Welcome to Music Gurus

In this episode, we're going to talk about 5/4. You've just listened to the introduction to Take Five. We haven't heard the tune yet, but you probably recognize Take Five already because that's one of the most familiar vamp-ins in contemporary music.

If you're walking across a shopping mall or you hear someone busking in the subway, they might well be playing this. Even people who aren't jazz fans consider this pretty familiar. And so it is, because it's been around for a long time.

Playing in Odd Meters

Some people might consider playing in odd meters difficult. Sometimes it is. It is for me too. But when something is as familiar as this, you can afford to stop thinking of the meter and to stop counting. Just think of it as a beat you're used to playing in 4/4.

But there are a lot of different ways of playing 4/4. It could be:

• A bossa nova
• Afro Cuban
• Regular jazz swing

Because it's familiar, we don't realize how complicated it is, but it's really a polyrhythm superimposing three against two. And so it is with the Take Five vamp that is so familiar.

Understanding the Five

What makes it five is that it is simply three plus two. Because Take Five was a hit so long ago and remains heard, when we think of 5/4 in jazz, that's the kind of feel we expect.

When you listen to the drums at the beginning, they're superimposing a regular jazz feel. But let's just drop meter for a moment and talk about the beat. The beat is really a three against two. The three is divided evenly, one and a half.

That's dotted quarter notes in American parlance, or, I should say, dotted quarter notes plus two quarter notes. And when we were vamping in, you got to hear the drums for four bars.

The Feel of Jazz

Notice how easy that really is. It has an even number feel because 20 is an even number, it's 20 beats. When we're playing jazz, we're not trying to make it complicated necessarily. When we add different meters to our vocabulary, it's just a way of giving more variety.

The bass is articulating the parts of that beat:

• 1, 2 and 3, 4, 5.
• 1, 2 and 3, 4, 5.
• 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

That's basically the Take Five 4 formula. When we get to the melody, we'll see other ways that this three plus two is being articulated and divided.

Introducing Different Divisions

Now, to be complete, we should say there's an unfamiliar way of dividing five. Of course, you can do two plus three, and that is often something we might do even when we're improvising.

In Take Five, the familiar 3/2 just makes it more interesting to cut up our lines into different units. Mike Rossi, who wrote many etudes, lines, and exercises for the Odd Times book, has put it all down into units that you can practice.

I'm going to have him illustrate on the saxophone, going three plus two in a familiar way, and then the opposite way, two plus three.

Practicing the Beat

Let's just start with the beat:

• 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
• 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
• 1, 2, 3, 4.

Now practice accenting three:

• 1, 2, 3, four, five.
• 1, 2, 3, Four, Five.
• 1, 2, 3, four, five.

Now practice accenting four:

• 1, 2, 3, FOUR, FIVE.
• 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
• 1, 2, 3, four, five.

To kind of internalize the two and the three and the three and the two, you can take just the first five notes of your minor scale, starting on E-flat concert, and play the first five notes and group them that way.

So I'll first start with:

• The more common one would be three, two.

Now we'll do two plus three:

• Da da da da da da da da da da.

So it gives you kind of a feeling, and you're feeling the subdivisions within the beat to use when you're starting to improvise or starting a phrase, or ending a phrase, or playing with the drummer, or playing with the bass player or the piano player and how they accommodate you.

Additional Resources

Also in the book, and as a play-along part of this series, there's a tune called Take Another Five, which demonstrates three, two, and then switches in the next section at the B section to two plus three and alternates back and forth. So you'll find that quite useful to play along with.

In addition to having a listen to Take Another Five, if you check out also in the book and a PDF of a 5/4 minor etude, done in a play-along fashion, included with this series is three plus two.

So Darius and I, why don't we give it a go and play the first part of that? This illustrates three plus two over C minor and B-flat minor going back to C minor.

Performing Together

Okay. Actually, it's quite long if you play the whole thing because it's going through 12 keys. So let's do the first four lines, and then like you said, we'll just go back to the top. Cool.

Here we go:

• 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

All right, so that was the basic three plus two, Take Five kind of rhythm.

Moving On to Etudes

Now we're going to move on to an etude, which will require a lot more concentration because I'll have to be alert to the fact that the melody goes from three plus two to two plus three.

If you look on page 18, you can see in the first line, it's a dotted half note, half note. That rhythm articulates perfectly:

• 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
• 1, 2, 3, four, five.

The next line where the chord changes goes da, da, da, da. So you have the syncopated three, the sort of jazzy three, and the three divided into two equal parts, preceded by two accented beats.

So that's where we have to be alert. And Dr. Rossi wrote this, and he's responsible for that difficulty.

Here we go: So starting off three plus two, switching to two plus three every eight bars:

• One, two, three, four.

Okay, so there we have an example. You can start using these, turning these around if you want to bar by bar or every four bars and playing with them.

Final Thoughts

The thing is to do it slowly and to mark those changes when they occur. It's like Darius says, so you're aware of it, and the others in your group or your band are also aware of it.

We've tried to use the Take Five rhythm. Turning it around makes it a little more complicated, but overall, the feel is pretty much the same.

It's a swing feel superimposed on 3/2 or 2/3. In every case, the 3 is cut into two equal parts, and that's what makes it sound jazzy. That's what relates it to swing.