Beat Me Daddy, 27 to the Bar

Avant-garde jazz nowadays makes a lot of noise and a lot of speed, but rhythmically it has scarcely moved out of the '20s; the boys are still thumping along mostly in a 4/4 beat. This old-fashioned conformity bothered Trumpeter-Composer Don Ellis, so he organized a 21-piece band in Los Angeles, beefed up the rhythm section (four drummers, three double bassists), and sent the meter flying. To the modern far-out sound of jazz, he has added an exciting rhythmic pulse by playing in meters with 5, 9, 11, 19 and even 27 beats to the bar. And he makes it sound completely natural.

Fact is, says Ellis, 32, "the odd-numbered meters, which at first seem so exotic and difficult to us, are really very natural and a part of the folk culture of much of the world." It was while he was doing graduate work in ethnomusicology at U.C.L.A. in 1962 that Ellis grasped the jazz potential of the complex, repeated beat cycles underlying Asian and Middle Eastern music. With Indian Sitar Player Hari Har Rao, then a member of the U.C.L.A. music faculty, he formed the Hindustani Jazz Sextet to explore musical passages to India; two years ago, he launched his big band.

Demonic Pitch. Musicians who could play the quirky rhythms of Ellis' arrangements, or even tap their feet to them, were hard to come by. Eventually, he lined up a group, which today includes teachers, studio men, students and one lawyer, that could feel at home with everything from a quasi-classical passacaglia and fugue to raga time. After months of rehearsals, he brought in a score in 3 2/3 time, and the band read it at sight. "That was the turning point," recalls Ellis. "The time barrier had been broken."

Last week the band capped off the first Los Angeles Jazz Festival with an electrifying performance that brought 4,000 jazz buffs in U.C.L.A.'s Pauley Pavilion to their feet, cheering "More! More!" The trim, bearded Ellis lunged about the stage whipping the music to a demonic pitch, molding the arrangements on the spot by cuing his men in and out with shouts and hand signals. Occasionally, he pivoted and loosed a flock of high-flying notes from a specially made four-valve trumpet that enables him to play 24 tones in an octave, rather than the usual twelve.

In the Forefront. The son of a Quaker minister and holder of a degree in composition from Boston University, Ellis served his apprenticeship by playing and writing for groups of every musical stripe from Charlie Mingus and Woody Herman to the New York Philharmonic, with interludes of teaching and organizing jazz happenings. His band currently works only once a week regularly, at a Hollywood spot called Bonesville; between dates, he supports himself by playing studio orchestras and scoring TV sound tracks. Now he has a long string of offers from festivals in Europe and the U.S. He sees himself in the forefront of a revolution in jazz rhythm, predicts that teen-agers will make it a pop revolution as well by learning to dance to his new meters. After all, he says, "the Greeks and Turks and Indians have been doing it for centuries. Why shouldn't we?"

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