Practice This! is an educational project of Earshot Jazz with sponsorship from The Seattle Drum School. Each month in Earshot Jazz a new lesson by a different local jazz artist will appear for students to learn from and for non-musician readers to gain insight into the craft of improvising.

Practice This!
November 2007
Greta Matassa on Rhythmic Phrasing

Click here to listen to Greta's Practice This! audio clip.

As you listen to jazz singers, or singers of American popular song from Billie Holiday to Frank Sinatra to contemporary singers like Diana Krall, they all have a different kind of rhythmic phrasing. This is one of the things that makes each of them sound different. Each artist’s sound or style is determined by their sense of timing and rhythm, their own rhythmic phrasing.

Their melodic improvisation sets them apart from each other as well. Melodic improvisation is melody-based improvisation, or simply put - coming up with a new melody. When you hear Ella Fitzgerald improvise a whole new melody to a song you thought you really knew, it’s quite dazzling. But I think that what a lot of people really miss is that Ella and many of the truly great singers are extremely advanced rhythmically.

Each singer has his or her own way of playing with the rhythm of a song. Dinah Washington pulls her phrases a little bit early, Shirley Horn waits and waits until almost the last minute and then drops them in, Ella Fitzgerald was much more like a drummer than a singer. If you listen to her improvised solo on “How High The Moon” and remove all the melody and harmony from it and just listen to the rhythm, it sounds like a great drum solo. That’s how advanced the rhythm is in her phrasin

One way to develop your rhythmic phrasing is to sing the words to a tune, and forget about the notes of the melody. Just sing one note and reduce the tune down to just the rhythm of the lyrics as they were intended. Once you have simplified the tune by eliminating the melody notes, you can focus on just the rhythm of the lyrics. Try to improvise with just the rhythms, not worrying about the actual notes. You can sort of play with the rhythm and “tap dance” with it. You sort of rhythmically “speak” the melody

Instead of changing the melody of the tune and improvising a new melody, which is the common practice among jazz improvisers, you can start with just changing the rhythm of the melody. You can move the bar line or the downbeats hear and there, and replace the downbeats of the original rhythm with upbeats; you can elongate or shorten a phrase too.

After you have done this for a while, you can add melody back into your improvising. You’ll find that this will free you up quite a bit, rhythmically speaking.

What can you say about Greta Matassa that hasn’t already been said? The Seattle-based vocalist is among the busiest musicians in the city, performing in a variety of musical settings, venues, styles and genres. This past summer she opened for Herbie Hancock at the Woodland Park Zoo and released “The Smiling Hour,” her 4th album on Origin Records to wide critical acclaim. She has collaborated on many shows such as “Zirkus Weill” with the Pacific Northwest Ballet, “Voices Of Jazz, Danced” with Spectrum Dance Company, and has developed her own shows “Light Out Of Darkness, A Tribute To Ray Charles,” “The Shearing Sound,” featuring Susan Pascal, her critically acclaimed one woman show “Ella & Billie” and has released her own DVD with guitarist Mimi Fox. She is one of the top studio professionals in the city and maintains a very active teaching studio as well as a busy touring schedule. This November she will present a tribute to Cole Porter at Bake’s Place.