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I GOT RHYTHM, PART 13
Dissecting and rearranging a classic, enigmatic riff
by Jimmy Brown
Senior Music Editor “Downtown” Jimmy Brown is an experienced, working musician, performer and private teacher in the greater NYC area whose mission is to entertain, enlighten and inspire people with his guitar playing.
ONE OF MY all-time favorite songs is “Kashmir” by Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page’s epic masterpiece in DADGAD tuning. One of the things I love about the composition is the intriguing, cyclical rhythmic pattern that begins the song and repeats for the verses — “da-da dat, da-da dat, da-da dat, da-da dat,” etc. That riff offers a great example of some of the very cool and trickysounding things you can do with 16th-note syncopations, which we’ve been exploring in depth recently. In this lesson, I’d like to offer a scholarly analysis of that rhythm and also present what I think are some interesting “spin-off” variations on it that are based on different but similarly cyclical patterns.