The Wire's Top 50 Rhythms of All Time

Pheeroan AkLaff on Shelter Craig Harris (Polygram) 1988
Born Paul Maddox, drummer Pheeroan AkLaff is one of the best arguments against the jazz-is-dead pop supremacists. His drumming is informed by the new spaces of free playing, but can work in more inside contexts, the rhythmic backbone of many of the most important black avant garde outfits. His contributions make the crucial difference between good and great (as witnesses of the recent tour by an AkLaff-less Ray Anderson learned). His presence at a gig means 'Go!' His name on an album means 'Buy' (apart from his soul album, which is a dud). (BW)

The Birthday Party "Mutiny In Heaven" Mutiny EP (Mute) 1983
A war between beat and chaos. Also a war between Cave as Milton's Lucifer ranting wildly, and a chorus of good and bad Dead Elvises, whose voice-throbs and hiccups are beginning to possess Cave's singing - not that he does much singing. A Birthday Party arrangement by now was a vastly stretched-out affair, slowed to the point of collapse. But for this they muster the driven togetherness, one last time, of - say - Junkyard's "Hamlet (Pow Pow Pow)". Late great bassman Tracy Pew is the song's centre, with a granite hard ostinato (seven notes, three pitches, lord-knows-how-many-bars) that propels the others into always unsteady unity. (HG)

Art Blakey "I Mean You" Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers With Thelonious Monk (Atlantic) 1958
Blakey knew Thelonious Monk's music better than any drummer, and on what was one of the greatest records either man ever made, he converses with the pianist more closely than anyone ever did. "I Mean You" is played more slowly than in almost any other version, but Blakey's 4/4 has the gathering power of an incoming storm: he improvises a second rhythm against the pulse in the first chorus, and his solo rationalises and celebrates all the quirks in Monk's music. (RC)

Jimmy Blanton & Sonny Greer "Jack The Bear" The Blanton Webster Years (Bluebird) 1940
Nobody remembers bass before Blanton. He dominates this Duke Ellington record with an almost supernatural mastery, colouring the basic 4/4 with all sorts of little added twists, slipping in an extra note or changing the direction of his line without reneging on any of the bassman's duties. As a result, the whole band sounds rhythmically charged. Sonny Greer is seldom regarded as one of jazz's master drummers, but his inevitable steadiness and fine cymbal tones are a modest marvel. (RC)

Paul Bley/Gary Peacock/Barry Altschul "Virtuoso" Virtuoso (Improvising Artists Inc) 1967
One of the free-est and most magnificently abstract (yet ignored) jazz recordings of the 60s. Prefiguring much of the music on the ECM label it eddies and swirls with a shimmering intensity, stated meter not so much abandoned or avoided as genuinely transcended. Like Albert Ayler's Spiritual Unity the rhythm is indefinable, yet undeniable, flowing organically as a result of the unique friction between the minds and bodies of the players. (RS)

Brazil
Latin America and the Caribbean are of course regions rich in musics untainted by modern Europe's insensitivity to rhythm; pop and jazz have frequently gone there to get themselves a fix. To mention just four percussionists from Brazil: Airto Moreira (Bitches Brew), Dom Um Romao (Weather Report), Nana Vasconcelos (ubiquitous) and Cyro Baptista (Cyro, a duet with Derek Bailey on Incus). Watching percussionists of this quality in action shows that it is not enough to twang a berimbau to add rain-forest ambience (an increasingly widespread and irritating habit.) (BW)

James Brown "Funky Drummer" In The Jungle Groove (King) 1969
James Brown's "Funky Drummer" provided late 80s rap with its beat just as Chic's "Good Times" had done for the early 80s. Its shuffling, acoustic feel has a weight which rap quotes like a genuflection to black tradition. A rhythmic genius, Brown goaded his top-notch musicians until they boiled up a new funk. Brown's beat swept Africa as each local rhythm tried to make its own nuances speak to the world (reggae was to sweep it the same way in the late 70s). Brown has the key to a relationship between discipline and spontaneity far beyond pop's usual brittle repetitions, which is why "Sex Machine" is good for the thousandth time while Marvin Gaye's "Heard It Through The Grapevine", for example, palls. (BW)

Cabaret Voltaire "Western Mantra" Three Mantras (Mute) 1980
A remorseless machine-drive dirge. 12 years later it's still as gripping as James Brown, as addictively sickening as a Martin Scorsese film. Cheap drum-box rhythms, distorted and fed through a dark inverted-funk-meets-Strockhausen mentality, create that sense of mechanism rhythmic intoxication so beloved of House-fiends and Technoheads, but also unexpected by-products; claustrophobia, nausea and horror. Human and machine in perfect disharmony. (RS)

Chic "Good Times" Chic's Greatest Hits (Atlantic) 1978
In 1977 bassist Bernard Edwards and guitarist Nile Rodgers - in association with drummer Tony Thompson - introduced a new, hard-edged rhythmic matrix into black dance music, a cork-up-the-arse sound of repression ideally suited to their upwardly mobile image. Early 80s rap provided a dialectical subversion of Chic ideology by using the break of "Good Times" as the rhythm track for its street-conscious message. Rhythm - something to use, not to moralize with. (BW)

Bootsy Collins "Munchies For Your Love" Ahh . . . The Name is Bootsy Baby! (Warner Bros) 1977
Sexiest rhythm slur-slide-spook of all time: stretchin' out with William Bootsy Collins (ahh... the name is an endless mumutation, baby!) in "Munchies" (and to an only slighter lesser extent "What's A Telephone Bill?"). Ahh, how the bass starts out as a mouse squeak burbling in the background of William Winsome weirdo phono-seduction, gradually, er, mounts till it tears through the fabric like an El Lay earthquake tremor, scrunching all before it. It wah-wah's out the sun in eclipse. This is the slow side of the Clinton P(eak)-Funk experience. Bio-logical funk parameters: in Clinton texture and rhythm advance the track simultaneously; solving-dissolving that most ancient philosophical quandary of the supposed body/soul split. (Rhythm sez: "S'about time us guys thought merger, ain't it?"). (IP)

Tom Cora "Burning Hoop" Gumption In Limbo (Sound Aspects) 1991
cf: David Moss or Arto Lindsay or half of the other improvisors in New York (or Manchester for that matter). A sort of broken zig zag rhythm, fluent without being fluid, jerky, angular, narrative. Pinball, video-gaming, decision-making, crossed wires, the limits of coordination, self-contradiction, percussive, interjections, interruptions, misunderstandings, arguments, stupidity. The decision both to make the next step and trip oneself up at the same time. (RS)

Don Covay "It's Better To Have (And Don't Need)" Hot Blood (Mercury) 1974
This record was as epochal, for me, as "Voodoo Chile"; it took me, one summer, one foul swoop, out of rock fandom and into funk worship. Like other records of the time - The Meters, Hamilton Bohannon, Swamp Dogg - you can still hear the ripples and struts of R'n'B influence, it is still raw, in transition, with a bounding, boundless energy. This 45 had the same unpredictable effects on me as Charlie Parker or Jerry Lee Lewis or Black Box had on other generations: not seduction but instant capture. It's obviously not the song or even the voice (and there were far more important Black Music records around - O'Jays, Mayfield, Wonder) - but the rhythm seems able to suggest a whole world beyond - but contained within - itself. (IP)

Culture Club "Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?" Kissing To Be Clever (Virgin) 1982
The boy starts in free time, ooh-ing with himself. Thump, thump: a backbeat that's crisply anonymous, mixed bright, cool and plain, the bass a bubble-up Lover's Rock, a pop reggae almost insulting in its calculated diffidence. No real heat, certainly no dub weight; a certain smug plumpness. Love me - or anyway notice me, George is pleading, his buttery, slightly thin voice pushing out along the lines, suddenly expanding into full tragic plaint. You begin to hear the rhythm section as the object of desire. "Do you really want to hurt me?" Responds the bass, "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn." (HG)

Baby Dodds "Swipesy Cakewalk" Ragtime (Riverside) 1947
A modernist and a staunch traditionalist at the same time, Baby Dodds played New Orleans rhythm in every band he worked for - two-beat figures, press rolls and a sense of a street band marching past. This session with Tony Parenti was a throwback to ancient history, a programme of rags and cakewalks, but Baby's iron grip on the beat gives the music a superb swagger, inflected with woodblock rhythms and cymbal flashes to make the parade fizz. (RC)

Eek-A-Mouse "Wa-Do-Dem" Wa-Do-Dem (Greensleeves) 1982
Tempting to talk about the Mouse in the only language he understands "Ah, wa do dem, ah, wah do dem, a, wa do dem dem dem/ah, wa do dem, ah wa do dem dem dem/ah, me no nu-oh, ah me no no-oh-oh/nah nu-oh ah, me no no-oh-oh", and so on. A beanpole of a man, Ripton Hylton, with a set of tuned bedsprings for a larynx, he flooded a violent and corrupted reggae landscape with his daft charm - all glottal stops, gurgles, bing-bong-boing, exuberance and husky richness, a man humming to himself about nothing much more than the pleasures of being able to hum to himself and make a noise like this. When he wants he takes off into triple time: tongue twisting tangles of syllables for the joy of it. (HG)

Einsturzende Neubauten "Haus Der Lüge" Haus Der Lüge (Some Bizarre) 1990
On this their finest record they move beyond their urban-jungle metal bashing in a bomb-shattered Berlin of the mind, to set up house in some deep primeval pagan forest, vast and dark. The rhythm isn't mock-tribal, it's too simple to owe anything to any version of African-American beat. Throughout the whole first side, tension builds pitilessly; and yet in "Haus Der Luege" itself, all it consists of is Blixa's voice singing a nursery rhyme, and FM Einheit standing like The Man With The Stick banging the floor with a metal pole. You can hear the same taut daring in some of Lydia's spoken word stuff: similarly, in a different universe, in In A Silent Way. It's all discipline, and desolation. (HG)

Marvin Gaye "Let's Get It On" Let's Get It On (Motown) 1972
This (track and eponymous LP) did everything I above subscribe to Covay, but on a sensual, sexual, infinitely slower, subtler level. If Covay was the prise into the skies, this was the heavenly gift of Soul: complex, layered, textural. Not just Gaye's voice and his way with/into an arrangement, but the deep ocean shark-beat of the bass, and Mervin 'Wah Wah' Watson's guitar. I begin to figure the 'wah wah' motif - always important - as a rhythmic figure of absence/presence: of a discreet but engulfing oscillation, a primal ON/OFF switch which echoes everything from walking to...suffice to say that this record WAS my sex education. (IP)

Jimi Hendrix "Voodoo Chile" Electric Ladyland (Track) 1968
The very paradigm of rock's rhythmic seduction of the child - a seduction through the ear. Or the wah-wah that changed my life; the wah wah that conjured up - for an 11 year old - a vague utopian unease. This was literally magic for me - a sound out of nowhere, a technological mirage, a vortex sound: a Coleridge multiplying glass echo, an Escher etch-a-stretch. A supernature - not R 'n' B, not Funk, not HM, but their forms can all be traced like arabesques in the fetid electric air. Probably more damage, more magic, than I still know how to tabulate: rhythm as frenzy, as overmatter, going beyond into ecstasy, loss, abandonment. (IP)

Michael Jackson "Black Or White" Dangerous (Epic) 1991
Actually, almost anything by the Motown aristocracy's own mad Ludwig would do just as well, to make the point about the space he finds - corridors and ballrooms and great sweeping staircases-full, just for himself - in the over-ornate cake-icing Bavarian castles of present-day sculpture-pop. And spins and dips on his live lonesome ownsome, the prior genius of pure body-music as manifested in the voice, with no one to talk to. The facts about "Black Or White" are these: it's discometal, a genre he more or less invented with "Beat It", he's singing for his life, to protect his honour, to declare his politics, it has a bass line like a funky needle-skip on a dust-covered record, and it's affecting because it proves he knows how trapped he is - he's as impassioned as he was on love songs ten years ago, but throws all the technique of passion, the little gasps and screams, at you as if they were easy and meaningless. They are, too, to him. Poor kid. (HG)

Elvin Jones "Impressions" Impressions (MCA) 1961
Elvin's work with John Coltrane offers many epic versions, but this Village Vanguard performance is a particularly concentrated classic: over 14 minutes, the drummer creates a whirlwind of rhythms. As freely as he plays - and by the end, the proscribed roles of snare, cymbals and bass have become protean - there's always a sense of ordered time, opening on the triplet cymbal beat beloved of hard bop drummers and developed, with intense, surging precision, into a wide vista of sound as well as rhythm. Bonus: you can hear Jimmy Garrison's bass, for once. (RC)

Kanda Bongo Man "Amour Fou" Amour Fou (Hannibal) 1983
From the first careening shudder, a shimmering athletico-psychedelic mesh of primary colours and major chords, Soukous-as-HiNRG - nothing new there - but overheated even for Zaire, it takes Sun-studio slapback echo, Diblo's bright guitar, Ray Lema's cheeky keyboard squinches, Domingo Salsero's idiot-precise drumming, KBM's helpless interjections (he almost doesn't get to take part at all, sideline cheerleading apart) and winds the repetitions up to the onset of delirium - like quantum physics, it heats up the whole unit until it breaks up towards a new energy level, guitars run like electrons in highspeed orbit inside the atom. The bass player's name is Du Soleil: "from the sun". (HG)

Eartha Kitt "My Heart Belongs To Daddy" any good Eartha Kitt compilation
A jazz singer becomes a Jazz singer by being able to know where they are in the changes, being able to scat up and down every scale in the book at will. Kitt became Kitt by being funny - which is a matter, as you know, of timing. Maybe only Billie has better timing, but she turns the mouth down at the ends: even so, Eartha's delivery is so languorous, affectless, disgracefully bored, a feline drawl of matchless older-but-wiser lived memory, that when she breaks high and desolate, as in the chorus here - "Yes, my heart belongs to daddy, so I simply couldn't be bad, yes my heart belongs to daddy, da-ra-ra ra-ra-ra ra-ra ryaaah" - the laugh stops in your throat. (HG)

Scott La Faro and Paul Motian "Solar" Sunday At The Village Vanguard (OJC/Prestige) 1961
Bill Evans's trio were all individual masters, but as a unit they seemed to function with one mind. "Solar" is unanswerable evidence of La Faro's command of the bass: he plays incredibly fast, multi-noted lines that resound within the pulse of Motian's deftly-stroked cymbals, and chorus divisions seem to melt in the face of such a sustained, lyrical swing. When they trade eights with Evans at the end, stated time dissolves as in a dream. (RC)

Maa Hawa Kouyate and Soundioulou Cissokho "Tuta Jara" Volume 2 (7008) 1980s
African rhythm's not all drums, the strings - the kora and ngoni/halam - are equally important especially where song (as opposed to dance) is concerned. Soundioulou was an exceptional kora player; modest, minimal, quietly staggering, his accompaniments and brief solos expressing the same rhythmic subtlety and complexity as a six strong drum orchestra. His strings form the heart for Hawa's exquisitely piercing voice and soaring melody rooted in a total grasp of the rhythm, echoing with a thousand miles of desert and bush. (RS)

Gyorgi Ligeti "Atmospheres" Atmospheres (Wergo) 1961
Rhythm? What rhythm? G. says, "it's like the convergence of passing clouds, all to do with mutating formations and mathematical densities of rhythm and how these produce timbre, innit?" Similarly in "Continuum" (for cembalo) the clockwork-toy-plus-amphetamines meter finally leaves the ear not with notes or rhythm but the rattling of fingers on the instruments keyboard mechanism. This man doesn't dance. (RS)

Paul Lovens "Fra Di Noi" Detto Fra Di Noi (Po Torch) 1981
Tempting to describe Lovens's improvisations as 'rhythm as a line', since they have no real beginning or end and are, perhaps, timeless (why, for instance, does this trio tune with Evan Parker and Alex Schlippenbach last 32 minutes?). But a line suggests continuity, seamlessness, and Lovens prefers a continuous babble of incident, rhythm jostled in with colour, texture, noise, movement. One thinks impetus, not beat. (RC)

Malcolm McLaren "Buffalo Gals" Duck Rock (Charisma) 1983
The usual view of McLaren as charlatan-entrepeneur merely repeats his own mythology. Actually, his involvements stand up remarkably well. When punk threatened to turn into grey rockist Puritanism he counter-attacked with Bow Wow Wow, a delightfully trashy counterpart to Peter Gabriel's WOMAD worthiness, bringing all kinds of world rhythms - Burundi, Salsa, Punjabi - into the pop context. His Duck Rock is a masterpiece, a weird combination of HipHop, Cuba and Appalachian mountains that sounds different every time you listen to it. Without the non-musician catalysts like McLaren and James Brown, pop would consist of nothing but Dire Straits, and how many interesting rhythms do they use? (BW)

Machito "Frenzy" Latin Soul Plus Jazz (Caliente) 1957
Ludicrous - horrible recording, thumping riffs, a flash of Cannonball Adderley's alto, and an irrational blast of congas, shakers and what have you, the band are superfluous - the point of the record is this steaming hothouse percussion rhythm finding its own level. And Machito doesn't play on it - there are nine other percussionists. (RC)

Warne Marsh "Jason's Judgement" Two Days In The Life of Warne Marsh (Interplay) 1987
The saxophonist lived under the twin shadows of peer Lee Konitz and teacher Lennie Tristano for almost his entire career, appreciated by few, influencing fewer (exceptions; Braxton, Jimmy Halperin), his material familiar but his conception of rhythm and phrasing restless and extraordinary. Abstract and shifting accents working both inside and outside the rhythm's codes; the simultaneous appearance of flight and stasis, acceleration and deceleration, certainty and doubt. Sometimes he almost seemed to plat backwards. (RS)

Massive "Unfinished Sympathy" Blue Lines (Circa) 1991
Another emblematic - albeit perfect - record. Massive's Blue Lines is a virtual compendium of a young rhythm tyke's 70s-80s listening - Studio One & Joe Gibbs, Blackbyrds & Sugarhill, Billy Cobham & Mahavishnu, et al. It represents all the post-Soul II Soul DIY young production genius scattered around these isles; proving that "dance music" fixations don't lead straight to knee-jerk synth-fart headbanger House. As George Clinton once said: not just knee deep. (IP)

Material (Up River)
How to be free and how to groove: the crucial question of our time. Commerce turns dancing into repetitive work - how to resist without ending up with non-body music? Bill Laswell's Material were one solution in a line that stretches from Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica to Ornette Coleman's Prime Time. Early Material is grim and industrial. One Down is blatantly commercial (Whitney Houston duets with Archie Shepp). Memory Serves and Laswell's Baselines are the best. Since then he's mellowed - using less free jazz, more sumptuous World Music travelogue-productions. (BW)

Munich Machine
Together with Peter Bellotte, Giorgio Moroder pioneered a dramatically mechanical dance music, the idiot commercialism of disco. Munich Machine's A Whiter Shade Of Pale (1978) reached new heights of mercilessly technocratic inanity (with such material freely available in the bargain basements after the disco slump, it was hard to stomach New Order serving up the same beats as youth expression with "Blue Monday" in 1983). Since then, with Reich, Glass and Nyman serving up repetition-as-art, it's always refreshing to hear Munich Machine's trashing monotony - commerce without pretence. And when you're done with Munich Machine, there's always Meco. (BW)

Conlan Nancarrow "Studies For Player Piano" (1940s/80s), Studies For Player Piano I-V (Wergo) 1977-84
Conlan Nancarrow, veteran of the fight against fascism in Spain retired to Mexico and began an eccentric assault on the human limitations of piano-playing that feels more and more crucial to the development of scored music. His "bionic boogie" is made by punching holes in a player-piano roll, effecting rhythmic juxtapositions and patterns that are too much for a human player to conceive or act on: steampunk futurism. The human groove and the classical machine fuse in forensic glitterbang. Thanks to Henry Kaiser (among others) this astonishing music is now available on the Wergo label. (BW)

Augustus Pablo King Tubby Meets The Rockers Uptown (Clocktower Records) 1976
One of the odder elisions of punk was the assumed comradeship with reggae. Reggae was Faith, punk was Nihilism; on a cod-mystical level. Rasta was potentially as alienating to dole queue brats as anything by Yes. But for such a dubiously patriarchal music, what made reggae magnetic as music was its majestic FLUIDITY. Reggae was bodymusic, played live, at gigs, it was like a tai chi warm-up for the shitstorm ahead. My favourite reggae hails from that time. King Tubby Meets... is still a shocker today, a warped, clanging, metallic-edged warpdrive of a record, a hymn turned inside out. As with Lee Perry - like George Clinton or James Brown - it's the legacy as much as individual records. Perry's one of those people who make records where a single cymbal sound can betray his touch, a few seconds of rhythm texture can spell out the producer's signature. Rhythm as the key that unlocks: an intelligence a VISION which guides rather than simply anchors a music. (IP)

Primal Scream "Higher Than The Sun" Screamadelica (Creation) 1991
Somewhere I should nominate a very obscure Chicago House record to back up the surrounding points. But in sheer terms of alchemical excitement I go for the long remixes by The Orb and Andy Weatherall of Primal Scream. These do everything for me that punk, in actuality, rarely did: simplistically put, they combine whitepunksondope stroppiness with the discrete jouissance of 'black' polyrhythms. You can hear everything from Funkadelic to Pablo (literally) mixed in here; higher than the sun. (IP)

Ornette Coleman/Prime Time "Song X" Jazzbuhne Berlin '88 (Repertoire) 1988
Ornette's own obscure pronouncements concerning Harmolodic Theory notwithstanding, his main contribution still lies in freeing rhythm. Here his saxophone is less dominant than usual, just another voice in the hallucinogenic mix of electric guitars and percussion. The instruments enter, each suggesting their own patterns and tempos which merge, drift and mutate throughout. Denardo's drumming is extraordinary: intuitively finding logic in the most obscure orbits and pulses. Miraculously, clear and coherent patterns and multidimensional masses form, suggesting that the possibilities of rhythm in today's music has barely even begun to be addressed. (RS)

Max Roach "Valse Hot" Jazz in 3/4 Time (Emarcy) 1957
Bop's grandmaster didn't much like the idea of an album in 3/4, and this Sonny Rollins original is probably the only one on the record that sounded just right. But it swings off Roach's distinctive snare sound, and there's a little rhythmical flurry in the theme which, by the end of a long track, Roach has thought about and interpolated into a longform drum part that is superbly propulsive, building to a furious closing solo. Titan at work. (RC)

Roxy Music "The Bogus Man" For Your Pleasure (EG/Island) 1973
Important not just for its own glint, but for Eno's comment that it was inspired by the "open-ended stuff Can were doing" which also led me to them. "The Bogus Man" still sounds eerie, otherwordly. At its heart is - what else? - a wah-wah chicken-scratch guitar motif, with the bass and synth canoodling around each other like Barbarella dolls in some SF sex ether. It is rock-dub before its time, gradually striping away each component right down to the rhythm plod. Hypnotic trance muzak: rhythm/texture like the counterpoints of mind/body - their echo-work, knot, current. (IP)

Run DMC with Aerosmith "Walk Tiny" Raising Hell (London) 1986
Simple, brutal, a record that altered the times around it. The usual line is that the Hollis crew saved the tired old 70s rockers, that rap rescued metal - truth is that both needed the other, though it's notable that it was Run and DMC who realised this first (third time of asking, mind: there'd been a rap-rock track on both previous LPs). Rap had the urgency metal - or rather 'Smith's own post-Stones surly R&B - has, an operatic goof-off hysteria that would help Public Enemy bringing the noise, punting everything into a new ballpark. Together, black and white teams produce a slippy cross-ply of slack guitar grind and plosive beatbox: it wasn't cool, but it was new. (HG)

Sex Pistols "Anarchy In The UK" Never Mind The Bollocks (Virgin) 1976
The cliché about punk was that it was fast - The Sex Pistols gave an impression of speed because they sang about it, because they hated the stately poses of stadium rock, because Rotten's singing was so urgent; actually they played quite slowly. Paul Cook is a great drummer (the "can't play" stuff was a cruel put-on - and a pose - swallowed by the gullible - Mekons etc), producing a disgusted flurry that sacrificed muso-clarity for texture. Cook, with Steve Jones (bass was irrelevant), delivered a rhythm that sounds like sex (which, given their anti-sex stance, was hilarious). (BW)

Sali Sidibe "N'Daya International" N'Daya International (Camera) 1990
I chose the title track of Salimata's album, but it could be any track or hers, or by Bintou, Kagbe of Coumba Sidibe for that matter. This was Wassoullou style from Southern Mali and Guinea; a fertile contemporary music uniting traditional and modern, acoustic and electric, into a hypnotic, intoxicating brew drawing on a variety of West African and occasionally Western sources. Deep, raw, explosive trance music, almost with a Chicago R'n'B edge. (RS)

Sun Ra "Purple Light" Purple Light (A&M) 1980
Criticised by those who fetishize the random as an index of creativity, Sun Ra's return to swing in the 80s did not mean abandoning his unique stress on multi-rhythmic activity - at shows hour-long percussion workouts would precede any melodic explorations. Ra layers polyrhythms until the choices left soloists became so varied they can play freely. His rhythmic colloquy is a glimpse of utopian non-hierarchical communication. It is also a crowd-pleasing ritual. (BW)

June Tabor "Queen Among The Heather" Airs & Graces (Topic) 1976
Cold, dark, hard, cruel: she may be an Oxford librarian, but she knows how to find the raw ugliness at the heart of songs that barely exist even as memories. Part of the power comes from the scale she uses: with a sinister and resonant accidental just where you weren't expecting it. But the rest comes from the way she carries the tune, free-style alone, across a pulse that's more breathing time than counting time - so that it hangs in air from phrase to phrase, bleak and dreadfilled, using the turns and grace-notes to twist the knife. It's a boy-meets-girl boy-has-girl song, and the darkness is all her interpretation (you could just as well do it as cheeky lads' fun). What's it about? Using time and pitch together, ruthlessly. (HG)

The Todd Terry Project "Bango (To The Batmobile)" The House Sound Of Chicago (London) 1988
This could be any of many unselfconsciously brash crashing Chicago House tracks, as promised. Why I nominated this was the presence of shadowy NY rhythm-twister maverick Arthur Russell - a name obsessive label-readers will know all the way back to the thunderous "Kiss Me Again" by Dinosaur (Sir, 1978) itself a contender for this list. (IP)

Edgard Varèse "Ionisation" Boulez Conducts Varèse (Sony) 1931
Edgard Varèse wrote nothing but masterpieces, frequently short, always shattering. No-one else registered futurism in sound with such rhythmic ferocity. As in painting, the rest of the 20th century classical music sounds like a mere echo of the pioneering abstractions of the 20s and 30s. Hyperprism (1923) and Ionisation propose a new syntax that balance raw sound blocks rather than fiddling with theme-and-variations (a practice that should have gone out with the periwig). Percussive sound was freed from illustration: no wonder Eric Dolphy, Pierre Boulez, John Cage, Frank Zappa, Tony Oxley and Joe Zawinul took note. (BW)

Various Artists Voices of the Rainforest (Rykodisc) 1991
Not many human musicians on this eavesdropping collection of sounds recorded in Papua New Guinea, but those who do appear singing, playing and working against the backdrop of the forest with its million birds and insects sounds in rare accord with their environment; a Jew's Harp player jams with the sounds of the forest, listening, reflecting its sounds. The fundaments of rhythm - cycles of day and night, speech, walking and working, revealed in a context anything but fanciful or abstract. (RS)

Weather Report "Mysterious Traveller" Mysterious Traveller (CBS) 1974
One of the only interesting Desert Island Discs selections was in fact Eno's, a virtual micro-history of 20th century rhythm. One of his more laudable choices was Miles's "He Loved Him Madly" - which I thought of placing here; but to be strictly accurate, Weather Report were my teen conduit to jazz, into Miles and beyond. They made me realise that adult 'sophistication' needn't be arid; that 'serious' music too could be "polyrhythmatic with a big bass boom" (as A Tribe Called Quest recently put it), could sway me away from the (g)runty economy of Rock, into longer transports. Their later stuff may be a confused melange of pop-jazz, Pastorious's ego problems and World Muzak, but early on they were an inspirational soundburst. (IP)

Tony Williams "Out To Lunch" Out To Lunch (Blue Note) 1963
"This is a recurring figure around an improvised chorus. This figure, in 5/4, sets the rhythm section up with a definite solo feeling. In the improvised sections, the rhythms overlap. Notice Tony. He doesn't play time, he plays. Even though the rhythm section breaks the time up, there's a basic pulse coming from inside the tune" (Eric Dolphy). We hear you, Eric. (RC)

Z'EV "Shake Rattle & Roll" One Foot In The Grave (Touch) 1981
Who else calls up Gods? z'ev uses his array of hanging metal objects to invoke moods which are more than just moods; to charge the airspace he's working in with the spirit he's saluting. This is an old idea - maybe the oldest - in drum-lore, but almost everyone else has lost sight or sound of it, behind a tradition of art-directed technique. A torrent, a clatter, a tumult, a vast, endless ringing; you barely get the idea on record. No surprise: as he says; "With recorded sound, the speaker cone is all you hear, and all you hear is cardboard." (HG)