Jazz-Blues

[Joseph K]

I've been pondering about the blues form for a while now. It's so fundamental and basic to jazz it can be three chords or, as in something like Charlie Parker's 'Blues for Alice', more like 30! Then there are other things which are like disguised blues, like 'Bluesette' or 'Solar'. I've read that Coltrane's tune Transition is quite an altered blues - this probably would have eluded me, unless I had tried transcribing it.

So - the blues comes in so many different, variegated forms it would be impossible for me to pick a definitive favourite. But 'Straight, No Chaser' by the Miles Davis Sextet from Newport is one of my favourites, for sure. As is 'No Blues' by John McLaughlin and the Free Spirits too - McLaughlin's command of chromaticism escapes easy analysis, but sounds just exquisite.

From my perspective as someone trying to learn jazz, this form - or rather, these forms - are quite tricky because, and perhaps this could be said about playing any kind of jazz, you have to simultaneously know everything and nothing - that is, have to know the options, but then forget them, to paraphrase Charlie Parker. As with Rhythm Changes, one has to know both the simple and complex forms of the chord changes and be able to juggle them tastefully.

[Joseph K]

Actually, I guess I overstated apropos 'Transition' and how difficult it is to identify as a blues.

Writing the above prompted me to listen to the John McLaughlin & the Fourth Dimension album 'To the One' and quite a few of the tunes sound to varying degrees like they might be blues - some more than others. Essentially they seem to have the 'thesis - antithesis - synthesis' dialectic about them, where the synthesis can be identified as the conclusion in the form of a turn-around. This is how similar to how the head on Transition sounds, except that it's simpler, with, rather, a few statements of a question and the turn-around as the answer.

[Serial_Apologist]

In a sense the blues offers a template in miniature for an ideal for structuring composition - the AABA tonic-subdominant-dominant-tonic cycle having been at the base of western composition for centuries before being adapted in the singular form devised to incorporate the major/minor oscillation which, in itself, allows for any degree of ambivalence, here implying as you say the statement of the proposition and its response in the tension-releasing resolution onto the tonic, or the delay of closure facilitated by how the improviser is enabled use of that harmonic irresolution to extend his or her own narrative or personal psychodrama on board that very ambivalence. In this way the basic blues form contained within it from the start, in that simple flattening of the third, sixth and later, fifth intervals, the potential to encompass in a nutshell the concerns of generations of western composers, from those of the Renaissance such as Tallis in his prepared cadential uses of flattened dissonances right through to Mahler's expressive waverings between major and minor and beyond to atonal and serial composers' devising intervallic shapes which have been adaptable within blues or blues-based structures, and of course jazz, gospel and country music. And this is before we even get onto rhythmic underpinnings and their sources of origination, or considering cross comparisons with other, non-western musical traditions I know too little about to presume to comment upon. Such is the "genius" of the blues!

[Joseph K]

You are right - such is the strength of the form it can incorporate a vast amount of approaches to pitch and rhythm.

[Ian Thumwood]

I think that Parker's twist on the Blues was based on using a lot of passing chords. The fascinating element with his Blues for me is the complexity of the melodic lines he produced. There are pieces like "Cheryl" which I think are quite inspired.

Here is one of my favourite blues performances from 1927:-

[Ian Thumwood]

Or then there is this track....

Always found this record impressive too even if the meaning of the title is probably not something you would get away with in 2020!

[Joseph K]

Thanks for posting these, Ian.

[Serial_Apologist]

Thanks for posting these, Ian.

I'll second that.

[Padraig]

I think that Parker's twist on the Blues was based on using a lot of passing chords. The fascinating element with his Blues for me is the complexity of the melodic lines he produced. There are pieces like "Cheryl" which I think are quite inspired.

Here is one of my favourite blues performances from 1927:-

I note Monette Moore as one of the artists mentioned on that record, Ian. Here is a touching, spare, blues performance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZvluB4Z47Q