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There was a moment where I began paying more conscious attention, with the advice of John Stubblefield, to the structural function of breathing in music. He urged me to concentrate more on removing my jaw from the mouthpiece and breathing before I played a phrase and we watched together some videos of some of the masters playing - Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Johnny Griffin - and I saw it.

As I was refining my own discipline in this area on the horn, I began to explore the role of breath-thinking in music, the conscious development of which I think can be heard most clearly in the work of Charlie Parker (whom I feel to be an innovator in this ) and furthermore continued in the improvisations of Fats Navarro, Miles Davis, Oscar Pettiford, and John Coltrane (especially in the 50's) among others.

Breathing directly with the pulse just proceeding a phrase not only assists wind players in their collaboration with the rhythm section, but I think is one of the important invisible (and usually neither notated nor mentioned) and defining elements in the logic of the shaping of musical sounds.

I even began to think I could find this breath-thinking in some of Monk's writing, such as in the first 4 or 5 measures of Evidence :

Evidence is in 4/4, but the breath that would most emphatically support the melody line would happen in 3/4. That became something to think about.

In the explorations that led to the composition COVERT, I was thinking about the two faces a core pulse can take in relation to the fundemental polyrhythm of 2:3 :

3:2

3 triplet quarters : 2 QUARTER NOTES

2:3

2 dotted half notes : 3 QUARTER NOTES

The same rhythmic melody is happening, but at two different tempos, with each hinging off a common pulse (drawn here as a quarter note).

Both of these hemiolas are active in the formation of the sound of COVERT with a core riff stated at 3:2 and the bass sounding at 2:3.

The riff is this 4/4 pattern:

converted to triplets (3:2):

The breaths land here and help lock the triplet pattern with the quarter note pulse:

Each bass phrase ends on these breath points, which are also functioning as downbeats to the entrances of each phrasing of the riff. The anacruces leading up to these points consist of dotted quarters (2:3).

Here's the weave of the first 4 measures:

It took some time to find the right melodic tension for this . I was thinking about a conversation I'd once had with Marvin Blackman where he'd mentioned that bebop wasn't really in 4/4, but that the 4/4 was something superimposed over the other rhythms. I though about superimposition when I tried draping a 12 bar blues over this pattern. I like how it worked out. There are 3 melodic parts: the riff, the bass, and a third melody that weaves in between.

On the recording of this we did on which way what, as there are only bass and saxophone, these parts are implied.

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