Know Your Role

Imagine a peace sign — that classic circle split into three equal sections. Now ask yourself: what are the three elements that make something music?

Rhythm. Melody. Harmony.

Rhythm comes first, always. Every living creature runs on rhythm. Your heartbeat, your brainwaves — all of it is rhythmic. Rhythm is the thing all human beings share, which is part of why music communicates across languages and cultures.

Melody is what we recognize and remember. Harmony is the framework underneath that gives melody its color and emotional direction. When you improvise, you are constantly shifting the proportions among these three in real time — one moment emphasizing a rhythmic idea, the next outlining a harmonic shape, the next sitting inside a melodic phrase. That is what improvisation actually is.

But none of that works in a group setting without awareness.

McNeil talks about thinking in terms of foreground, mid-ground, and background in any ensemble situation. The soloist is in the foreground. The rhythm section is the background. Everyone else is somewhere in between. Your job is to understand where you are in that picture at any given moment and play accordingly.

The drummer, he notes, is the head of the rhythm section — they are managing seven or eight instruments simultaneously and have the ability to color the entire ensemble with a single cymbal choice. Everything flows from that pulse.

What holds it all together is listening. Real listening — not waiting for your turn, but actually taking in what is happening around you and responding to it. When the band was trading fours with the drummer in the masterclass, what made it work was that everyone was responding to what the other person actually played, not just waiting for the bar count to turn over.

"When you listen, you're comprehending," McNeill says. "Taking in somebody's information. And when you understand somebody's information, you can communicate back."

That is true on the bandstand. It is also just true.