Since the music contains so many elements that resist accurate notation, it is probably safe to say that without the "fossil record" of recordings of early jazz our understanding of the style would be very limited, and in fact the limitations of early 20th century      recording techniques present formidable obstacles to research. Tulane professor John Joyce, Jr., who has done extensive transcription work in this area, has written that. "the notation of 'drum' parts in early jazz recordings is particularly challenging, for several reasons. The first is their sheer audibility, which is fitful, at best, on earlier recordings...

The only percussion parts that are clearly audible are such high-pitched sounds as wood blocks, temple blocks, cymbals, and the occasional tom-tom. What are consistently inaudible -- if, indeed, they are being played at all -- are the core instruments of early jazz trap sets: snare and bass drum. This is particularly problematic with recordings of New Orleans bands since New Orleans drummers of the pre-Swing period led' (i.e., kept time) from the snare and bass drum in live performance, reserving such sounds as cymbals, wood block, and tom-tom for accents and stop-time patterns. On early jazz recordings, then, one is left with one of two assumptions: either the drummer is keeping time on snare and bass drum throughout the recording (as he did in live performance) and their frequencies are inaudible, or he is limiting himself to only such high pitched sounds (blocks and cymbals) as can be picked up by early recording apparatus. When, as on many of Oliver's Creole Jazz Band recordings, the drummer keeps constant time with wood block patterns throughout (an acoustical accommodation?), a continuous, even if skeletal, drum part can be accurately notated" (John Joyce Jr., in forthcoming volume in MUSA of transcriptions of the complete recordings of Sam Morgan's Jazz Band).

Since New Orleans drummer Chinee Foster has stated that recording engineers instructed him to "stay off the snare" and that "drums wouldn't record then," so he confined himself to cymbal and woodblocks on early jazz recordings (Chinee Foster interview, June 29, 1960, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University), it seems likely that Joyce's assertion that early New Orleans jazz drummers often played snare drum parts on wood blocks to assure their audibility on sound recordings is correct. For this reason, in the following transcriptions, wood block patterns will be assumed to be synonymous with snare drum patterns.

The issue of how musicians operating outside the bounds of European musical tradition conceived time-patterns is also of primary importance. Musicians who were adherents to European training and musical aesthetics, operating in the "metric" rhythmic system, perceived rhythms as divisive in nature, with shorter notes felt as divisions of a slower underlying pulse. In the metric system, the Tresillo pattern would be conceived as a three-note division of a four-beat measure. Counting four, the percussionist would strike the first note of the pattern on "one," the second note on the upbeat of "two," and the third note on "four," notated as follows:

Here, the three-note Tresillo played against an underlying four beat is felt as an asymmetrical pattern, often described as a "lilting" Latin rhythm. This pattern is actually a syncopated variant of the Cuban habanera rhythm, with the two middle notes of the habanera "tied" together:

The Afro-Cuban tradition, on the contrary, is based on the "additive" rhythm of most non-Western cultures. Where metric rhythm forms shorter (rapid) notes as divisions of a longer (slower) beat, additive rhythm forms longer notes as cumulative fusings of rapid beats. Thus, Cuban negrito bands perceived the three notes of the Tresillo pattern, not as a three-way "splicing" of a four-beat measure, but as irregular cumulative groupings of a rapid underlying pulse. This can be notated as follows:

This may seem like a small distinction, but in performance practice it makes an enormous difference. A perusal of the phonograph recordings from the period of classic 1920s jazz reveals that drummers in particular (and ensembles in general, to greater or lesser degrees) interpreted rhythms as additive in nature, resulting in the distinctive "lope" or "groove" which was to be a unifying factor in jazz styles up to the avant-garde period beginning in the early sixties. In addition to this distinctive "feel," which jazz musicians applied even to the most European of rhythmic structures, early New Orleans jazz drummers often employed figures easily identifiable as Afro-Cuban in origin, such as this example of a pattern which occurs on woodblock in the piano solo section of King Oliver's "I'm Going Away To Wear You Off My Mind.

We see that the pattern is continually moved forward by an eighth-note in each measure, so that by bar four it has come back around to its original placement on beat one, creating a sensation of two meters occurring simultaneously:

As in most early New Orleans jazz, the eighth-notes are weighted slightly differently from each other in what would later be called a "swing" feel, but it is the accents that concern us here. If only the accents are played, then the rhythm is revealed as identical to the Afro-Cuban Tresillo:

In King Oliver's recording of "New Orleans Stomp," a similar pattern is revealed, except the eighth-note displacement occurs in bar two of what is, in this case, a repeated two-bar phrase. It should be noted that, when these types of figures are executed on the snare drum, it is the accents that form the audible outline of the rhythm, resulting in a Tresillo figure in the first bar:

Examples of variations of this pattern can be found in Oliver's recording of "Buddy's Habit" in which the accents in the stream of eighth-notes played in the accompanying banjo figure reveal a bar of three quarter-notes, followed by the Tresillo pattern:

And in Freddie Keppard's recording of "Adam's Apple," in which a bar of "swung" eighth-notes is followed by a bar in which the eighth-note accents reveal yet another Tresillo pattern:

It should be stressed that these repeated rhythmic cells were by no means used throughout every piece. They were generally deployed in trio, bridge or contrasting sections, sometimes in "out" (final) choruses, and appear to have been used as a means of generating additional rhythmic excitement. They do not appear to have been used to consciously replicate actual Afro-Cuban styles of the period, but since these styles were "in the air" during this period, it seems safe to assume that local musicians seized upon them as a means of generating rhythmic interest which would be attractive to dancing couples attending the social and ceremonial functions at which they performed. An additional affinity for these rhythms would presumably have been present in those musicians ("uptown" African Americans and, to some extent, Creoles of Color) who were more likely to have an unbroken cultural connection to these concepts. I absolutely do not mean to imply that this tendency is somehow genetically based, but rather that members of particular cultural groups are likely to be taught things like the generation and interpretation of rhythms as their ancestors were. While 19^th Century New Orleans was less prone to cultural and social apartheid than the rest of the United States, it still seems to me that someone coming of age in a Creole of Color or African American family and social environment would be more likely to interpret even strongly European-influenced forms (such as Sousa marches) in an "additive rhythm" context.

In later periods the swing feel would become ubiquitous, crowding out the more obvious Afro-Cuban rhythmic devices, and yet a case can be made (indeed has been made very persuasively by Christopher Washbume in "The Clave of Jazz") that the underlying rhythmic structure of jazz remains based on these figures, that it influences and shapes the melodic and harmonic content of the music as well, and that it is the inherent tension between the two types of rhythmic conception (the divisive European and the additive Afro-Cuban) that gives jazz its unique flavor.