Everyone always says the same thing: you’ve got to keep the time. The most important role of the bass player and the drummer is to keep the time. So you worry about rushing and dragging, and if a tune starts at 135, you make sure it never gets past 140. Ray Brown’s bass line on “Have You Met Miss Jones” is a great way to find out whether any of that is what good time really means.
What does keeping the time actually mean? Does it mean keeping the tempo in the same place? Does it mean never rushing or dragging? The answer is none of those things.
What a tempo map shows on Have You Met Miss Jones
The recording is “Have You Met Miss Jones” from We Get Requests by the Oscar Peterson Trio, with Ray Brown on bass and Ed Thigpen on drums. Put that track into a tempo tracker and watch the number. It changes every beat.
It goes from 76 to 81 to 74, and it keeps changing by several beats per minute. Not each measure, each beat. In one spot it goes from 83 to 77. In another it goes from 86 to 77 in two beats. And yet listen to it. It swings.
Giant Steps speeds up too
Here’s an even crazier example. Take the classic recording of John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” with Paul Chambers on bass. If you don’t know it, it’s awesome. Check it out. It’s one of the seminal recordings in jazz history. Now check out how insanely the head speeds up. It jumps from 132 to 152 in two bars, and the tempo mapping goes all over the place from there.
We listen to that recording all the time, and a lot of us feel like we can dance to it. The harmony’s crazy and the tempo’s fast, but it’s very danceable and it feels really good. What we don’t realize is that the thing we’re dancing to is a beat that’s moving from around 135 beats per minute to 152 to 147. It’s fluctuating all over the place, and that’s what actually makes it swing.
Time vs feel: what your job really is
When people refer to time, they don’t actually know what they’re referring to. A lot of people say you’ve got to keep the time solid. Well, we’re playing jazz. Most of our favorite jazz recordings speed up and slow down, even the most swinging ones, the ones that are known for their time. So why am I being forced to keep the time solid and stay in the same tempo?
What we do need to work on is our feel, so that we can make any musical situation feel good. In the lesson I play two bass lines back to back, and I’d argue the first one is more swinging. In that first line I sped up and slowed down a lot, but those peaks and valleys actually made the bass line swing. When I lay back a little, you feel that. When I slow down and then speed up a little, it actually makes the thing feel better.
Now, I’m not saying you should drastically speed up or slow down on a gig. Not at all. What I’m saying is don’t worry about it.
Your bread and butter as a bass player is making everything feel good.
Cole Davis
And as those two records show, our favorite recordings that feel great speed up and slow down like crazy. I walk through both tempo maps in my Ray Brown Miss Jones lesson from The Groove Files.
How the Miss Jones bass line is built
There’s one more thing worth seeing on this record, and it’s on paper, not in the tempo map. Look at how the line on “Have You Met Miss Jones” is organized. It’s built from distinct two-bar phrases, and each one ends in a cadence. He plays the same thing in bars one and two, so he’s repeating himself. Bar four echoes bar three. Bars five and six are a variation on bars one and two, like a theme and variation. The bass line becomes a little composition of its own.
That two-bar organization is something I noticed across Ray Brown’s lines: every two bars has a cadence. I go further into how he builds his lines in the Ray Brown walking bass line formula. If you want to play this one yourself, it’s in the Have You Met Miss Jones walking line from the Walking Line Vault.
Practice feel with records, not just the metronome
A metronome will help you get in the ballpark. That’s its function. To some extent it can straighten things out, and if you want to learn how to play five over four or something like that, playing with the metronome is a good way to do it. But the way you work on feel is by playing along to records, way more than playing with a metronome. Here’s how to start today.
- Start with the click. Use the metronome to get in the ballpark of the tempo, and for specific jobs like five over four.
- Walk with Ray Brown. Put on “Have You Met Miss Jones” from We Get Requests and play along with the record instead of the click.
- Try Giant Steps. Play along with the head and notice that you’re following a beat that’s moving, not a fixed number.
- Judge it by feel. Don’t ask whether you stayed at one tempo. Ask whether it felt good.
Put on the record tonight and play along until it feels good. If you want to keep building that skill, start The Locked-In Bassist.
