>Don’t listen to me, I am supposed to be accompanying you!
As a conductor and director in my experience this is the hardest one for many musicians to learn, and it even goes a bit against the “keep the time is #1“ rule.
As accompaniment, harmony, etc you need to understand who the lead is at any given moment and follow it. If you just keep the time robotically and don’t pay any attention you will destroy any possible magic. If you are homophonic harmony but you are out of time with the lead, it won’t be tight and may be bad (unless a loosely hinged style is what you want). The lead may be taking micro beats of time here and there with the line and you’ll want to follow this.
Even this has nuance though. Sometimes the lead might be taking time (or rushing time) and actually expect you to be keeping time, to stay in the pocket, to give him a landing zone to anchor back to once he’s decided he wants to come back in time on a cadence or a downbeat or something. And you need to know that too, as the lead goes in and out of the pocket what is his intention there?
In this way it’s beautiful how the really best music doesn’t require only experienced musicians, or even musicians experienced with each other (understand each others styles, tastes and intentions) but also requires a level of trust between them to be able to leverage those experiences in a special way. And that could be generalized to other areas of work and life
As a conductor and director in my experience this is the hardest one for many musicians to learn, and it even goes a bit against the “keep the time is #1“ rule.
As accompaniment, harmony, etc you need to understand who the lead is at any given moment and follow it. If you just keep the time robotically and don’t pay any attention you will destroy any possible magic. If you are homophonic harmony but you are out of time with the lead, it won’t be tight and may be bad (unless a loosely hinged style is what you want). The lead may be taking micro beats of time here and there with the line and you’ll want to follow this.
Even this has nuance though. Sometimes the lead might be taking time (or rushing time) and actually expect you to be keeping time, to stay in the pocket, to give him a landing zone to anchor back to once he’s decided he wants to come back in time on a cadence or a downbeat or something. And you need to know that too, as the lead goes in and out of the pocket what is his intention there?
In this way it’s beautiful how the really best music doesn’t require only experienced musicians, or even musicians experienced with each other (understand each others styles, tastes and intentions) but also requires a level of trust between them to be able to leverage those experiences in a special way. And that could be generalized to other areas of work and life