beat and groove

A beat is a repeated sequence of percussive effects. A groove is an extended engagement with time. It takes certain musical skills to construct a good beat, but that’s a job you can outsource to a machine. There’s a different kind of musicality at work in a groove: you have an extended and ever-negotiated relationship to time that develops through the course of a song.

Stewart Copeland reminds us that when Ringo got demoted from being the drummer on “Love Me Do” — because the EMI people didn’t think he was good enough — he was allowed to play the tambourine. But, Stewart says, if you listen to the song you’ll notice that the tambourine is where the groove is. (Ringo really is the ultimate groove drummer. Well, maybe not ultimate: that would probably be Ziggy Modeliste.)

I think what’s happened in music over the past few decades is an increasing over-emphasis on beats and a de-emphasis of grooves. This is one of the reasons why, so often, when people want a groove, they have to sample it — because the Roland beat machine (or its purely digital equivalent) is not going to produce a groove. Also, what makes J Dilla so great is the way his microadjustments of tempo are always turning beats into grooves. That’s really an extraordinary skill.

If you think of the job of the percussion as being to establish and sustain a beat, you’re limiting the possibilities for what a drummer might do. Steve Jordan, the current drummer for the Rolling Stones, once commented that he didn’t really understand how to play in that band until he figured out that Charlie Watts wasn’t the guy who kept time: it’s Keef who keeps time, which allowed Charlie to play around the beat in ways that groove. For keeping time you might just use a drum machine, or, if you do have a drummer, make him play to a click track. But there are other musical possibilities.

Think, for instance, of Carly Simon’s 1971 hit “Anticipation“: a terrific song, wonderfully sung, but Andy Newmark’s drumming takes it to the next level. Note how musical his drumming is, how his playing mimics the theme of the song — especially in that first break where we’re, yes, anticipating the beat that comes a little later than expected. A studio drummer today is not going to be allowed to express that kind of musicality, with very few exceptions — one being JT Bates drumming for Big Red Machine, especially on “Phoenix.” (I chose the live version from Colbert’s show because you can see, as well as hear, Bates’s groove.)

We’ve traded in the groove for the beat, and we need to get our groove back.