Teaching "21" Through Rhythm Exercises
I've been really excited by the potential for awesome rhythm learning through Andy Akiho's "21". In a previous post I explained the basic rhythmic ostinato (as I understand it) that undergirds much of this work. However, as someone who spent quite a while trying to unpack the complex rhythms in a lot of modern jazz (see here and here for a couple of examples), I know that it can take quite a long time to get your head around rhythmic ostinatos that rely on beat displacement and syncopation.
So, with those challenges in mind, I decided to jump straight into writing a series of rhythm exercises that students could work through, each one being more difficult than the last. With all of these exercises, I made sure to write a part for the feet, not because tapping your foot instantly means that you'll play in time, but so that the pulse is central to all of the exercises. I think it's definitely possible to learn rhythms from memory but not really have the kind of "embodied knowledge" that Simon Barker used to talk about in the rhythm classes I took at the Con. By "embodied knowledge" Simon meant a knowledge that was bodily and experiential i.e. the ability to perform or demonstrate something, as opposed to head knowledge of a concept (though of course it's possible to have both kinds of knowledge about something). Simon really hammered into us students that it wasn't enough to be able to explain how a rhythmic concept worked. You really needed to be able to do it, and sometimes it would take years to work on doing a particular rhythm before it would really sink in.
Rhythm Exercise #1
This exercise is designed mainly to introduce a 2-bar 3/4 pattern, where the first bar is all about just keeping the pulse, and the second bar focuses on groupings of dotted quavers and semiquavers. I would teach this exercise to the whole class and really make sure it is nailed before moving on.
Rhythm Exercise #2
This exercise introduces the dotted quaver syncopation, and is the basis for all the other exercises. Depending on how students go with it, I might really slow it down, or get half the class to do the pulse while the other half claps the rhythms. This pattern above all is an attempt to break "21" down to its simplest parts, which is essentially a group of crotchets followed by a group of dotted quavers.
Rhythm Exercise #3-#6
The rest of the exercises are basically extensions of #2, with subtle changes at each point. I think in a classroom situation, once I was satisfied that students had learnt exercises 1 and 2, I would get them to split into groups of 3 or 4 for the rest of the exercises, to build some more independence and allow students to work a bit more at their own pace. For exercises 5 and 6, I added two more parts to complicate things a little further and get students used to people around them playing different parts. It's one thing to hold a syncopated rhythm while the rest of your group is doing it, but it's another to hold it in tension with other things that are going on. Within each group, students would have the option to either play one part each, or they could all do the foot part and then choose one hand part.
So there you have it. Those are my rhythm exercises. Depending on the unit of work I plan, they might get some tweaking along the way.