The Importance of Swing

I'm not a classical player as you will soon see. I don't play that well, but that's what they needed at the time. But I found myself in a teacher role very often because they said, how do you play this? Where does this come from? How does this work? So I was explaining a lot. And one of these things was this notion of swing. It's this distinctive jazz rhythm that has this wonderful, danceable kind of energy to it. Jazz tunes are written like this with straight eights or straight eighth notes or quarter notes. Those eighth notes are actually what we call triplets. The emphasis is on the, what we call the offbeat.