> What is a breakbeat? Simply put, it’s a beat that’s found in a song’s drum break, a section in which other instruments fall silent to leave the drums and percussion playing on their own. The term ‘break’ refers to the notion that these drum parts are found during breaks in the music; gaps in the arrangement where the drums sound by themselves.
These drum breaks would typically be found in funk, soul, jazz and R&B recordings, most of which centred around vocal arrangements and varied instrumentation – however, many tracks would feature four- or eight-bar segments, often found in the transition between verse and chorus, in which the drums played a groove solo. For enterprising hip-hop producers and DJs in the ’70s, the discovery of these breaks on vinyl records presented an opportunity to repurpose existing rhythms to their own musical ends. It was a way for young, cash-strapped musicians to work with great drummers without the need to source session musicians or pay studio fees. This simple act of musical resourcefulness changed the course of musical history.
ENTER THE B-BOYS
Though they’re now associated with dance music genres like jungle and drum & bass, the use of breakbeats was pioneered by those working in hip-hop, and breaks have remained a staple element of rap instrumentals over the decades. Although breaks are now mostly used as samples, they were first used in live performance by hip-hop DJs accompanying rappers and breakdancers.
Clive Campbell, aka DJ Kool Herc, is credited with pioneering this technique and laying the foundations for the genesis of hip-hop. While DJing at parties, Herc noticed the crowd would respond enthusiastically to breaks in the funk records he was playing. Rather than wait for the breaks in each song to appear, he began to use two turntables and a mixer to juggle between multiple breaks – as one reached the end, he would cue the second record’s break, transitioning seamlessly between the two, dubbing this technique “The Merry-Go-Round”.
The technique soon caught on, as figures like Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa began to develop the approach while continuing to explore the musical possibilities that breakbeats opened up. In the early ’80s, hip-hop transitioned from a nascent subculture based around live DJing and MCing at Bronx block parties into a fully-fledged musical genre, recorded and produced in the studio. It was in this era that the first
