In jazz, blues and popular music, a short melodic ostinato which may be repeated either intact or varied to accommodate an underlying harmonic pattern. The riff is thought to derive from the repetitive call-and-response patterns of West African music, and appeared prominently in black American music from the earliest times. It was an important element in New Orleans marching band music (where the word ‘riff’ apparently originated), and from there entered jazz, where by the mid-1920s it was firmly established in background ensemble playing and as the basis for solo improvisation. Riffs also appeared in the accompaniments of many early blues, being particularly suited to their repeating structure. The conflict between an unvaried riff pattern and the changing harmonies of the blues progression became one of the most distinctive features of the blues and its derivatives.
The riff came to the fore in the early 1930s in the Southwest tradition of orchestral jazz, where the influence of rural blues musicians was notably strong. Among the innovations of these groups was the ‘double’ or ‘compound’ riff, in which the brass and reed sections played separate riffs in counterpoint. As exploited by Bennie Moten and, from 1936, by Count Basie’s band, riffs of this sort came to dominate large-ensemble jazz, either as the accompaniment to solo improvisation or as self-sufficient sections within a score. An outstanding example of a compound riff occurs at the end of Basie’s theme song One o’Clock Jump, where the trumpet, trombone and saxophone sections play contrasting riffs in three distinct rhythms. By the 1940s the riff had become a jazz cliché. However the big band riffs were translated directly into the horn sections of rhythm and blues and later rock and roll. A more primitive form of the riff, from the rural blues tradition, formed a fundamental part of the accompaniment in postwar urban blues; a notable example is the repeated five-note guitar riff in Muddy Waters’s I’m your Hoochie Coochie Man (1953, Chess).
The blues-influenced rock bands of the late 1960s and 70s and subsequent heavy metal groups often used this kind of guitar-based riff; notable exponents were Led Zeppelin. In songs such as Whole Lotta Love and Immigrant Song the guitar and bass guitar repeat a simple riff that confirms the tonic throughout the verses. Longer, more complex riffs that are repeated in different keys are used in Black Dog and Heartbreaker. Kashmir is created entirely from a series of varied riffs and vamps, at times creating a dense, multi-layered texture. Simpler uses of riffs can be heard in the work of groups such as AC/DC, Iron Maiden and Metallica.
Short multi-layered riffs were also an integral part of funk and other forms of dance music. In much of the work of James Brown, the JBs, George Clinton and Sly and the Family Stone harmonic and melodic variation is suppressed as all the instruments contribute a variety of riffs and chordal vamps to create highly rhythmic textures. This approach was imported into the electronic dance music of the 1980s and 90s most notably in the psychedelic trance of groups including Astral Projection, Prana and Shakta. In tracks such as Astral Projection’s Enlightened Evolution (from Trust in Trance, 1996, Transient) combinations of repeated riffs and patterns based on certain modes are used as the platform for wild timbral effects and rhythmic variation created by electronic synthesizers and digital effects.
J. BRADFORD ROBINSON/R