Polyrhythms Quotes

Jazz is the music of the body.

Rhythm is the pulse of music.

My experience with playing in odd time signatures was progressive rock and learning King Crimson songs as a kid coming up and maybe learning Pink Floyd, 'Money,' that kind of thing.

So I concentrated on the rhythmic side of things, and therefore left a lot of holes. I didn't want to use big pad chords everywhere. All of the songs are built up of small melodies and counter melodies all played very rhythmically.

Well I guess my music came to prominence around one piece called 'In C' which I wrote in 1964 at that time it was called 'The Global Villages for Symphonic Pieces', because it was a piece built out of 53 simple patterns and the structure was new to music at that time.

Jazz music is a style, not compositions; any kind of music may be played in Jazz if one has the knowledge.

Western ears have a hard time hearing anything that isn't in four-four time. A lot of cultures experience music in five-eight, for example, five-four.

As with any art, you create it [drumming] out of something that isn't there. It's very architectural. It's the architecture of whatever piece of music I'm playing. I think the whole idea of drumming is to allow other people around you to more easily express themselves.

But since the middle of the century in particular, the music has become very irregular in rhythm.

Bach was so mathematical and I liked this idea that you could have one instrument going, 'One, two, three, four', and then you have another instrument going, [double time] 'One, two, three four', and another instrument going, [doubled again] 'One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four', so you could add twos and fours and eighths, and that happens a lot in Bach.

Stravinsky influenced film music in general - those stabbing chords and rhythms from 'The Rite of Spring.'

I've been taking tabla lessons and they've helped expand my rhythmic horizons.

In the early days of jazz, it was ensemble music: everybody playing all together. Nobody really stood out.

I love songs with, like, six or seven or eight different things going on at once, and that's just me.

I've always found some way to kind of incorporate second-line music in what I did.

Without Tony Allen, there would have been no Afrobeat.

What's really good is African drum music.

There's definitely that tribal Africana thing going on in my sound. It's that marching band, second-line music, that Creole-influence in the kick, and the snare that drives everything for me. I think it's really what's separated my sound from a lot of the R&B and pop music out there.

You need three or five hands to play Ligeti.

I'm from the East Coast; I think about things dialectically sometimes - in other words, antagonistically. The rhythms that I think of are polyrhythmic, bouncy, loping. The way that I want to approach that is to get, like, a flat-footed Connecticut hard-core drummer to play these bouncy, loping polyrhythms.

As far as favorite tunes, 'You Know You Know' is one, and why it is important is difficult to say. The rhythmic cycle is very interesting and challenging to play, since it can be considered three bars of 4/4 or four bars of 3/4. 'The Dance of Maya' is another, and I have to mention 'Sanctuary.'

I'm a fan of odd meters. For example, I've decided to sing 'No Business Like Show Business,' but I'll be doing it in constantly changing 5/4, 7/4 and 11/4 time signatures. I've found a way to make that work.