Most jazz is in four. You can tap your foot to it, the bar divides into four even beats, and the music is built on the assumption that everyone in the room knows where beat one is.
That default is so strong that the exceptions have become famous partly for being exceptions. “Take Five” is a household name in a way that no other Dave Brubeck recording is. Understanding why takes a little unpacking, and it makes a lot of jazz easier to follow.
What a time signature actually tells you
A time signature is a count. The top number says how many beats are in a bar, the bottom says what kind of beat is being counted.
In 4/4 you count to four and start again. In 3/4 you count to three, which is a waltz. In 5/4 you count to five, which feels lopsided to most listeners because there is no way to divide five into equal halves.
That last point is the whole story of odd meters. Four and eight feel stable because they split evenly. Five, seven, nine and eleven don’t, so the music has to lean somewhere, and the choice of where it leans is what gives each of these pieces its character.
Why jazz settled on 4/4
Jazz inherited its rhythmic default from dance music.
Early jazz was functional music for social dancing, and social dancing works best on an even pulse. Ragtime, marches, blues and the swing era all reinforced it, and by the 1940s the four-beat bar was so embedded that bebop musicians could take extraordinary harmonic liberties precisely because the underlying count never moved.
Swing complicates this slightly. A jazz musician playing in 4/4 is usually subdividing each beat unevenly, so the eighth notes fall in a long-short pattern rather than evenly. The bar is still four beats. What happens inside each beat is where the feel lives.
The jazz waltz
Three-four was the first real departure, and it arrived earlier than people assume.
Fats Waller recorded “Jitterbug Waltz” in 1942. Sonny Rollins wrote “Valse Hot” in 1956, generally cited as one of the first bebop tunes in three. Max Roach recorded a whole album, Jazz in 3/4 Time, in 1957.
The piece that made it permanent was John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things”, recorded in 1960 and released in 1961. Coltrane took a Rodgers and Hammerstein waltz from a Broadway musical, slowed the harmonic movement almost to a standstill, and improvised over it for thirteen minutes. After that, a jazz waltz needed no explanation.
Listen for the difference between a waltz that dances and a waltz that churns. Bill Evans’ “Waltz for Debby” does the first. “My Favorite Things” does the second, because McCoy Tyner’s vamp keeps cycling rather than resolving.
Take Five and the arrival of five
Time Out, recorded by the Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1959, was built deliberately around meters other than 4/4. It became one of the most commercially successful jazz albums ever made, which was not the expected outcome for an experiment in counting.
“Take Five” was written by the quartet’s alto saxophonist, Paul Desmond, not by Brubeck. It’s in 5/4, and the reason it feels natural rather than awkward is that the five is divided unevenly: three beats then two. Count “one two three, one two” repeatedly and the vamp locks into place immediately.
Joe Morello’s drum solo on the recording is the part musicians study. Holding a five-beat bar steady while playing across it is considerably harder than it sounds, and he makes it sound like nothing at all.
Blue Rondo à la Turk and the 9/8 bar
The other famous piece from Time Out is stranger still.
Brubeck said he took the rhythm from street musicians he heard in Turkey, where a nine-beat grouping is common in folk music. “Blue Rondo à la Turk” divides its nine beats as 2+2+2+3, which produces a lurching, repeatedly-catching-itself feel, and then periodically drops into straightforward 4/4 blues before snapping back.
That alternation is the point. The piece is a conversation between a European folk meter and an American one, and you can hear the join every time it happens.
Six, twelve, and the feel that isn’t quite either
A lot of jazz that sounds like it’s in three is actually in six or twelve, which means the beats group in twos rather than threes.
Miles Davis’ “All Blues”, from Kind of Blue, is the clearest example. It’s usually written in 6/8, and it has a rolling quality that a straight waltz doesn’t. Much Afro-Cuban and Afro-Caribbean music works in 6/8 or 12/8 as well, which is one route by which these feels entered jazz.
If a piece feels like it’s swaying rather than turning, you are probably hearing six.
Seven, and the fusion era
Odd meters stopped being a novelty in the late 1960s and became part of the working vocabulary.
Brubeck himself had already recorded “Unsquare Dance” in 7/4 in 1961. Don Ellis then built an entire big band around unusual meters, playing pieces in nine, eleven, nineteen and beyond, with a rhythm section that had to be drilled to hold them.
Fusion took it further. The Mahavishnu Orchestra played odd meters at high speed and high volume, which is a different problem entirely: at slow tempos you can count, and at fast tempos you have to feel it. Much of what makes Billy Cobham’s drumming on Birds of Fire extraordinary is that the pulse never sounds like arithmetic.
Where it stands now
Odd meters are no longer remarkable in contemporary jazz. They are simply available.
Brad Mehldau has recorded standards in seven. Vijay Iyer builds pieces around rhythmic cycles drawn partly from South Indian music. Tigran Hamasyan works with Armenian folk meters in a way that parallels what Brubeck attempted, with far more technical resource behind it. Snarky Puppy’s audience often has no idea a piece has shifted meter, which is arguably the highest compliment available.
The shift is that the meter is now rarely the subject. In 1959 an album of odd meters was a concept. Now it’s a Tuesday.
How to hear it without counting
You don’t need to count bars to follow this music, and most listeners never do.
Find the repeating cycle instead. Almost every piece, whatever the meter, has a figure that comes round again, usually in the bass or the drums. Once you have located that figure, you’re oriented, and the soloist’s phrasing against it becomes audible.
Then notice where the cycle feels uneven. That unevenness is the meter announcing itself. In “Take Five” it’s the small catch before the vamp restarts. In “Blue Rondo” it’s the stumble at the end of each group.
And if you lose it, wait. Jazz musicians resolve to the top of the form eventually, and when the whole band lands together you’ll hear the reset.
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