Will Jazz benefit under Jeremy Corbyn ?

[Serial_Apologist]

Lovely stuff, Ian. What an amazing form the blues is, this outwardly simple form grown out of the tonic/dominant/subdominant interplay worked on since time immemorial put in a nutshell. Those perfect and flattened intervals that can give you plangent Mahlerian switches from the major to the minor and redemptively back, hair-curlingly bitonal superimpositions worthy of a Stravinsky, a Ravel or a Bartok, and even pitch structures extendable into tone rows, as Howard Riley did with his "Blues Row", and probably others have too. That's not even touching on the spirit, or rather spirits of jazz. "Some blues are sad, some blues are glad, sad or glad, they're all blues" as Annie Ross (was it?) sang to Miles's tune. Many years ago, an old school friend asked me to make him a tape of blues so that he would have some music to console him through the long daily journeys he was making as a long-distance lorry driver, and so I decided to draw up a list of my favourite blues tracks, from all sides of the genre and beyond, extending into jazz and rock music, and from all periods, starting from Bessie Smith, my earliest, and going on through boogie-woogie in the 1930s through bebop, cool, hard bop, free, all the schools of jazz, not forgetting to look sideways into Gospel, which injected blues into spirituals, and on into Soul, Fats Domino, Ray Charles, Aretha, and back. Faced with accusations of dumbing down jazz, people like Gary Burton pointed out that when jazz borrowed from rock and from Gospel, it and they were only borrowing from themselves. One could even argue that Country music and Country and Western contain much blues alongside the folk musics translocated from Scotland and Ireland. One could even make a claim blues as being America's greatest gift to civilisation. Well, there has to be something... alongside New Deal economics, jeans, button-down collar shirts, abstract expressionism, John Cage, Martin Luther King, and many great words and expressions now part of our own lexicon... Shame one has to go back so far for America... but there's still blues.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Bluesnik

I think that you will appreciate this music. Alexander was a new name to me but I struggled to stop playing his CD in my car when it first arrived in the post. Absolutely brilliant:-

My favourite BB King "experience" was at a concert he gave at Cardiff in 1985. I was in the front row and after he played a dazzling set (with his very tight jazzy little five piece band behind him), he invited people up on stage to shake his hand. I climbed up, thinking it was all over, to say thanks and have my hand crushed by the Master. Haven't washed since. After about ten minutes of this he suddenly turned and launched straight into another number. I edged off stage and passed his bass player who looked at me and groaned, "we've already played this @#+&** concert!" King went on to play another completly different set! Wonderful night.

Ian, I will check that out.

BN.