Relating Sound & Time

Why does a rhythm pull at you?For decades, Jerry Leake has chased that question inside the traditions that ask it most directly-North Indian tabla, South Indian solkattu, and the drumming of Ghana and Burkina Faso. Relating Sound & Time is what came of it: a 400-page book in two halves, one about what sound does to us, one about how time is built.The first half is a working musician's account of sound itself. A Hindustani singer spends hours onstage tuning four tanpuras before he will sing a note. A guitar student's recital comes apart, and the cause turns out to be his jaw. There are conversations with tabla master Swapan Chaudhuri and with the Dagomba master drummer Dolsi-naa Abubakari Lunna, a chapter on rasa and the scoring of emotion, and an account of possession drumming in Ghana drawn from the author's own journals.The second half turns to time. Nearly two hundred pages of West African, North Indian, and South Indian rhythm theory, laid out as exercises a player can work through-cycles, tihai, jati, cross-rhythm, and the metric relationships that run between one tradition and the next.For percussionists, drummers, composers, and anyone who has wondered why certain sounds refuse to let go.The book's 155 audio examples-two full CDs, every track keyed to the page it illustrates-are available as a free download from the Rhombus Publishing website.