74,000-year-old site in southern India, match those used in Africa in the same period.

https://vedanta.org/2005/monthly-readings/native-american-spirituality-a-vedantic-view/

Don Miguel Ruiz Jr. on Self Mastery with Lewis Howes

 

 

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A polyrhythm is the use of two or more rhythms played simultaneously, with one of the rhythms subdivided into a number of beats different from the “normal” number of subdivisions one would have in a measure of music. Ex. 1: three-over-two polyrhythm In this example, the upper pattern plays three beats in the same amount of time that the lower pattern plays two beats. This creates a rhythmic tension, that can also be expressed mathimatically: if you divide three by two, you get a fraction instead of a whole number. Ex. 2 :  four-over-three polyrhythm Here, the upper pattern plays four beats in the same amount of time that the lower pattern plays three beats. Again, the patterns don’t divide into whole numbers. Ex. 3 : four over two–not a polyrhythm Here the beats come together on the grid, and produce a whole number when divided, so this is not considered a polyrhythm.

...it’s necessary to define “polyrhythm” ... Understanding the definition gives us direction in how to achieve the grooves that are used in most Sub-Saharan traditional music, arguably some of the most rhythmically interesting and danceable music in the world.

http://blog.dubspot.com/polyrhythms-put-hands-together/

Polyrhythm in Jazz

Jazz was one of the first Western music traditions to embrace polyrhythms, taking cues from African drumming and singing traditions and blending it with Western music sensibilities.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/making-sense-of-polyrhythms/

Ragtime was also a modification of the march style popularized by John Philip Sousa, with additional polyrhythms coming from African music.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragtime

Ragtime is primarily a solo piano style and was the immediate precursor to jazz. 1.     It originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 2.     It consists of each hand doing something different: a.     The left hand plays a steady, almost march-like succession of alternating bass notes and chords in a steady "oom-pah, oom-pah, oom-pah, oom-pah" fashion. b.    The right hand plays syncopated melodies in a "ragged" fashion (hence the name "ragtime"). 3.     Ragtime is primarily an African American invention and was a source of pride to African American composers, musicians, and listeners. 4.     One of ragtime’s inventors and most important pianists and composers was Scott Joplin.

Ragtime really isn't jazz since it rarely includes improvisation. However, it was the immediate precursor of jazz.

1.       For an excellent example of ragtime, listen to Scott Joplin’s "Maple Leaf Rag" on the Instrumental History of Jazz and/or "The Entertainer" by clicking below.

Audio Snippets

The Entertainer - John Arpin

http://www.jazzinamerica.org/LessonPlan/5/1/250

Maple Leaf Rag Played by Scott Joplin - YouTube

Ragtime, a precursor to jazz and relative of the blues, commonly considered the first purely American style of music, sparked a craze in the Progressive Era, to the dismay of those with more conventional musical sensibilities.

In researching the origin of ragtime and reactions to this new genre of music – which ranged from the equivalent of up-turned noses to full-blown alarm – I was struck by how much the criticism sounded like concerns to the advent of other revolutionary forms of popular music, particularly rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s and rap in the ‘90s.

What was the reaction to this new music?

In 1909, that same St. Louis Dispatch article declared ragtime dead, calling it a “mere empty rhythm, uninformed by a single musical idea,” though in its heyday, “millions of people, probably of every race on earth, have felt the current of their blood swiftly accelerate and their feet temptingly quickened by its pulsating rhythms.”

Predictions of the demise of ragtime coincided with its peak – and fears of its corruptive influence. The overwhelming appeal of the music meant, for many critics, that it just couldn’t be good – let alone moral. In 1908, The Violin World magazine, in response to a reader’s curiosity about this new genre, compared ragtime to “the cheap popular novel,” both of which “may be vicious, but of recent years the tendency has been to make them innocuous, so that moral objections no longer hold.”

Ragtime was considered low because it joyously, shamelessly appealed to the body rather, according to critics, than the spirit or the mind. Often these complaints were lodged in blatantly racist language and imagery, including frequent references to the jungle and voodoo and primitive sensuality – much like how critics of the cakewalk compared it to an African orgy.

Ragtime, rock and rap

“Mass produced popular music, of course, never disappeared from American life,” Mooney wrote, “and the genres that eventually replaced ragtime and jazz, such as rock ‘n’ roll and rap, would have been just as upsetting, if not more so, to the traditionalists who denounced [those] ubiquitous creations.”

A quick search in the ProQuest Historical Newspapers database uncovers abundant examples of how rock and rap indeed upset later generations of traditionalists who expressed many of the same charges of lowness and moral depravity of new genres of popular music.

Consider this 1956 article from the New Journal and Guide7 called “Rock ‘n Roll Beat Irks People the Nation Over,” featuring objections to this “new” craze from assorted experts, including Mitch Miller, “one of the canniest musicians in the industry” who complained that when “white musicians began to pick up the beat (a syncopated rhythm, in which the second and fourth beats are heavily stomped out) it took on a ridiculous frenzy.”

In the same article, a Denver DJ said, “Perhaps the most hopeful thing about Rock ‘N’ Roll is that it’s so bad. It cannot endure indefinitely,” and professor of psychiatry Dr. Jules Masserman called it “primitive quasi-music that can be traced back to prehistoric cultures.”

Two years later, The New York Times8 printed an in-depth report on this “fad” called “Why They Rock ‘n’ Roll – and Should They?” which wondered “is this generation of teenagers going to hell?” and included a quote from Frank Sinatra: “[Rock ‘n’ roll] is sung, played and written for the most part by cretinous goons and by means of its almost imbecilic reiteration, and sly, lewd, in plan fact, dirty lyrics.”

And by the 1990s, traditionalists were directing their outrage at the latest form of pop music – rap. As early as 1991, The Globe and Mail9 was predicting “The Last Days of Rap” even as that same year NWA’s first album became the country’s bestseller. “This kind of consumption,” the article’s author David Samuels warned, “of racist stereotypes, of brutality toward women or even uplifting tributes to Dr. Martin Luther King is of a particularly corrupting kind.”

https://www.proquest.com/blog/pqblog/2018/Ragtime-Rock-n-Roll-and-Rap.html    

Meet Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the black woman who invented that rock and roll sound ...

https://splinternews.com/meet-sister-rosetta-tharpe-the-black-woman-who-invente-1793846537

https://www.pbs.org/video/american-masters-watch-sister-rosetta-tharpe-godmother-rock-roll/

Sister Rosetta Tharpe - Rock Me.

One of her first recordings on October 31, 1938, aged 23.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25m8kcubLAo

"Rock Me" by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a gospel song originally written by Thomas Dorsey as "Hide Me in Thy Bosom". Tharpe performed the song in the style of a city blues, with secular lyrics, ecstatic vocals and electric guitar.^[26] She changed Dorsey's "singing" to "swinging," and the way she rolled the "R" in "rock me" led to the phrase being taken as a double entendre, with the interpretation as religious or sexual.^[27] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_rock_and_roll

The Story Of Sister Rosetta Tharpe 01

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuVzm86oB1Y

Polyrhythm music contains the fractal qualities of self-similarity, scaling, and fractional quantity(beats of rhythm/beats of rhythm = fraction).

3/2 = 1.5 fractional quantity. polyrhythm = multiple simultaneous fractional rhythm.

Polyrhythms are especially common in traditional African and Indian music, with the Pygmies particularly renowned for their complex polyrhythms.

https://bouncemetronome.com/video-resources/polyrhythms

of India" = "he found widespread use of fractal geometry only in Africa and southern India". 

Polyrhythmic music (similar simultaneous rhythms at different scales):

The 3/2 polyrhythmic music is very similar to the same chain (self-similarity) pattern at different sizes (scaling) with fractional (1.5) beat/rhythm.

Polyrhythm (in funk/soul) of Sly and the Family Stone "In Time".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mld7eSaydI

“Dance To The Music” ...The polyrhythms and African bell patterns.

https://songmango.com/dance-to-the-music-sly-and-the-family-stone-review/

Play media

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/Polyrhythm4c3.theora.ogv