The blues has long since made its way around the world. I’ve got two examples from East Asia. The first is a 2014 edition of the Big Friendly Jazz Orchestra (BFJO) from Takasago High School in Japan. They’re playing a Basie tune, by Frank Foster, which I examined here. That was the Basie Band in 1959. I’m guessing that the parents of most of these Japanese students (notice that most of them are young women) weren’t even alive then.
Blues In Hoss’ Flat (Frank Foster) / BFJO 2014 team Ota, with Guest Players
They’re not all high school students. There are some adult ringers. Listen to their ensemble work. How tight! I'd like to think of Frank Foster is grinning from ear while listening to this performance.
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This one, from Korea, is a bit more recent, 2019. Kwak Dakyung is sitting in on a blues jam. She appears to be about 10 years old here. I devoted a post to her about a year ago.
[윤아트홀] Blues Jam - 곽다경 (재즈 트럼펫 / Jazz Trumpet)
The first tune is a minor key blues. It appears to me that her father (the bass player) just tossed her into the fray, leaving it up to her to figure out what to do. Listen to her testing things out during the guitar and piano solos, figuring out where things lay. Now she’s got it, 3:23. Now she dialogs with the guitar, 4:31. Now we pick up the tempo, 5:49. But you don’t need me to point out what’s going on, do you? She’s still figuring it out.
Where have we been? We started with Old School jazz, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, and Henry Allen. Then we zipped ahead a couple decades to hear the very different blues of Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, and Frank Foster, blues shorn of much of the funk, but not the juice. The juice is always in the performer, not the specifications of the tune. Then we went back to fill-in the interval. Duke Ellington and Count Basie aren’t so far from Louis Armstrong but they work with the full force of a big band and so have more sonic resources and have to devote more attention to scheming out the course of a performance.
Then Charlie Parker showed us what happens when you fill the blues up with a zillion chord changes. Can you push that any further without the form collapsing in on itself? Monk increased melodic angularity to the point where the melody split into two streams. Mingus turned the form back on itself into an endless loop. How does it end? Miles washed all that away in the radical simplification of “All Blues.”
Now we’re going to continue on with John Coltrane’s “Mr. P.C.”; jump off the deep end – well, not quite – with Ornette Coleman’s “Broad Way Blues”; and become a snake swallowing its own tail with Hannibal Lokumbe.
John Coltrane: Mr. P.C.
John Coltrane is a tenor saxophonist who came up in the late 1940s on through the 1950s and apprenticed with Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis. That is to say, he came up as a bebopper, learning that style inside-out. Through his work with Davis he got ready to move on. That’s what we see him doing in “Mr. P.C.”, from his Giant Steps album, which was released early in 1960. He’s poised at the precipice.
Giant Steps came out at roughly the same time as Kind of Blue (Miles Davis), on which Coltrane played. The title tune, “Giant Steps,” is known for its difficult chord changes to be taken at a furious tempo. “Mr. P.C.” – named after Coltrane’s long-time bass player, Paul Chambers – is just as fast, perhaps faster, but the chord changes are more tractable. It’s a 12-bar blues in a minor key, which is common enough, but not so common as blues in a major key (though we should keep in mind that the blues tonality, if you will, is neither major nor minor, but something else). The fact that it is in a minor key puts it within the ambit of the modal jazz on Kind of Blue and which Coltrane would embrace whole-heartedly soon thereafter.
Let’s listen:
Coltrane starts right on the melody, which takes a standard blues form:
1) The first 4-bar phrase consists of a 2-bar phrase that goes up and then comes back down (bars 1 & 2); it is followed by a 4-note phrase in the third bar, which alternates on two pitches.
2) The second 4-bar phrase repeats the opening 2-bars, but transposes them up, to follow the shift in harmony (bars 5 & 6); it is followed by the same phrase we heard in bar 3, and on the same pitches.
3) The phrase in bars 9 and 10 is different from the one in 1 and 2, 5 and 6, but return to that same 4-note phrase in bar 11.
Easy-peasy.
Coltrane plays the melody twice and them launches into a solo (0:22). Listen closely for phrases that he repeats at various points in the solo. Listen as well for the parts where he hangs on a dissonant note (e.g. 0:28, 0:43, 0:49, etc.) and where he plays little (and not so little) runs that go chromatic (e.g. 0:34). There’s a nice cry at 2:26. In the next chorus plays rapid arpeggios (starting at 2:37) down and up and down and up for eight bars or so; there are more rapid runs in the next chorus (starting at 2:53). He’s building up a head of steam. Trane finishes his last chorus with the melody (3:18). He’s signaling that he’s done. Now Tommy Flanagan gets a piano solo – forgive me if I don’t offer some play-by-play; I’m burnt out. At 4:54 Trane starts to trade fours (that is, four bar phrases) with the drummer, Art Taylor. We return to the head at 6:25, for two choruses, and we’re out.
Ornette Coleman: Broad Way Blues
Ornette Coleman is an alto saxophonist and is Coltrane’s contemporary, a couple years younger. But, while Trane was based on the East Coast, Coleman matured out West, in Los Angeles. Nor did he apprentice in bebop. He created his own apprenticeship. Thus when he came East in 1959 no one knew what he was doing. He played a plastic alto sax and his compatriot, Don Cherry, played a funny looking little pocket trumpet. Are these guys for real, playing toy instruments and music that don’t make no sense no how. Sheesh! Yes, they’re for real. Some people dug them strait off, others had to warm up, and some never did.
He recorded “Broad Way Blues” in 1968 on New York is Now. It’s not a blues in any conventional way of thinking about such matters. And yet, in a somewhat less conventional way, it’s as all blues as “All Blues,” if not more so. Why don’t you give it a listen and see if it makes sense to you:
Make sense? Yes? No? Maybe? Or perhaps you did not try to make sense of it and it just sounded wonderful, though perhaps a bit sideways.
It sounded that way to me. When I tried to count it out, I got lost. So I looked at the sheet music. 22-bars long. That’s not a blues form, it’s not a 32-bar standard, it’s not made of 4-bar phrases (adding up to, say, 16 bars). And there are some bars in there that don’t count out to four beats; they’re in six. When solo they – Dewey Redman joins Ornette on tenor – time undergoes a different discipline, courtesy of Elvin Jones.
Let’s take it easy. I’ve been doing this for a while and my brain is running low on the neuro-transmitters that make for quick shifts of concentration. So I’m going to minimize my attempts get timings for you. But I’ll do this much: The melody starts at the beginning. That descending line at about 0:13 – the first one in the tune – is in six. We play a quick cyclic flurry across the bar and land on two quarter notes to end the first part of the head. We return to the opening figure at about 0:17, at bar 14, to begin the second part of the head. The descending line at 0:21 is in 6. We jump to come down in the next bar, up for a bar, and down for two. We’re at the end of the head. Starting at 0:28 we go around again, then into solos, where everything is up for grabs.
So listen and grab some why don’t you. Coleman is endlessly lyrical, no?
Now we’re back to small-group jazz, which has dominated since the mid-1940s or so. The group may be as small as a piano trio – bass, drums, and piano – but is more typically a quartet, quintet, or sextet. You fill out the group with a trumpet, trombone, or saxophone (generally alto or tenor), or some combination thereof. Of course we’ve also got guitars, which can substitute for piano or supplement it, vibraphone, other horns (flute, clarinet), and in some cases add Latin percussion to the rhythm section.
The blues we’re going to listen to in this post are bebop, or bebop-affiliated, in style. They’re after the swing style, but not quite to where Miles Davis had arrived with “All Blues.” And, like “All Blues,” they don’t (quite) sound like a blues unless you listen very carefully.
Charlie “Bird” Parker: Blues for Alice
Charlie “Yardbird” Parker was from Kansas City and is one of the progenitors of the bebop style, some say he was the chief instigator. He was first and foremost a supremely gifted musical thinker, a virtuoso player of the alto saxophone, a superb improvisor, and an inventive composer of bebop tunes. He was also a drug addict who died in 1955 at the age of 34. It’s that combination, musical genius and drug addiction, that is the stuff of which obfuscating legends are so easily constructed.
“Blues for Alice” is one of those blues that may not sound like a blues and unless you pay careful attention. Why is that? The basic blues form requires only three different chords, which are often fleshed out to five or six or so. “Blues for Alice” has 17 chords. It’s like you have your basic hamburger sandwich consisting of the burger, a bun, and a dab of catsup. Then you elaborate on that with cheese, bacon, lettuce, tomato, some pickles, and of course a “special sauce.” But it’s still a hamburger sandwich built around the burger and the bun. They’re still in there, but their taste and texture have been embellished by other tastes and textures.
Here's “Blues for Alice.” The recording is early, but there’s no information about it on YouTube.
We start with a quick four-bar introduction from the piano. Bird plays the head (melody) starting at 0.05 and going to about 0.25. He starts bar five of the form, the first major structural change at about 0.11 and the second change, bar nine, comes at 0.17. He then launches into a solo, playing three choruses. Listen for the fast figure he plays in the last section of each chorus; those “double-time” passages are typical bebop. The trumpet solo starts at about 1:15 and runs for two choruses. Notice the rapid flurry of notes in the middle of the second chorus – a different kind of construction from what Bird did. I’m conjecturing it’s Miles Davis, but I don’t really know. The piano takes two choruses starting at 1:49 and then we return to the head to finish it.
Here’s a live performance of “Blues for Alice” by Rahsaan Roland Kirk, one of the most dynamic performers I’ve ever seen. This is from 1967. I invite you to provide your own commentary, or perhaps you should sip some coffee, tea, scotch or tequila, as you fancy.
Oh crap, that didn’t work out. I gotta’ tell you a thing or two; but I’m not going to mark 4-bar sections for you. For that you’re on your own. Rahsaan plays the melody on the tenor sax, and then switches to manzello – a kind of soprano sax – to begin his solo. He then switches back to tenor sax. What’s that he’s doing Playing the manzello and tenor at the same time? Isn’t that illegal, or at least perverse? No. Starting at 4:56 Rahsaan trades fours with the drummer for three choruses. Notice that he switches from manzello, to tenor, and then plays both for his last four bars. At the point we’re back at the head.
Now, do some simple math. The blues is a 12-bar form. We’ve got two musicians who are trading four-bar phrases back and forth. Here’s how that works out:
If you listen you’ll hear that Rahsaan is at the correct section in the progression each time through.
Thelonious Sphere Monk: Mysterioso
In the 1960s, when I was born, mainstream print publications took the arts seriously, covering and promoting exceptional contemporary talents across all styles of music. Thus did Thelonious Monk wind up on the cover of TIME magazine, for example pic.twitter.com/joI4QBMNxl
Monk hard to classify. He’s generally associated with bebop and hard bop, one of bebop’s descendants, which makes sense given his active years, 40s and into the 70s, but his playing style tends to eschew the fleet lines more typical of bebop. However, he called on bop’s harmonic inventiveness and was comfortable in bop settings. He contributed many tunes to the standard jazz repertoire, including “’Round Midnight.” “Blue Monk,” “Epistrophy,” “Straight, No Chaser,” “Ruby, My Dear,” “In Walked Bud,” and “Well, You Needn’t.” Oh, but you do.
Now that we’ve seen some very different kinds of blues in jazz idioms – more or less traditional and more modern – let’s look at blues in Swing Era big band music.
Now that I’ve laid out the basic 12-bar form in the two previous posts I’m not going to spend so much time on that.
As you probably know, a standard jazz big band consists of a rhythm section plus saxophone, trumpet, and trombone sections. The rhythm section almost always has bass, drums, and piano. It may also include a guitarist and, in some bands, a Latin percussionist or two. Some bands carried a vocalist or two as well. The saxophones frequently doubled on other instruments, such as flute and clarinet. Ellington always had a clarinetist who only played clarinet.
Though we tend to think of jazz as being organized around improvising soloists, that’s not how big band jazz worked. It was as much a vehicle for composers and arrangers as for soloists. Soloists are assigned to play specific choruses in an arrangement in a way that allows the arrangement to have a coherent and compelling shape, often/usually culminating in a “shout” chorus near the end.
Count Basie: One O’Clock Jump, Blues in Hoss Flat
Let’s look at Count Basie’s first recording of “One O’Clock Jump” from 1937. It was to become his theme song. The Wikipedia article lays out the basics:
The melody derived from band members’ riffs—Basie rarely wrote down musical ideas, so Eddie Durham and Buster Smith helped him crystallize his ideas. The original 1937 recording of the tune by Basie and his band is noted for the saxophone work of Herschel Evans and Lester Young, trumpet by Buck Clayton, Walter Page on bass, and Basie himself on piano. The song is typical of Basie’s early riff style. The instrumentation is based on “head arrangements” where each section makes up their part based on what the other sections are playing. Individuals take turns improvising over the top of the entire sound.
The stuff about riffs and head arrangements is important. They just made this stuff up and, over time, figured out what to do with all those instruments in one organization. In the process some musicians came to specialize in writing arrangements for bands.
The tune starts out with the rhythm section, bass, drums, and piano (Basie), on a short vamp. The tune, that is, the blues form, starts at roughly 0:11. Notice that the guitar also enters, playing on every beat. That’s Freddie Green, who played with Basie for years. The second chorus starts at 0:28 – for those keeping track. The change should be obvious even if you aren’t counting bars. That’s followed by a tenor sax solo, which sounds like Lester Young, with backing riff by the trumpets. Then we have a trombone solo, with saxophone backing riffs. Another sax solo, now trumpet – notice how the backing riffs change from chorus to chorus. By this point we have a moderately thick texture. It thins out at 1:53 for piano, bass, and drums for a chorus. Now we bring the band back on riffs. Finally, the saxes have the standard melody at 2:27. That’s followed by another riff chorus and we’re done. This arrangement doesn’t have a proper shout chorus.
Think about that. We are over two-thirds of the way through the tune before we get the melody. Maybe the melody isn’t the point. It's mostly a way of attaching an identity to the tune. What’s important is the play between the various voices, soloists, and sections of the band.
“Blues in Hoss Flat” is from a 1959 album, Chairman of the Board. It’s by Basie, and tenor saxophonist and arranger, Frank Foster (we heard him in the previous post).
This one starts with the full band, no sneaking up on things with just the rhythm section. We’ve left the riff style behind. This was arranged from top to bottom, start to finish, by Frank Foster.
The tune starts at 0:07. Do you need me to tell you what’s going on? No, I didn’t think so. You can hear the call-and-response easily enough – typical of the blues. Now a trumpet solo, enter a sax soli with trumpet responding, then a trombone solo in dialog with trumpet figures. Time to calm things down (1:29) and then start building. Now the trumpets take it, 2:11; we’re at the shout chorus (hear Basie comping in the background) – ‘cause that’s how Frank likes to do things. Whew! Let’s calm things down as we take it to the end. Joe Newman ends it with some plunger work on the trumpet.
By 1959 bebop had been in the ascendent for over a decade and a half, and we’re heading toward modal jazz – Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue came out in ’59 as well. But Basie is playing pretty much the same style he had in the 1930s, though the arrangements had become more complex. That’s what he knew and liked, his fans too. Good enough.
Duke Ellington: C Jam Blues, The Mooche, Blues for New Orleans
What could be simpler than the melody for Duke Ellington’s “C Jam Blues?” We have just two pitches. This was recorded in 1942:
We start with just the rhythm section. Wellman Alvin "Junior" Raglin is playing bass, Sonny Greer on drums, and Ellington on piano. He starts right on the melody. In the second chorus (0:13) Ellington passes that two-note melody to the sax and plays backing figures. We get Ray Nance on violin for the third chorus. That’s probably Rex Stewart on cornet for the next solo. Then Ben Webster gives us a tenor sax solo followed by “Tricky” Joe Nanton on trombone. listen to that vocal style; it’s why they called him Tricky. Nanton and Stewart are playing with mutes. Barney Bigard takes a four-bar break on clarinet (1:50), then the band starts coming in as Bigard continues. We’ve got the full band at 2:21, with Bigard continuing, to take it out.
“The Mooche” is not a 12-bar blues, but it oozes blues from every pore. Call it an extended blues. This recording is from 1928 and it exemplifies Ellington’s so-called “jungle” style. That style is uniquely Ellington’s; it’s what made him famous.
Just listen to the tonal colors, the shimmering clarinet on top, Bubber Miley on plunger-muted trumpet in the background, to open. Sounds like the drummer (Sonny Greer) is playing temple blocks. Now we change it up (0:46), with trumpets playing the top line. It goes to the clarinet (Barney Bigard), in the lower register (1:10), with Lonnie Johnson answering on guitar. Then Baby Cox does a nasty vocal (1:30) and Bubber Miley returns (1:54), with answers from Johnny Hodges on alto sax. We go back to the beginning (2:17) and start fading to the end at 2:51.
All this is significant and enlightening, but insufficient to prove that New Orleans was the birthplace of the blues. But it does suggest that blues was a significant ingredient in its commercial music scene at a fairly early stage. My considered judgment is that New Orleans was the source of “blues-inflected jazz”—but that’s a very different claim than citing it as the home of all blues. And as all the available evidence shows, early jazz borrowed ingredients from every imaginable source—military music, spirituals, opera arias, etc. The fact that an idiom showed up in a New Orleans jazz performance is no proof that it was invented in New Orleans.
After further discussion of just how the blues wound up in New Orleans and how innovation spreads he says:
My assessment of the totality of this evidence suggests that the blues has very old roots, originating with performers who found new ways of playing African-inflected music in the New World—but typically in rural areas where they could remain immune to many of the influences linked to commercial trends in American music. The blues style eventually became urbanized in the closing years of the 19th century, and New Orleans was probably the first city where this style of music rose to prominence. It almost certainly arrived there as part of the larger migration from country to city—just as it later participated in the ensuing emigration of African-Americans from South to North. The idea that this path of dissemination went the other way around—with city musicians from New Orleans relocating to remote sharecropper plantations—is much harder to accept. That simply wasn’t the way people moved in those years.
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This is the fourth post in my series, “Tell me about the blues.” The series is tagged with the label, tell me blues.
Now that we’ve listened to a bit of Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, and Reds Allen, it would seem logical to move ahead in time, just a bit. That is, to take a historical approach. Perhaps the logical thing to do would be to look at Count Basie and Duke Ellington. That would kill two birds with one stone, so to speak. It gets us into the Swing Era, which it the next major style, and big bands. But that’s not the logic I have in mind. Oh, we’ll get around to Basie and Duke soon enough, but want to jump ahead several decades, to mid-century.
Why? To give you a sense of just what can happen to a musical form over time, to give you a sense of scope and boundaries of the blues.
All Blues
“All Blues” doesn’t really sound like a blues, not a down home, dyed in the wool, old time blues. But it IS a blues, it really is, it says so in the title – but we already know that’s not a sure indication, don’t we? Moreover it’s on an album called Kind of Blue, the best-selling jazz album of all time and, for that matter, one of the very best. Think of it as a modern high speed “bullet” train, like they have in Japan, in contrast to one of those old trains pulled by a steam engine. But it still runs on two rails.
Miles Davis released the album in 1959. He’s credited with “All Blues.” The musicians on the date are stellar: Davis on trumpet, Julian “Cannonball” Adderley on alto Sax, John Coltrane on tenor sax, Paul Chambers on bass, and Jimmy Cobb. Let’s listen to it before figuring out why it’s a blues. The tune proper starts at about 0:19 with the entrance of the trumpet:
It sounds sleek and modern. Notice, first of all, that it isn’t in 4/4 time, which is standard for the majority of jazz tunes, blues as well. It’s in 6/8, giving it a lilting feel.
It starts with an intro consisting of a piano tremolo and a repeating bass line, called an ostinato. Then the two saxes enter in harmony, playing a line that mirrors the bass line. The trumpet enters at 0:19, playing a simple line that alternates between only two pitches; the bass and saxes continue as before. Four bars later, at roughly 0:29, things change. The harmony changes – as the blues form dictates – and the trumpet joins the saxes in a simple moving line for two bars while the bass continues as before. Then it’s back to the initial pattern, both saxes and trumpet, for two bars. The bass continues. Everything changes nine bars into the form, at 0:42.
Of course the harmony changes. The saxes have a different line, but a simple one; same for the trumpet. Not only that, but the bass drops the ostinato it had been playing since the beginning, but only for two bars. In bars 11 and 12 the bass returns to the ostinato and the harmony changes accordingly; the trumpet and saxes harmonize on a simple melodic phrase.
So, while “All Blues” doesn’t sound like either “St. Louis Blues” or “Muggles,” it does follow a 12-bar structure that is divided into three different 4-bar phrases. It IS a blues, albeit of a different kind.
That first chorus is followed by a 4-bar interlude where the saxes mirror the bass, as in the introduction, but the trumpet drops out. Then we have another full chorus, as before. That’s followed by another 4-bar interlude. Miles enters at roughly 1:46 for the first solo. The bass continues its ostinato. Miles plays four continuous choruses, no interludes between them. Then:
a 4-bar interlude, four choruses by Cannonball Adderley on alto sax;
a 4-bar interlude, four choruses by John Coltrane on tenor sax;
a 4-bar interlude, four choruses by Bill Evans on piano, and finally:
a 4-bar interlude, and we return to the tune, playing it twice as in the beginning;
there’s another 4-bar interlude, and Miles does a very simple solo for one last chorus – it could almost be mistaken for a vamp.
Here’s another version of “All Blues.” It’s from a live performance in 1964 in Milan. Except for Miles, the personnel has changed: Wayne Shorter on tenor sax, Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass, and Tony Williams on drums. It’s at a much faster tempo than the previous version. Shorter mirrors the bass, then Miles comes in on the melody, playing more freely. You can figure out the rest if you wish.
Footprints
Let’s look another of these sleek modern blues in triple time. This is Wayne Shorter’s “Footprints” from Adam’s Apple (1967). Shorter is playing tenor sax, with Herbie Hancock on piano, Reggie Workman on bass, and Joe Chambers on bass. I’m not going to go into the level of detail I did for “All Blues,” but I will note that it is in 6/8 time and has an ostinato bass, except for bars 9 and 10. That bass line is part of the composition.
Here’s another recording of “Footprints.” This is with Miles Davis, again in 1967, Miles Smiles. Ron Carter is on bass, Herbie Hancock on piano, and Tony Williams on drums. Notice the faster tempo. But we have the same ostinato bass line; as I indicated, it’s part of the tune.
Here Wayne Shorter is playing a duet with bassist Esperanza Spalding in 2013. Shorter starts and Spalding picks up with the ostinato. Notice how she elaborates on it.
OK, the blues. Now that I’ve talked about the philosophizing, mythologizing, and identifying, let’s set that mess aside and get down to it. Let’s listen to some examples and see how they work.
W.C. Handy was known as the Father of the Blues – a sobriquet I believe he gave himself. He wrote our first example tune, “St. Louis Blues.”Bessie Smith was known as the Empress of the Blues; she’s singing it. Louis Armstrong was known as Satchmo; he’s responding to Bessie. She calls, he responds. That’s how the blues works. When performed by a single musician accompanying himself with a guitar, the voice would call and the guitar would respond, all the while continuing to preserve the ground beat and keeping the harmonic structure moving along.
I don’t know whether “St. Louis Blues” was the first blues I ever heard. Could have been, who knows? But it wouldn’t have been this recording; I didn’t discover this recording until my college years.
This version was recorded in 1925, by which time the blues had been doing all right. We don’t know just when the blues was born. That’s one of those things hidden in the mists of time and obscured by myth. But it likely wasn’t more than two or three decades before this recording.
What’s important about “St. Louis Blues” is that it is in three parts. The first and the third exhibit the formal characteristics we have come to recognize as the blues. The second does not. It has a tango rhythm, a bit of what Jelly Roll Morton called that “Latin tinge.”
You should be able to pick out these three sections pretty easily without me giving you the timings. They’re obvious:
Let’s break down the first chorus – “chorus” is a standard term for one repetition of a tune that’s repeated several times in a single performance. It’s twelve bars long and divided into three four-bar sections, what’s become known as the standard blues form.
First section: We have a single introductory chord and then the song-proper begins. Bessie sings, “I hate to see…” That’s the call. Armstrong responds with a little trumpet riff. And that’s the response. That’s one bar. Bessie continues, “…the evening sun go down.” That’s the second bar. Armstrong then responds in bars three and four. Notice how clever that is: Within the first two bars we have a call-and-response structure which itself is the call within the larger call-and-response structure. Such nesting is not itself obligatory. It’s the larger call-and-response structure that is common, though by not obligatory. The blues leaves you plenty of options.
Second section: It’s just like the first, same words, same nested call-and-response structure. The melody is the same. But, and this is very important, the underlying harmony is different on bars five and six. That’s one of the defining features of the form, the shift in harmony on bars five and six. On bars seven and eight we’re where we were on three and four.
Third section: Big change. Bessie sings some new words: “It makes me think, I’m on my last go ‘round.” The call and response structure is as before. The harmonic structure changes, again, on nine and ten, and back to ground on eleven and twelve, like in 3 & 4, 7 & 8.
That’s one chorus of the blues, text-book perfect: twelve bars; three sections; call-and-response; first line of lyrics repeated for the second section, then new lyrics for the third; I IV I V I harmony. Don’t worry just what those roman numerals are about. They come from notation that’s standard in harmonic analysis from the common practice period of European classical music. W.C. Handy was a well-educated musician and was likely familiar with it. Traditional bluesman were not. You don’t need to know the analytical language in order to perform and listen to the music to which it is applied.
That’s an awful lot of prose for such a little bit of music. That’s how it goes. Music is a physical thing, and physical things often resist easy prose description. And I haven’t said a word about nuance, how Bessie bends notes, about microtones and blues notes (that don’t even exist in standard European theory, nor on the piano) and how about Armstrong varies his responses. I’m leaving that up to you.
The second chorus is like the first, but with different lyrics. The third chorus (c. 1:36) is not yet another repetition of the musical forms and practices we heard in the first two choruses. The tune switches into a minor key, a different melody, and a different underlying beat, the tango. But Bessie and Louis are still engrossed in their call-and-response conversation. This goes on for 16 bars, divided into two 8-bar sections – the second 8-bar section starts at about 2:04. You hear things start to shift at about 2:27, when Smith repeats the phrase, “no where.” The repetition is on a rising phrase.
It rises to the final chorus, which repeats the standard 12-bar blues form. But we have a different melody and lyrics from the one in the first and second chorus. We get one chorus of this second blues form. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out what’s going on. Hint: It’s not quite the same as we saw the first time, but it is still the blues. There’s lots of fish in that sea.
Let’s try another example of the traditional blues form, an original tune by Louis Armstrong, “Muggles.” “Muggles is old New Orleans slang for marijuana, a substance Armstrong used freely for most of his adult life.
Earle “Fatha” Hines improvises a first chorus on piano – it may not sound much like the blues we heard in “St. Louis,” but is the same 12-bar I IV I V I form. Fred Robinson, trombone, takes the second chorus. Jimmy Dodds on clarinet, three. And now the tempo picks up and Armstrong himself takes a hit. The tempo slows back down when we get to bar nine in the form. Armstrong moves into the upper register for the final chorus (c. 2:10). Listen to how he is ever so slightly behind the beat, so he can nudge it forward.
Let’s take it out with a traditional tune that is a variant of the blues form, an eight-bar minor key blues. This is “St. James Infirmary” – one of my favorite tunes in the whole world. This is performed by Henry “Red” Allen, a contemporary of Armstrong’s and is from 1964 on the BBC. Allen is performing with The Alex Welsh Band, which is, I assume, a bunch of local cats, local to somewhere in the UK.
Allen starts off by naming a whole string of New Orleans musicians – I’m not going to transcribe their names ‘cause transcribing is tedious and I assume your hearing is fine. Allen starts playing at about 0:42. He plays the standard melody, with some of his standard embellishments. Listen to that wonderful juicy note at about 0:50. So sweet, so sweet! Second chorus at 0:56, starts with a nice rising phrase, varying the melody, dropping in that same juicy note at the same spot. Allen starts his third chorus with a rough sound (notice his firm stance), fluttering tonguing I believe, leaving the melody far behind.
He starts singing at about 1:28, with traditional lyrics. This song’s got a ton of them. He sings with his whole damn body! Check out his postures and poses. And now Allen calls for audience participation (2:27). We’re going to church and he’s the preacher. Call and response.
Now we get down to business. Notice how Allen begins so simply, one note repeated four times, starting on the second beat of the bar. At 3:01 he’s back on that juicy note, and this time he hangs on to it. Back to vocals: “I went down to St. James Infirmary…second trip.” Call and response. Now it’s the audience’s turn.
I’m done, but the performance isn’t. Surprises ahead. You’re on your own. Don’t need me anymore.
I’m planning a relatively short series, of relatively short posts, a half to maybe a dozen, each discussing, say, one to three examples.
Before plunging in we need to get a sense of what the blues is. First, it is a mood, a feeling, a sensibility: Feeling blue? Second, it is a musical form, existing on its own, but also as a form within jazz. The latter is what this series is going to be about, the blues as it functions within the evolving context of jazz. Third, the blues is an object of wonder, fascination, and mystery. That’s what this post is about.
Back in the middle of the 20th century some curious well-meaning white folks went looking for the blues. Marybeth Hamilton wrote a book about it, In Search of the Blues:
Leadbelly, Robert Johnson, Charley Patton-we are all familiar with the story of the Delta blues. Fierce, raw voices; tormented drifters; deals with the devil at the crossroads at midnight.
In this extraordinary reconstruction of the origins of the Delta blues, historian Marybeth Hamilton demonstrates that the story as we know it is largely a myth. The idea of something called Delta blues only emerged in the mid-twentieth century, the culmination of a longstanding white fascination with the exotic mysteries of black music.
Hamilton shows that the Delta blues was effectively invented by white pilgrims, seekers, and propagandists who headed deep into America's south in search of an authentic black voice of rage and redemption. In their quest, and in the immense popularity of the music they championed, we confront America's ongoing love affair with racial difference.
That’s from the publisher’s blub. It sounds about right, though I should say that I’ve not read the book myself. But I’ve read other books and I know a thing or two.
In 1966 a man named Charlie Keil published Urban Blues. It blew the doors off that myth, and then some. He wasn’t investigating blues as performed by often decrepit old men on battered acoustic guitars in the rural South. His bluesman played electric guitars, in cities, and often wore sharply tailored suits. Musicians like Muddy Waters, Bobby “Blue” Bland, B.B. King and even Saints help us and preserve us! James Brown, self-professed “hardest working man in show business.” Amen. And yet it was the real blues, as authentic as sweet potato pie.
But it’s not just white folks who were buffaloed by the blues. In 1963 Amiri Baraka, then writing as Leroi Jones, published Blues People: Negro Music in White America. It wasn’t just about the blues (in either the second or third sense I laid out above), though it was that as well. It was about black music in general. And it is very much about racial difference, as its subtitle indicates. It’s a good book, but a bit fanciful in parts.
Albert Murray’s 1976 Stomping Blues also reads the blues as pivotal to understanding black-in-white America. Murray, like Baraka, is black, but is of a more moderated political persuasion. His book is less fanciful, but it does have a mythic dimension. Whatever the blues is, it is more than just the music, the people, and the performances. It is, well, you know, damn near everything!
I was certainly after a bit of that when I first heard blues tunes in my early teens. I forget just what tunes those were, nor does it much matter. I liked them, a lot. I tried to play them, to learn how they work: 12 bars, I-IV-I-V-I, call and response, microtones on 3, 4/5, and 7 – that’s the form, more or less. As I became a better musician, the mythography receded.
But I don’t want to go into that now. We can get to that latter. Let’s end with a piece of music, two of them in fact. This is “The Real Folk Blues” by sublime Yoko Kanno. It is emphatically not a blues by any stretch of the formal musicological imagination. It is thus one of those many tunes that has “blue” or “blues” in its title, but is not the blues. It’s the closing theme from Cowboy Bebop, one of my favorite anime series. If you look closely you can see a blond trumpeter. That’s Eric Miyashiro. He’s from Hawaii, toured with Buddy Rich, and now lives in Japan.
Here's another non-blues tune with “blues” the title: “How the Blues was Born.” The constant call-and-response between Sinatra and Armstrong is, however, a feature of blues performances. Notice Sinatra’s folksy misspelling.
Lester Bowie and Brass Fantasy offers their own account of "How the Blues was Born."
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I’ve written a bit about the blues and collected those posts under that label, blues. A number of those posts are about my early musical interests and have several recordings in them; one or three of them will be blues. Back in 2003 Martin Scorsese did PBS series on the blues. It was a very mixed kettle of fish. I reviewed three of them in this post: Three White Men Look for the Blues: Wenders, Scorsese, and Pierce. One of Them Finds It. Both Scorsese and Wenders wander deep into mythology and don’t make it back. Richard Pearce follows three musicians as they work their way toward the W.C. Handy awards in Memphis; B.B. King is one of them. It is excellent. I reviewed two others (the series had seven segments in all): More Blues: The British Get Invaded and Uncle Clint Talks Piano. Mike Figgis tells a story about how the blues made its way to England in the 1950s and 1960s while Clint Eastwood, himself a good jazz pianist, looks at blues piano. Both of these are very good.