The rhythmic conception of music

This new attitude toward time can be summarized by Ornette Coleman: “…my music doesn’t have any real time, no metric time. It has time, but not in the sense that you can time it. It’s more like breathing, a natural, freer time….I like spread rhythm, rhythm that has a lot of freedom in it, rather than the more conventional, netted rhythm. With spread rhythm, you might tap your feet awhile, then stop, then later start taping again. That’s what I like. Otherwise, you tap your feet so much, you forget what you hear. You just hear the rhythm.” This is called ‘Tempo Rubato’ which distorted the time by accelerando and decelerando - Coleman’s ‘The Shape of Jazz to Come’ and ‘Change of the Century’ albums are prime examples. This concept of time structure - obscuring the meter and abstract time composites - became quite important in the collective improvisation of the ‘Free Jazz’ movement. Here, the very function of the rhythm section was preempted. Rhythmic energy became a characteristic of each voice in the overall texture - the stereotypical metric formulas were avoided and the bar line existed only as an abstract ...»