Binger wrote: ↑Mon Jul 25, 2022 1:59 am
Morley wrote: ↑Mon Jul 25, 2022 1:47 am
edit: Jazz and Blues are siblings joined at birth.
Ah. And do you consider the pentatonic scales to be the common DNA? Or, are you referring to their birth dates and not just their common elements?
Binger, I find this question and invitation to consider and review. I have no reason to think I am an expert but even so I have found the subject interesting. To the question I do not think there is any sure right or wrong view. It asks what are the blues at the heart of blues. It also asks when blues and jazz first started. The start of blues is not really known or perhaps it is not possible to assign a start. The blues may well be a coalescence
traditions and inventions in the 19th century. No recordings. I once fell into a folk music class review at university of Iowa where professor had a 19th century banjo. It was large , fretless, and had a carved devil head for its head. Fretless it could combine strong rhythm and all sorts of slides and blues notes. It sounded like some wicked blues but what did it sound like in 1875? There is no knowing beyond noticing what sounds it seems designed to make or emphasize. It is also a reminder that the banjo now associated with bluegrass white fellows and even young white women is actually an African instrument played by African Americans in the 19th century.
It is almost true that either blue note or minor pentatonic scale at least touches all blues. I checked a couple of books noted blues music. Ledbetter songs, sugar in the gourd is straight minor pentatonic and nothing else while midnight special is in a regular major key no additions. I thought of Love in Vain, Johnson, and notice it is in straight major key giving it an odd light feel except for one note, flat seventh, in one place. It is a critical point in the song however.
It has long been noted that blue notes or pentatonic scales come from Africa and would have been bouncing around in America for well more than 100 years before somebody first said , I heard blues music.
I think the ideas making the blues are rhythm and ways to combine that with assertive rhythmic melody.Call and response which invites inventive musical replies to phrases which are the jumping off point for jazz as well as a staple for blues. I think blues songs are more personally assertive than European folk and song music. This is not an absolute difference but I think has transformed American music. In blues, "I woke up this morning , looked around for my shoes, had this mean ol feeling called the walking blues" there is a big emphasis on that I. White folk music is long on stories good bad or ugly about other people who stand in for expression. In the blues it is i. as in I can't get no satisfaction, or I am a man, spelled mahn , or I went down to the station......
