Using Notes Differently: Funky Drummer, Thelonious & A.I.
By the time we got the groove going, James showed up, added a few touches — changed the guitar part, which made it real funky — had the drummer do something different. He was a genius at it. Between the two of us, we put it together one afternoon. He put the lyrics on it. The band set up in a semicircle in the studio with one microphone. It was recorded live in the studio. One take. It was like a performance.
The above quote comes from Pee Wee Ellis who arranged and co-composed “Cold Sweat” in 1967. This is the first known recording in which James Brown calls for a drum solo (i.e., “give the drummer some”), beginning the tradition of rhythmic breakbeats that would form the foundation of funk and later hip-hop (sampling). In 1984, scholar James A. Snead wrote an essay that deconstructed “Cold Sweat” to describe how the rhythm was created:
The essential pattern, then, in the typical Brown sequence is recurrent: ABA or ABCBA or ABC(B)A, with each new pattern set off (i.e., introduced and interrupted) by the random, brief hiatus of the “cut.”
When I first read “On Repetition in Black Culture” it was as if a door had opened, with a bridge to algorithmic design, a term concerning algorithms or sequences of instructions (codes/scripts) that computers use to complete tasks. Algorithms can be used to program computers to make image-editing and design applications, or video games. Algorithms can be used to do this:
Machine learning, a subcategory of artificial intelligence or AI, makes it possible for computers to learn without being programmed. This is what I use to create visual art based on AI (see below) and it can even be used to create music. NSynth, part of the Google Brain AI unit, uses machine learning to interpret music and come up with new sounds. The project trained a neural network on over 300,000 instrument sounds such as a bass and flute, into a new, hybrid bass-flute sound.
The NSynth interpolation reminded me of the Pee Wee Ellis quote, as well as something I read about Thelonious Monk (i.e., layering and interpretive sampling): “Monk summed up his music by saying that it was about how ‘to use notes differently’.” I imagined that, like James Brown, Thelonious Monk implemented the cut (see Snead) in jazz by looking/inserting new sounds in between existing ones… similar to how NSynth does what it does. If this is so, then we can make a case that black creative production is computational at the base level, representing an African American continuum.
A few months ago, I found myself in a room with computer science experts on one side and the community (black folks) on the other. On screen was “Cold Sweat”” written as computer code. After the first presentation I sensed something was missing, so the second time I played the song. The CS guys looked at the screen & listened and a few of the black people started to get up and dance. This is how DJs Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash discovered the get down (breakbeat). It was then that I knew I would finish the book.
More on this soon… also note that what Pee Wee Ellis describes in the top quote is known as a cypher in hip-hop.