The Red Thread: 12 Bar Blues, Part 2:A
Lesson 2, Part A: Modern Influences and Genre-Bending
Tresillo Rhythms, Rhythm Sections, and Melodic Ostinatos
Modern Blues Across Genres
In the last lesson, we focused on performing the cyclical 12 bar harmonic progression by focusing in on a single familiar but unreferenced track that is in every one of our students’ ears in 2024. But the accessible and addictive groove of our practice track is borrowing not just the 12 Bar Blues harmonic progression, but also compositional elements and instrumental technique from country music traditions, latin rhythms, and a mixture of vocal styles hailing from multiple genres. This multi-genre influence - or genre-bending, as I have coined it - is in fact indicative of the trends and patterns that 12 Bar Blues has morphed into across the 20th century and into the 21st century, and in this lesson we are going to identify and learn to experiment and extrapolate on those musical elements in the classroom.
Tresillo Rhythm
A tresillo rhythm is a 3-3-2 rhythmic ostinato that is incredibly, pervasively common in blues/pop/rock/r&b/hip-hop music, and in modern blues it is a common rhythmic layer, including in the looping example used in Lesson 1 (pulled from the contemporary cultural phenomena of 2024, which for instructional purposes will remain unnamed). For hip-hop fans out there, a tresillo rhythm will be recognizable as the pre-set high hat rhythm for literally everything on your Spotify playlist. It shows up in Faith and Valerie by Amy Winehouse; it is the rapping pulse in Black Eyed Peas Boom Boom Pow; it’s in Royals by Lorde; it’s the kick drum pulse in Thunder by Imagine Dragons; and the list goes on and on.
It is called a 3-3-2 rhythm because if you start with the eighth note subdivision in 4/4 time...
…the tresillio rhythm divides the eighth note subdivision onto groups of 3/3/2. This is often counted as 1-2-3/1-2-3/1-2:
A common melodic interpretation of this rhythm is to arpeggiate the notes of a chord into ascending groups like so. You can hear this exact pattern in the piano part of Coldplay’s Clocks.
This is realized as a percussion or bass rhythm by playing on the beginning of these subdivision groupings.
This is also known as part of the “Bo Diddley Beat,” an R&B syncopated pattern, slightly altered from the clave rhythm, named after (you guessed it) Bo Diddley when he popularized it in his 1954 release (wait for it) Bo Diddley. The “Bo Diddley Beat” is considered a fusion of Afro-Cuban rhythms, Americanized Latin rhythms, and rock music. The reason we’re not talking about the “Bo Diddley Beat” in relation to our unnamed contemporary example is because this 3-3-2 rhythm is only half of the figure that we hear on Bo Diddley. That phrase is followed by accents on 2 and 3 in the following bar, making the full gesture look like this:
In fact, the only discernible difference that I can explain between the Bo Diddley Beat and a Son Clave rhythm (besides the distinction that Son Clave is played on clave in Cuban music, and Bo Diddley played this on rhythm guitar) is how they rest of the instrumentation is positioned around this rhythm, impacting the feel and genre that the resulting definitions live in. A further discussion on the blurry lines between genres will be explored later in this article.
We’re using Tresillo as a defining characteristic of our 12 Bar Blues examples, because, hailing from Cuban Habanero dance music, it translates as “triplet,” as in specifically referring to the 3 side - or the first three strokes - of the Son Clave rhythm, leaving out the second bar of the gesture.
In the D Pentatonic Looping track from Lesson 1, the tresillo rhythm really shines in the bango and string instruments playing this figure:
Syncopated rhythms were made for rhythmic speech building blocks. I prep this pattern with an itty bitty Latin geography lesson, using “Panama” for the sets of three and “Cuba” for the set of two, creating a chant of Pan-a-ma, Pan-a-ma, Cu-ba (but really any rhythmic speech building blocks notated as trip-a-let/trip-a-let/eight-note can be used). We practice just clapping on the underlines, really locking in the feel of the tresillo rhythm, and testing our musical independence by adding in the 12 bar blues progression (I will play it on a bass xylophone while they clap and chant). When they can audiate and stay independent of me is when they are ready to transfer this to the instruments. I have this rhythm notated under general “percussion” in the score, and this is an excellent opportunity to give students arrangement power, asking them to choose which unpitched percussion is going to take this role. If hip-hop is a familiar sound to your students, they may gravitate towards a closed high hat. If Latin-based sounds are more familiar, they may naturally gravitate towards the click sounds in your small percussion collection. Anything that is played by striking will help them kinesthetically maintain the rhythm and lock in wonderfully to the looping track.
Setting Up a Rhythm Section
Tom Dempsey has a great video talking through roles of the rhythm section during a solo section in this video produced by Jazz at Lincoln Center. I like to show this clip and engage the class in a student-led discussion, and make a collective thinking map comparing and contrasting ensemble roles to similar divisions of responsibility within their social community. Would our community work if everyone did the exact same job? What are some roles that need to be “divided and conquered” in daily life? We need to split up and become doctors, mail carriers, teachers, bus drivers, mechanics, etc, to work as a society, and different roles in a music ensemble is no different.
As a class, students will set up our ensemble as a small jazz/blues ensemble (which is pretty close to how we set up anyway, but a discussion of how this works in jazz is appropriate).
The bordun instruments (bass and bass bar) will be placed in the center, anchoring the rhythm and the harmonic foundation.
The rest of our “rhythm section” will be placed right there in the middle around the bass, with players establishing groove on pieces of the set like hi hat and non-pitched percussion, and comping melodic voices will round out the core.
Once the rhythm section roles are locked in, differentiating between this simple Blues progression is elementary. The bass xylophones and bass bar will stay playing 4-on-the-floor tonic and whole note tonic, respectively, while the alto and soprano instruments will expand to open fifths in quarter notes. Glockenspiels (explained next) will take on a melodic ostinato, and unpitched percussion will play the 3-3-2 tresillo pattern.
Think of this arrangement as a diving off point to arranging and improvisation, which will be explored next in Lesson 3. While this article explores how to establish your general music blues ensemble and lock in groove across roles, the foundational possibilities to empower your students’ creative, improvisational, and compositional creativity is now laid out. This initial exploration of a incredibly catchy, record-breaking, genre-bending, and undeniably popular song is the jumping off point to a whole unit of improvisation, and can serve as a locked-in cornerstone that the improvisational results of your students can be grafted onto.
Emulating the Banjo Pattern
The banjo pattern is the main instrument contributing the rhythmic/melodic tresillo ostinato groove that holds the unnamed looping track together, and is notated here:
While this exact notation does not translate well to barred instruments, a modified version for glockenspiel is very achievable and locks in well with the unpitched tresillo rhythm already present in the arrangement:
I encourage you to empower your leaders in to take on this pattern in order to emulate the best part of this song!
Blue Notes and that “Old Country Blues” Sound
I credit the infectious sound of the arrangement we are using to train our students in the 12 Bar Blues to the incredible Rhiannon Giddens who plays fretless banjo and viola, and is the source of the melodic ostinato that is emulated by the glockenspiel part above. In the backing track, Giddens is playing clawhammer style, an older technique than the better-known bluegrass style. Bluegrass pickers wear metal fingerpicks and pluck upwards with their index and middle fingers while plucking downwards with their thumbs. Clawhammer players use bare fingers, plucking downward with their index fingers, which requires a finger position that resembles the back of a hammer. You can see Giddens’ banjo technique in action here. Her command of the fretless instrument shines in the blue notes that cut through the texture in our backing track, capturing the “expressively out of tune” idiom in Blues music.
Preserving the character of Gidden’s banjo playing is the exact reason why I include the modified instrumental version of the not-so-appropriate-for-school (but incredibly worthwhile to capture a relevant and important cultural moment in the music room) studio recording during this activity. I want her expressive riffs and insatiable groove to be grafted on to the experience my students are having, even though her technical mastery is beyond the limits of a general music classroom. Having her recording playing along with my students is an incredibly aesthetic experience, and I want them to feel that and be able to join in at their level.
For a resource in the elemental music and movement community on this “old style” banjo playing and its impacts in American music, try to catch a workshop from Brandi Waller Pace - a another incredible resource in the styles and reclaimed history of the banjo.
Justine Marie Sullivan is an elemental music and movement educator from Denver, Colorado. She holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in Music Education, Performance, and Composition, as well as Orff-Schulwerk Certification. She splits her professional career between instructing in classroom and studio settings ranging from kindergarten through undergraduate music education courses, and in marketing/social media/design projects for local and national music education professional development and advocacy groups, including ACEMM.