rubato...what is it really ???

[paulkogut]

I don't think that's quite how jazz 'stop-time' works. The band drops out between 'hits', but the beat and the form remain in time. If someone calls "You And The Night And The Music" on a pickup gig, someone else might ask "Are we doing the 'stop-time' in the last A section?"

PK

[Toddep]

Rubato:

—adjective

having certain notes arbitrarily lengthened while others are correspondingly shortened, or vice versa.
—noun, plural ru·ba·tos, ru·ba·ti .

a rubato phrase or passage.
a rubato performance.
—adverb

in a rubato manner.
Origin: 1880–85; < Italian (tempo) rubato stolen (time), past participle of rubare to steal < Germanic; see rob


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[emanresu]

Rubato:

—adjective

having certain notes arbitrarily lengthened while others are correspondingly shortened, or vice versa.
—noun, plural ru·ba·tos, ru·ba·ti .


in a rubato manner.
Origin: 1880–85; < Italian (tempo) rubato stolen (time), past participle of rubare to steal < Germanic; see rob

Yeah. "stolen time" If you give it back, its not a real robbery then

[stringsalive]

Yeah. "stolen time" If you give it back, its not a real robbery then

Your misunderstanding of a word does not change any of its accepted definitions. Get yourself a quality music dictionary. You cannot get better than the New Grove. It's updated regularly, peer reviewed, and includes changes in definitions over time. The Harvard Music Dictionary is good too, as is Baker's. For a pocket dictionary, I suggest Schirmer's, though Doug Clark's is a good basic pocket dictionary. If you are attending, or have attended a university, you should have access to their library's databases. The New Grove (if you don't want to buy the multivolume set yourself) is accessed through "Oxford Music Online." I would be surprised if your school did not have access to this; I've attended 5 different colleges, and taught at 4 -universities and junior colleges - and each has offered access to at least this resource.


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[emanresu]

I made a joke.

[emanresu]

OP had a very clear question: rubato...what is it really ???

I understood this as "ok ok, there are definitions but in rl?"

You can go after definitions but they change when something happens in rl. So, whats rubato nowadays? Its not one single way of toying with tempo. Maybe "ad libitum" is better to say "do whatever you like" but that would mean also more than just tempo/time. So rubato is used very loosely anywhere. I'm not a scientist, and most active musicians are not either - lets blame them, I'm not trying to change any definitions here in a forum

[matt.guitarteacher]

The way I most often hear time being "stolen", in a jazz context, is through rhythmic "borrowing " and then "paying back" if you will.

Jazz phrasing is heavily based in subbing certain rhythms for others. And it's much more than simply playing something "ahead" or "behind" by an 1/8 note etc. More than being a simple "tweak" of classical 4/4, it's more like a different basis all together, in basically a triple meter. You can think of it as akin to 12/8, but the accents aren't really fixed. Triplets are the common denominator very often but could be 16ths or double time etc.

Think about this, if your time basis is eighth note triplets instead of eighth notes, you have a basis for playing something which APPROXIMATES the original, "straight" rhythm of a tune, while never actually playing much straight -- like the original.

Subbing "triplet time" for regular eighth-note-based time you get these phenomena:

1. Eighth note triplets "rush" 8th notes.
( 12 fit in a bar instead of eight. So, if you sub them for eighth notes you end up "ahead". )
2. Quarter note triplets "drag" eighth notes. ( Six per measure means that they are somewhere between quarter note and eighth notes which would be four and eight per measure respectively. Sounds like lazy blues phrasing of eighth notes , "behind" the beat. Billie and Lester live here . This is also where Louis Armstrong made his name as a singer.)
3. Quarter note triplets "rush" quarter notes. (Again, because there are six-per-bar instead of four, you end up "ahead" , assuming you're starting in the same place .)

Too many words really. That's not really the way you learn it, but it's worth beginning the conversation probably.

One very basic jazz phrasing feel, which you will hear from the likes of Billie holiday or Louis Armstrong is to sub triplets for straight time in phrasing basic phrases. Because triplets generally "rush" , they'll start a hair late and then be "ahead" by the end of it.

For example, if you have three quarter notes as a starting point, you would very often sub that for quarter note triplets to jazz it up. The first quarter not triplet begins on the eighth note triplet AFTER the beat. As a result , the next quarter note triplet lands ON the beat and the third is AHEAD of the beat by one eighth note triplet. The result is very loose feel which doesn't necessarily feel ahead or behind because it is neither and both. Because the basis is not actually in normal eighth note subdivisions and Western musical feels , people will begin to talk about this kind of rhythmic feel in a very mystical way, as if it's magic, but it's actually a very different basis in time.

It's probably a couple of years of solid work to really learn to hear it well, even at this basic level, but it's the most important thing about playing music in my opinion. Everything else is just notes. Louis Armstrong didn't sound great and make everyone else sound cheesy by singing MORE notes. It was usually LESS, but with a great time feel.

Anyway, back to rubato , what I'm describing above is more of a straight "sub" kind of approach, where you are using these different values by ear to start behind , get ahead , rinse, repeat . The effect is that you're basically playing pretty close to straight time but with a jazzier "feel".

If you want to abstract things even more, you just take the patterns farther out before reeling them back in. Also, you probably deemphasize reference to beat more, by not giving chord stabs to show where the beat is etc.

All of this is pretty concretely based in time and actual rhythms . I listen to a lot of Keith Jarrett. So, there's probably a bias there . He does a lot of this sort of thing for a rubato feel. if you watch Jarrett play one of his rubato intros, you'll notice him at times doing thing of shaking his head side-to-side pretty quickly while playing very slowly. Always assumed is just a musician thing or him being "full of the Holy Ghost" or something. :-)

But if you look at it, and learn to hear what he's doing , he's actually subdividing eighth note triplets. A lot of jazzers do this kind of thing where forward and back rocking or up down is the BIG beat , and some kind of side to side thing like that headshake is some triplet subdivision.

Anyway , they're very concrete ways to systematically work on counting this type of thing. Pianists and drummers have it easy with being able to do it with separate hands etc. we have much the same with right hand fingers or with pick direction. might be interesting to look at examples at some point.

[vsaumarez]

I don't think rubato is borrowed and paid back. That is playing around with time feel, which is standard while playong any jazz melody or improvising. In a jazz sense, I've always understood it to mean free time, so no bar lines. However, when you hear some of the greats doing a rubato intro to a song, or just playing solo it always seems they are somehow in time. I think this is because it is an interplay between time and no time. So 'borrowed' if you like, but no obligation to pay it back. It is actually very difficult to achieve effectively and only comes from both technical mastery and having a very good sense of time giving the illusion of time.

[Alter]

rubato can be the classical player's interpretation of jazz time

[Runepune]

Regardless of "correct" definition, rubato has always meant playing without a (strict) pulse in my part of the world. In my lifetime

[grahambop]

I've been learning the tune 'Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most' and I wanted to include the intro (verse?) which is generally sung 'out of time/rubato' by vocalists. The main part of the song is in tempo. (There's also an ending which is usually rubato too).

So you can get a good idea of how to do this by listening to versions by great singers, and comparing the way they handle the intro, to when they go into tempo. Some good examples I found were Irene Kral and Carmen McRae. (Beware some singers omit the intro however, e.g. Mark Murphy, I love his version but it doesn't have the intro).

I found it helps to imagine these singers singing the lyrics while I play, it helps me phrase the melody segments in a more musical and logical way when out of tempo.

[vsaumarez]

Matt, very insightful but I'm struggling to understand what you are saying fully. You say this is this most important thing in music. Do you mean in jazz music? Are you saying that rephrasing a melody line with triplets shortens its length so starts later and ends ahead of it?

[matt.guitarteacher]

Matt, very insightful but I'm struggling to understand what you are saying fully. You say this is this most important thing in music. Do you mean in jazz music? Are you saying that rephrasing a melody line with triplets shortens its length so starts later and ends ahead of it?

Yes. I guess, if I get what you're saying. I notated some examples in another thread. I'll have to find it.

You hear it all the time in music , but unless you've kind of done the work to really subdivide things to a lower level, it's hard to hear it for what it actually is. When one note is slightly behind, the middle one is "on", and the third one is ahead, it's perceived as basically being "loose" or jazzy.

As musicians, we mostly can't hear what we can't PLAY , and we certainly can't PLAY what we have never played, at least in the fundamental sense. If you want to play quarter notes solidly, you better be mentally subdividing in eight notes . And in early stages, you need to actually PLAY those eighth notes in études or whatever , actually changing your quarter note tune to its eighth note- subdivided version.

Same with eighths. You need to be subdividing down to the next level to eighth note triplets to really hear the juice in between. All of the grace notes and ghost notes that you hear in horn players and players of all sorts are really just the ARTIFACTS of this WORK which has already been done in really subdividing things , whether in a practice room or just in playing a lot of slow, slow 12/8 blues tunes over the years.

All of that "extra stuff" , at level of subdivision maybe beyond our comprehension, is what makes the music really pop at the level we CAN hear – the implied "real" level. Start analyzing what vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald are doing on the voiced consonants and diphthongs before the "real notes " in all of their phrases. All kind of approach tones there. They're doing all of the instrumental jazz devices , but they're slightly hard to hear , at least until you start playing it/really listening for it.

Gotta go. I'll try to post something better later.

[vsaumarez]

"When one note is slightly behind, the middle one is "on", and the third one is ahead, it's perceived as basically being "loose" or jazzy."
Still not clear on this. What do you mean by middle one? Are you talking about a triplet? Are you describing the closest way to notate jazz swing ie triplets with the middle note muted. Or are you describing the subtle ways musicians play with that jazz feel? Sorry you've lost me here.

[vsaumarez]

I'd add that rubato is not just 'no time', but also 'no tempo'. Having no pulse to lock into and then adjusting tempo and dynamics together is a very expressive way of playing. It's probably borrowed from classical music, and often used by European players like Bireli Lagrene.

[matt.guitarteacher]

"When one note is slightly behind, the middle one is "on", and the third one is ahead, it's perceived as basically being "loose" or jazzy."
Still not clear on this. What do you mean by middle one? Are you talking about a triplet? Are you describing the closest way to notate jazz swing ie triplets with the middle note muted. Or are you describing the subtle ways musicians play with that jazz feel? Sorry you've lost me here.

Doesn't really make sense in notation as much, but this is an APPROXIMATION of different types of subs you might do with eighth note triplets. the first one is the "straight" version, in the next three or variations. Notice that in the second variation the original phrase is displaced . Compared to the original phrase, the first note is "behind", the next note is "on", and the third note is "ahead".

In the audio examples above I mostly hear things like what's notated in these images. These are pretty difficult to hear at first , especially without actually working on them and playing them someway. When you add duple accent patterns to triplets, they sound like "rushed eight notes".

The same is true for quarter note triplets, in feeling like they drag eighths notes. Once you learn some of these feels, you really can do a lot with moving things around.

Notice in these three examples that one begins in the same place as the original , one has beat two in the same place as the original, and one has the final note in the original position. These three patterns therefore occupy about the same "time space" as the original eight note pattern. There's a lot of phrasing to be found in these triplet patterns.

They are specific rhythms a lot of the time and not just "feelings". Worth nailing down some of these basic ones.

[matt.guitarteacher]

"When one note is slightly behind, the middle one is "on", and the third one is ahead, it's perceived as basically being "loose" or jazzy."
Still not clear on this. What do you mean by middle one? Are you talking about a triplet? Are you describing the closest way to notate jazz swing ie triplets with the middle note muted. Or are you describing the subtle ways musicians play with that jazz feel? Sorry you've lost me here.

Did this while the wife was teaching a lesson. Sloppy, but it illustrates the "start behind, finish ahead" at it's most basic. This is a very vanilla, straight rhythmic substitution, but it's just a simpler version of what I hear in many of these recordings, where people are talking about how so-and-so is playing "behind the beat". Again, I don't really think of this as "that".

[vsaumarez]

Thanks for going to the effort of posting a video. I think I understand what you saying. It's what I'd call 'rhythmical interpretation' of a melody. Playing around with time or teasing the listener. Instead of playing it straight, or as written, you are coming in late, and making up time with a triplet or even 16th notes, and sometimes finishing a little early. Very valid observation.