For an audience to love your music, you must first and foremost establish a steady rhythmic flow, a continuous, even pulse. This allows them to relax and be able to anticipate the next measure and beat with reliability and they quit worrying about whether you're going to mess up and start to enjoy the music. When they are unable to anticipate your next beat, you lose them. Micro-pauses, little one beat and half beat pauses as you get from one little difficult part to the next, destroy the flow, adding up to no groove and blank stares from your friends. Don't think it's just funk tunes or Khachaturian that demand rhythmic consistency. "Happy Birthday" will flop if there's an extra beat or pause every 3 t0 6 beats. This error is not what we talked about in the last post; in fact it proves the point of the last post - that is, if the listener can anticipate that 1, 2, 3, and 4 are going to arrive on time, they'll forgive some rushing or slowing down on the notes in between (which is also why rubato works).
A comet is an image of your musicianship. The head is the cutting edge, what you're learning; the tail behind is what you can do naturally.