In the world of jazz, the word “swing” was typically used to describe the cohesive rhythmic sense of a skilled band. This claim checks out too, as the term ‘groove’ is often associated with musical performances that make people want to move or dance. In fact, according to Barry Kernfeld, when a song or performance “has or achieves groove”, this usually means that it has the ability to compel the body to move. It wasn’t until the 1990s that musicologists and other scholars have started to analyze the concept of ‘groove’, suggesting that it’s an understanding or feel of rhythmic patterning and an emotion-driven sense that results from carefully arranged rhythmic patterns that act collectively to stimulate dancing, head-nodding, or foot-tapping in listeners.Īs such, connecting the ‘groove’ of music to dance is inevitable. If we step back and look at ‘groove’ from an ethnomusicological point of view, we’ll find that Feld (1988) had a broader definition of the term as “an unspecifiable but ordered sense of something that is sustained in a distinctive, regular and attractive way, working to draw the listener in”.
![groove music won t play groove music won t play](https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/articles/03pbyciR6S4C0qQ36Kruu69-1.fit_scale.size_1028x578.v1569487737.jpg)
It’s also an essential feature of popular music, present in various genres including jazz, salsa, soul, hip hop, rock, R&B, funk, and fusion.
![groove music won t play groove music won t play](https://s3.amazonaws.com/neowin/news/images/uploaded/2017/07/1501347596_groove_music_story.jpg)
![groove music won t play groove music won t play](https://www.digitalcitizen.life/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/groove_music_6.png)
It’s a quality of continuously repeated rhythmic units, formed through the interaction of the instruments in a band’s rhythm section (such as drums, keyboards, guitar, and electric bass or double bass). As I mentioned above, ‘groove’ is an effect that you sense when a pattern changes in a propulsive rhythm. Now, let’s go a bit deeper and explain what ‘groove’ means as a “feel”.