Darcy Argue wrote:
Even in an amateur situation -- *especially* in an amateur situation --triplet swing feel.
my experience is that the triplet indication just makes things worse. IMO, you would be better to tell them *not* to try to swing the eighth
notes in an exaggerated manner. The only thing they should worry about
are offbeat eighth notes that are either followed by a rest or tied to
another note. Those notes (and no others!) should be delayed -- "laid
back" -- and the amount of delay depends on the tempo. If they can
manage to do that one thing reasonably consistently, everything else
can be sung absolutely straight and the choir will sound 100% hipper
than they would if they tried to adopt an artificial quarter-eighth
I am 100% in agreement with Darcy on this, and it is one of the unfortunate shortcomings of institutionalized jazz education that this misinformation continues to be perpetrated as "gospel". In fact, it is more useful to suggest that all eighth note passages that do not fit Darcy's clear description of anticipations should be played more or less as you would play the same passages if they had been written by Bach. "Swinging" strings of eighth notes separates things into groups of two, strong - weak - strong - weak, kills any sense of line, and sounds plain silly. Jazz musicians do not play this way.
I was always puzzled by the way Leonard Bernstein chose to notate jazz rhythms in orchestra. For example, in West Side Story, in the Prelude, it is all written in 6/8, EXCEPT for final syncopations, which are written as duplets (?!) in clear opposition to Darcy's description (which I completely agree with, BTW.) Yet just about any group that can phrase jazz simply plays it correctly according to the usual jazz performance practice, rather than the way it is written.
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