The very best players compress enormous inventiveness into that four-bar mbaqangathing. It can also be an eight-bar sequence in which the melody sits only over the third beatof the first bar to the first beat of the second bar. That same bit of melody might happenin a 16-bar sequence, you see.
You’d get people working all the options with fascinating results. There were people, like those in the band led by “Cups and Saucers,”3 working with a really great sensitivity to this kind of structuring, and very cleverly, too.