Coltrane Plays The Blues
The United States of the Blues
The blues did not come directly from Africa, but it certainly has African elements. Just when it crystallized as a specific form is not certain, though the late nineteenth century is a good guess.
More important than when and where is the matter of why: Why was the blues born? In Blues People of Baraka suggested that the blues evolved when African Americans took their new-found freedom and confronted a society which had no place for them as free men and women.
With the old paternalistic society of the South went the simple role of African-American in the western world. Now the African American was ask to throw himself into what was certainly still an alien environment and to deal with that environment in the same manner as newly found white “brother” had been doing for centuries. The post-slave society had no place for the African American, and if there were to be any area of the society where the African American might have an integral function, that area would have to be one that he created for himself. While the older musical forms, the dances, hymns and spirituals, the work songs, and so forth, continued, a new musical form was needed to meet and fulfill the expressive demands presented by the new social and moral situation confronted by most African Americans. That form became known as the blues, and the blues came to be the foundation of much of African American secular music up to Hip-Hop.
The blues is to African American music as what the sonnet is to English poetry, a basic form, to be mastered by all will aspirations to excellence, which has been put to the most various expressive uses. Thus, while often sorrowful, sadness is not the defining essence of the blues. The blues is more abstract and general than a particular emotional tone. Blues music is often joyful, ironic, confrontational, witty, and worldly wise. It is also a highly individual form of expression, both in lyrical content and in performance presentation; a solo performer told about his or he own experience. In the more technical terms of musical device and structure, the blues is a set of expressive conventions and strategies- 12 bar AAB form, I IV I V I harmony, call-and-response, the blues scale—within which African Americans have articulated a full view of life as generations of musicians improvise extensions, emendations, expostulations, emancipations, and ecstatically lubricious transubstantiontiations.
As Dizzy Gillespie so often observed, before there was the universe, there was the blues. While most early blues performers appear to have been male, in the second and third decades of the twentieth century a blues known as the classic blues emerged as a distinct genre, mostly performed by female vocalists, of which Bessie Smith became the best known. W.C. Handy, Known as the Father of the Blues, collected and arranged many of these songs, with the “Memphis Blues”, “St. Louis Blues” and “Beale Street Blues” among his best-known. The blues has developed many forms throughout the twentieth century, varying between regions, adopting electric instruments after World War II, and functioning as a cultural well from which other musical forms could draw inspiration and ideas.
One of these forms became known as jazz, which began consolidating in teens. If the is one tributary feeding into the jazz delta, then ragtime is the other. Straddling the turn of the century, ragtime was primarily a piano player’s music and was strongly influenced by dance forms and the military march. Scott Joplin was the best known exponent of the music, and his aspirations went far beyond what he was able to realize in his lifetime-his opera, Treemonisha, wouldn’t receive a full performance until 1972, fifty-five years after Joplin’s death in 1917. Just when jazz finally emerged as a distinct style is uncertain. But it was going strong in the mid-teens. New Orleans, or traditional jazz, is relatively simple in its devices, but, catalyzed by Louis Armstrong, it quickly evolved into the more sophisticated styling of swing. Jazz became a popular music of the second quarter of the century, naming first the Jazz Age of the twenties, and then the Swing Era of the thirties.
Americans of all ages and ethnicity danced to the beat of the African diaspora. Jazz also traveled to Europe, where it was treated with aesthetic and intellectual seriousness it did not enjoy at home. In time, jazz conquered the rest of the world. Jazz attracted the attention of classical musicians who began to incorporate some of its devices into their music as they had drawn on various European folk traditions. By this time classical tradition had taken its central techniques to their limits and many composers were casting about for new inspiration, new scales, different compositional devices, and more rhythm. At the same time, European artists such as Pablo Picasso were responding to African sculpture and Sigmund Freud was diagnosing the emotional ills of Western culture.
Europeans were ready for a change and jazz gave it to them. Popular though jazz was, it did not receive universal approval. In particular, it was denounced for its sexuality For example, a group of New York citizens formed a commission that complained about “slow jazz, which tempo in itself is the cause of most of the sensual and freakish dancing”. In 1926 the city of New York passed the first in a series of regulations intended to restrict opportunities for live jazz performance, though the regulations were never stated in those terms. At one point, Duke Ellington was moved publicly to deny that jazz was responsible for a rash of sex crimes. This disapproval, of course, did not keep whites from listening to the music or playing it; white teens and young adults followed the black and white swing bangs and white players swelled the ranks beginning in the early twenties.
The net effect was an influx of African-American musical ideas into Tin Pan Alley and Broadway—for awhile black musicians and dancers thrived on Broadway. White swing bands, from Benny Goodman to Sammy Kaye conquered popular music, with the great black bands of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Jimmie Lunsford and others playing to a more restricted house. Inevitably, the white bands plow deeply it could accommodate played sweeter and less expressively than the black.
European America admired and desired the particular expressive vitality of jazz, but there were limits to how deeply it could accommodate itself too that expressiveness. Meanwhile the most adventurous jazz musicians—including Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk—invented bop during the early forties. Jazz is a music which slipped the yoke of racist oppression and, in bop, created a style which elevated improvisation to the same level of sophistication European classical music had achieved (Benzon, 1993b).
Bop is an Art-Form with a capital “A”. As A.B. Spellman (1970, p. 193) observed,” The bebop era was the first time that the African American ego was expressed in America with self-assurance.” Bop artist went beyond their immediate tradition and explicitly searched other music’s for techniques and inspiration.
Rashid “The Jazz Aficionado” Booker
