE: Beginner - help with palmas + fe... (in reply to Stu)
Thanks, Stu.
Story telling is a Texas tradition. It runs through the Old South as well. I was marinated in it as a kid. My father, my grandfather, my uncles all could spin a yarn. Even my brother, usually taciturn, could hold forth when he had good material to work with.
RE: Beginner - help with palmas + fe... (in reply to Richard Jernigan)
quote:
The thrower takes a pigeon out of the cage, bends or pulls a feather so it will fly crazily and throws it. A good thrower can throw all day with no two birds flying the same way. The shooter waits until the bird crosses a semicircular distance line and takes his shot.
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
RE: Beginner - help with palmas + fe... (in reply to devilhand)
From a viewpoint 66 years later, much of South Texan, Cuban, Mexican and Spanish culture of those days exhibited casual cruelty.
I haven't owned a firearm for nearly 30 years. I live in one of the safest neighborhoods in the USA. But there are a few parts of Austin, where if I had to live there I would buy a pistol or a shotgun to keep in the house. There are too many firearms in the hands of criminals.
Recent events here raise the question whether a few members of the police department should not have access to firearms.
I stopped hunting deer at the age of 20. I kept up hunting doves and quail for another few years, until opportunities became rarer. With my grandfather gone, my uncles scattered and my father's eyesight damaged I lost interest. Dad offered me his beautiful Purdy shotgun. I asked him to give it to my 16-year old son. His best friend's parents owned a country place northwest of Austin, where they hunted birds.
Training with firearms and hunting birds and bigger game were rites of passage in my youth. Now in my neighborhood you have to be careful at night not to run into deer in the street. If I get out for my walk by 7 AM I see does with young fawns these springtime days. A few nights a month you can hear the coyotes howling in the forest preserve nearby. I think it's when the moon is full.
But when I was ten years old there were still jaguars in South Texas.
Going to the bullfights across the border on Sunday was another rite of passage. My first trip to Spain was inspired by that and by reading Hemingway's "Death in the Afternoon." I attended the Fiesta de San Isidro in Madrid, spent nearly a month in Sevilla going to La Maestranza, saw Dominguín, made it to Valencia to see Antonio Ordoñez. They were magnificent.
But what has stuck with me from that trip were several nights at Zambra in Madrid with Rafael Romero "El Gallina" and Perico el del Lunar hijo, and a couple of evenings at the Villa Rosa.
When my mathematics/physics class schedule ended my trumpet playing in the Unversity Symphony and Concert Band, I took up the guitar.
Last year and the year before we went to the Corrida Goyesca at Ronda. I wanted to see how today's Spaniards reacted. Years ago I had come to agree with the view of the 18th-century Ilustrados: the corrida coarsens public sensibilities. Any value in the lessons of the bull and the torero bravely facing death is not worth the casual cruelty of the fiesta brava.
To my surprise, year before last the young Peruvian Roca Rey excited some of the old emotions. Reflecting, it was a lesson for me how easily we can be trained to compartmentalize our empathy. If he is good, the torero brings us out onto the sand with him. The adrenaline flows, the heart pounds. The bull is bred to show no sign of pain or abuse, to charge over and over again, so we objectify him.
Last year I was repelled by the shameless cowardice of the matadors and the drugging of the bulls and shaving their horns. Twice, more than 50 years ago, I had seen the upper tiers of the old Plaza Mexico off Insurgentes boil over and charge the ring, spilling over the barrera and attacking the toreros for cowardice. Last year the Spaniards just sat there quietly. Could they have been that ignorant? Was it what they had come to expect? The corrida is disappearing. It can't be soon enough for me.
But there are far more important issues these days than killing pigeons or abusing cattle just to illustrate bravery. My father was the commander of the first integrated U.S. Air Force base due to a direct order from president Dwight Eisenhower in 1953. Upon acquaintance with the cream of the black Air Force, Dad abandoned his life-long racism. I always admired him for it.
Larisa served in the U.S. Air Force for six years. For three years she was lead electronics tech in an F-16 outfit at Aviano, north of Venice. The other day I asked her whether she agreed with my impression that the military is the least racist major institution in the USA. She said that was her experience. Yet the first black Chief of Staff of the Air Force was confirmed only this week, 67 years after the integration of Bolling AFB.
For the first time since the Vietnam War people are turning out en masse on the streets of Austin in support of a cause. In the first day or two a car was set afire, some windows smashed, the Interstate was blocked. The only episode of looting, at a Target away from downtown, was revealed to be organized by agents provocateurs, formerly associated with the local Red Guards, a now-defunct radical left wing organization. Two young men were seriously injured by the police, shot in the head by "less lethal" rounds. The Police Chief acknowledges that the young men were orderly, peaceful and posed no threat to the police or public order.
But since then the streets have been packed mainly with young people, demonstrating peacefully for racial justice. Now the police have been far more disciplined and restrained than they were in the 1960s. For the first time in nearly 50 years I have had a faint whiff of tear gas. It inspires nostalgia.
RE: Beginner - help with palmas + fe... (in reply to Richard Jernigan)
Richard, I don't know if your stories are getting more interesting, or if you are getting better at telling/writing them, or if it's a case of my paying them more attention and coming to appreciate them more, but either way I am hooked!
RE: Beginner - help with palmas + fe... (in reply to mark indigo)
I always check in at the Today's Posts tab on the Foro and I'll almost always click on Richard J's comments first.
HR
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I prefer my flamenco guitar spicy, doesn't have to be fast, should have some meat on the bones, can be raw or well done, as long as it doesn't sound like it's turning green on an elevator floor.
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