P-Funk Rhythm Theory
The Mathematical & Spiritual Virtues Of ‘The Pocket’
As a member of the funk powerhouse Parliament Funkadelic, Danny Bedrosian is no stranger to swung grooves, wonky rhythms and the other ingredients of break-neck beats. In this interview, he explains ‘the pocket’: one of the secrets to the P-Funk groove.
Like many musical stories, this one begins with James Brown, who Danny Bedrosian first saw at the age of eight or nine. “My Dad brought me to see James Brown, and I remember him saying to his band on stage, ‘keep it in the pocket, keep it tight, keep it in the pocket’ and it just drove me to figure out what that meant.”
Even at that tender age — long before he joined the hallowed P-Funk roster as keys player for George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic — Bedrosian was no newcomer to musical theory. By his own admission, he was “reared” to be a concert pianist by his Armenian parents, so he had already learned some aspects of what the pocket was from playing orchestral music and hearing traditional Armenian folk. “A lot of that stuff came from me playing Beethoven as a kid, even though I couldn’t tell you what it was when I was younger. But I grew up with it and I could feel it, and I knew exactly what it was when I felt it.” recalls Danny.
Terminology
So, what is ‘the pocket’, and how is it defined? Danny describes it thus: “The pocket is the pulling back of the backbeat to create a more funky, kind of limping feel to the way the groove moves.” Using the example of a jazz bass-line played on an upright bass, he continues, “you can picture it as ‘walking’ bass, where all the notes align within the same rhythmic parameters. But when you have the pocket being applied, that downbeat has more of a stagger, or it lasts a little bit longer within the framework of what is considered one musical measure, whether it’s a quarter note, eighth note, half note, or whatever. Those notes end up being stretched as far as they possibly can without going into the next beat. At that very last moment, you create that pocket, that pull-back.”
“When you have the pocket being applied, that downbeat lasts a little bit longer within the framework of what is considered one musical measure.” — Danny Bedrosian
Other P-Funk alums have embraced the mathematical nature of the pocket, as Bedrosian explains, “Cordell ‘Boogie’ Mosson, who was a long-time bass player in Parliament Funkadelic, used to describe the pocket in terms of looking at the period of a musical measure on a graph, where there are a million places that you can land the beat within the parameters of that actual measure, without being too early or too late. The way that you can stretch the time between beats to the point where, with P-Funk music specifically, the beat comes at the last possible moment before it would be considered late, almost to the point where it is late to someone who is very metronomical. As long as you can maintain that within each beat, it can be a really beautiful pocket that transports people to places that they’ve never gone to before — both the audience and musicians. It really does have a mathematical and a spiritual side to it.”
An extension of the pocket is the concept of ‘the one’ — the first beat in the bar — and specifically when to play it, and with what emphasis. The track ‘Cold Sweat’ by James Brown is slated by Bedrosian and other musicologists as one the first modern funk songs, and one of the earliest examples of the pocket being used in modern music. “In ‘Cold Sweat’, the one is emphasised more than the rest of the groove. After that first ‘bam’ comes the backbeat, which is the second beat in the bar, which is also heavily emphasised. You’re hearing this emphasis on the one with the backbeat deep in the pocket, so the one and the two have serious prominence within the groove. Fast forward to P-Funk — our sub-genre of funk — and the one and the backbeat pocket are both emphasized to the highest regard.”
Feeling & Learning The Pocket
“The pocket is completely 100% feel oriented,” says Danny, and a lot of P-Funk’s trademark rhythms can be traced to the rhythmic feel of one of the band’s originators — and Danny’s personal mentor — Bernie Worrell. “Bernie was the original keyboard player for Parliament Funkadelic, and he is cited as the chief architect of the type of pocket that P-Funk works with. Cordell ‘Boogie’ Mosson pointed to Bernie as the one who really started it all for them in terms of how they looked at the pocket: where to put the one and where to put the back beat. With Bernie, it all literally came from his hips and his fingers — how he moved, and how he felt each note.”
And, though Bernie Worrell is sadly no longer alive, his influence lives on today through the material of George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, who continuously tour to packed houses around the world. “When we’re on stage, and everyone is hitting the same pocket,” says Danny, “it’s one of those things when you feel like ‘oh it’s all fitting right now’. When every single piece of the band is completely in a perfect cycle, everybody’s feeding everybody, and the rhythm is doing what it’s supposed to do naturally, it’s an incredible moment. That’s the part with the pocket that is less music theory, less maths, and more ‘spiritual’, or whatever you want to call it.”
While there is some difference of opinion among musical types as to whether the pocket can be learned, Danny’s viewpoint is optimistic. “A lot of people believe in the tenet that you can either hear and play the pocket, or you simply can’t. I agree with that for the most part, except that I think a person who has a basic idea of the concept can improve their ability. Basically, if you can figure out how to feel the pocket, then you can learn how to play it — it’s like dancing.” Perhaps the hardest part in personal pocket improvement is letting go, says Danny. “As long as the learner approaches the pocket with the same open mind that, say, a classical musician would approach learning a new piece, it’s all good. You have to completely surrender yourself to the music.”
“To feel the pocket, all that’s required is listening.” — Danny Bedrosian
The Pocket In Electronic Music
Speaking about the pocket in non-instrumental music, Bedrosian acknowledges the challenges in the early days of rhythmic machines. “I think the first incarnations of electronic music-making devices were mostly what would be considered ‘funk-less’ or ‘pocket-less’, although there were exceptions, like the Linn Drum and suchlike. The sampling era brought pocket back to electronically created music, allowing it to feel the same way.” Danny again uses another James Brown song as an example, “If you have a sample of ‘Funky Drummer’ in your song, you know that the pocket is there and it’s going to be there whether it’s a sample or the real thing. But, when making beats from scratch, the onus of making the machine have an organic feel is on the programmer. The operator has to have the wherewithal, the knowledge and the desire to inject that human feel into their music.”
There are of course countless examples of electronically made music that carries the hallmarks of the pocket — think J Dilla, Just Blaze and entire tomes of music such as Detroit Techno, where Motown roots rarely lay deep behind the electronic facade. Danny adds, “you heard it in some of the music erroneously called ‘neo soul’, where you had live drum beats mixed with electronic instrumentation. But in those cases, the programmer had a working knowledge of pocket on an electronic level, so they could create beats that are wholly electronic, but which had some, if not all, of the characteristics of good pocket in organic music.”
From Folk To Funk
As for how the pocket manifests itself in Danny’s keys playing, he stresses the importance of the ensemble playing as one and concentrating on every note, moment to moment. And it’s not just playing the P-Funk. “In Armenian, Arabic or Persian folk music,” remarks Danny, “a vocalist might sing a phrase that will pull the whole band back so far that they’d all have to be back on the one so deep in the pocket because of how that line was delivered.”
In the case of George Clinton — hands down one of the funkiest humans ever — the cues come from a variety of sources. “George will signal where in the pocket he wants you to play all the time, although it could be with a hand gesture, or a clap, or a walk, or with the back of his right foot, or with the microphone. He’ll do it with any number of different movements and motions, which you as the player — especially the rhythm section — has to follow. Period. If you don’t, then you’ll get caught up and have to remedy yourself really quickly — if you know how!”
“But when we’re all in the pocket, we definitely feel it when it’s good and when it’s right. And by extension, the audience feels it — either viscerally from the players if they’re sensitive to it, or from the eyes and the faces of the players — and that makes them happy. To feel the pocket, all that’s required is listening.”
Danny Bedrosian has has been a permanent fixture in the George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic band since 2004, and takes his Novation Bass Station II with him everywhere he goes.
The latest album with his band Secret Army is EIGHTFINITY. Check it out on Spotify here.
To hear his experimentations with the pocket in electronic music, check out his 2015 album The Clock, where he deliberately programmed his beats with the pocket at the forefront.
