iffs-short repeated segments of sound, deployed singly, in call and response, in layers, as melody, accompaniment, and bass line-per- vade African-American musics and various world popular musics, especial- ly those of the African diaspora. They are but one aspect of a multilayered set of musical and cultural practices contributing to an African American musical sensibility, and they interact freely with the entire musical complex that Samuel Floyd (1995) has termed ring shout elements: Calls, cries, and hollers; call-and-response devices; additive rhythms and poly- rhythms, heterophony, pendular thirds, blue notes, bent notes, and elisions, hums, moans, grunts, vocables, and other rhythmic-oral declamations, interjec- tions and punctuations; off-beat melodic phrasings and parallel intervals and chords; constant repetition of rhythmic and melodic figures and phrases (from which riffs and vamps would be derived); timbral distortions of various kinds; musical individuality within collectivity; game rivalry, hand clapping, foot pat- ting, and approximations thereof; apart playing; and the metronomic pulse that underlies all African-American music (Floyd 1995:6). In jazz, the alleged and repetitiveness of patterns, as well as their supposed non-developmental quality in a large-scale structural sense, have been grounds for the ambivalent admittance of musicians such as Count Basie into the modernist critical canon. Gunther Schuller finds inherent flaws (including harmonic stasis and lack of melodic interest) in the riff cum blues format of many Basie compositions, and Andre Hodeir, while praising Basie's rhythmic sensibility, finds his recordings character- ized by extreme melodic monotony (Schuller 1989:253; Hodeir 1962:97). A more pessimistic view of repetition in modernist critical theory can be found in the work of Theodor Adorno, who, through a chain of metaphor- ical associations, equates the repetition in popular music with industrial standardization, loss of individuality, military marching, and hence fascism (Adorno 1941; 1990:61).