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Re: [ARSCLIST] Rock and roll drumming



Eric -

Perhaps you or someone else could help elucidate a mysterious passage from Bob Dylan's "Chronicles: Part 1" where he writes about a revolutionary system taught to him by Lonnie Johnson, the great blues and jazz guitarist.

Dylan writes (p. 157) that his guitarmanship was electrified in the 1980s when he learned how to play "based on an odd- instead of even-number system" that he learned from jazzman Lonnie Johnson: a "highly controlled system of playing and relates to the notes of a scale, how they combine numerically, how they form melodies out of triplets..."

"Popular music is usually based on the number 2 [...] If you're using an odd numerical system, things that strengthen a performance begin to happen [...] In a diatonic scale there are eight notes, in a pentatonic scale there are five. If you're using the first scale, and you hit 2, 5 and 7 to the phrase and then repeat it, a melody forms. Or you can use the 2 three times. Or you can use 4 once and 7 twice [...] The possibilities are endless [...] I'm not a numerologist. I don't know why the number 3 is more metaphysically powerful than the number 2, but it is. Passion and enthusiasm, which sometimes can be enough to sway a crowd, aren't even necessary. You can manufacture faith out of nothing and there are an infinite number of patterns and lines that connect from key to key..."

Is this a baffling to you as it seems to me?

Russ Hamm


I have never thought of Bob Dylan as one of music's great theorists, and now I know why. His technical description is at least as confusing as some of his lyrics, which at least had the advantae of being obscure in a poetic way.


What I was describing in the drumming discussion was rhythmic, not melodic. q e


Eric



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