A battery of percussionists, glistening with sweat, started pounding out waves of rhythm that brought hundreds of guests, draped in elaborate kente cloth, to their feet.
Mr. Williams unspooled at length in a few places, making his soloing rise continuously through a tune, improvising waves of rhythm through the bar lines.
Much of the effect is psycho-acoustic: on the page, the strongly rhythmic figures are melodically and harmonically simple, but as the lines move out of phase the overtones take on a life of their own, creating waves of rhythm and melody that are not in the printed score, but are this music's lifeblood.
Steve Reich's "Drumming" (1971), in which the four percussionists played eight bongo drums lined up in a row, created hypnotic, overlapping waves of rhythms and riffs.
A computer was used to record and analysis the beat to beat variability of consecutive R wave of sinus rhythm.
Despite the choppy footage throughout the roughly 30 minutes of unedited film, there is something sacred about the way in which the dancers, both men and women, ride a wave of soundless rhythm.
They promise you a local experience you Wen't find anywhere else in Miami.
While surely both require rigorous training, practice and precision, the moment the soccer player steps onto the field and the moment the dancer hits the dance floor, any ripple of fear is taken over by a swift, surmounting wave of freestyle rhythm.
Chicago Tribune s Lynn Van Matre praised the album's "wave of funky rhythms" and called for more apppreciation of Gabriel's talent, but noted that there were no tracks as stand out as "Biko", a single from his third eponymous album Peter Gabriel or "Melt".
There is more than a hint of tin-eared snobbery in today's champions of pop song standards: lurking behind their paeans to the "golden age of popular song" is the assumption that melodic sophistication and lyrical wit disappeared from pop music the day rock 'n' roll blazed in, riding a wave of African-American rhythm.
