Groove (music)

In music, groove is the sense of propulsive rhythmic 'feel' or sense of 'swing'. In jazz, it can be felt as a persistently repeated pattern. It can be created by the interaction of the music played by a band's rhythm section (e.g. drums, electric bass or double bass, guitar, and keyboards). Groove is a significant feature of popular music, and can be found in many genres, including salsa, funk, rock, fusion, and soul. In music, groove is the sense of propulsive rhythmic 'feel' or sense of 'swing'. In jazz, it can be felt as a persistently repeated pattern. It can be created by the interaction of the music played by a band's rhythm section (e.g. drums, electric bass or double bass, guitar, and keyboards). Groove is a significant feature of popular music, and can be found in many genres, including salsa, funk, rock, fusion, and soul. From a broader ethnomusicological perspective, groove has been described as 'an unspecifiable but ordered sense of something that is sustained in a distinctive, regular and attractive way, working to draw the listener in.' Musicologists and other scholars have analyzed the concept of 'groove' since around the 1990s. They have argued that a 'groove' is an 'understanding of rhythmic patterning' or 'feel' and 'an intuitive sense' of 'a cycle in motion' that emerges from 'carefully aligned concurrent rhythmic patterns' that stimulates dancing or foot-tapping on the part of listeners. The concept can be linked to the sorts of ostinatos that generally accompany fusions and dance musics of African derivation (e.g. African-American, Afro-Cuban, Afro-Brazilian, etc.). The term is often applied to musical performances that make one want to move or dance, and enjoyably 'groove' (a word that also has sexual connotations). The expression 'in the groove' (as in the jazz standard) was widely used from around 1936 to 1945, at the height of the swing era, to describe top-notch jazz performances. In the 1940s and 1950s, groove commonly came to denote musical 'routine, preference, style, source of pleasure.' Like the term 'swing', which is used to describe a cohesive rhythmic 'feel' in a jazz context, the concept of 'groove' can be hard to define. Marc Sabatella's article Establishing The Groove argues that 'groove is a completely subjective thing.' He claims that 'one person may think a given drummer has a great feel, while another person may think the same drummer sounds too stiff, and another may think he is too loose.' Similarly, a bass educator states that while 'groove is an elusive thing' it can be defined as 'what makes the music breathe' and the 'sense of motion in the context of a song'. In a musical context, general dictionaries define a groove as 'a pronounced, enjoyable rhythm' or the act of 'creat, danc to, or enjoy rhythmic music'. Steve Van Telejuice explains the 'groove' as the point in this sense when he defines it as a point in a song or performance when 'even the people who can't dance wanna feel like dancing...' due to the effect of the music. Bernard Coquelet argues that the 'groove is the way an experienced musician will play a rhythm compared with the way it is written (or would be written)' by playing slightly 'before or after the beat'. Coquelet claims that the 'notion of groove actually has to do with aesthetics and style'; 'groove is an artistic element, that is to say human,...and 'it will evolve depending on the harmonic context, the place in the song, the sound of the musician's instrument, and, in interaction with the groove of the other musicians', which he calls 'collective' groove'. Minute rhythmic variations by the rhythm section members such as the bass player can dramatically change the feel as a band plays a song, even for a simple singer-songwriter groove. UK musicologist Richard Middleton (1999) notes that while 'the concept of groove' has 'long familiar in musicians' own usage', musicologists and theorists have only more recently begun to analyze this concept. Middleton states that a groove '... marks an understanding of rhythmic patterning that underlies its role in producing the characteristic rhythmic 'feel' of a piece'. He notes that the 'feel created by a repeating framework' is also modified with variations. 'Groove', in terms of pattern-sequencing, is also known as 'shuffle note'—where there is deviation from exact step positions. When the musical slang phrase 'Being in the groove' is applied to a group of improvisers, this has been called 'an advanced level of development for any improvisational music group', which is 'equivalent to Bohm and Jaworski's descriptions of an evoked field', which systems dynamics scholars claim are 'forces of unseen connection that directly influence our experience and behaviour'. Peter Forrester and John Bailey argue that the 'chances of achieving this higher level of playing' (i.e., attain a 'groove') are improved when the musicians are 'open to other's musical ideas', 'finding ways of complementing other participant's musical ideas', and 'taking risks with the music'. Turry and Aigen cite Feld's definition of groove as 'an intuitive sense of style as process, a perception of a cycle in motion, a form or organizing pattern being revealed, a recurrent clustering of elements through time'. Aigen states that 'when groove is established among players, the musical whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts, enabling a person to experience something beyond himself which he cannot create alone (Aigen 2002, p.34)'.