The Wire's Top 50 Rhythms of All Time

PHEEROAN AkLAFF

"Shelter" (1988), from Craig Harris: Shelter

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" (1983), from Mutiny EP (Mute)

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" (1958), from Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers With Thelonious Monk (Atlantic)

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" (1940), from The Blanton Webster Years (Bluebird)

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" (1967), from Virtuoso (Improvising Artists Inc)

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 (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" (1980), from Three Mantras (Mute)

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)