From: rshapiro@bbn.com (Richard Shapiro)
Newsgroups: news.groups,rec.music.bluenote
Subject: Re: r.m.bluenote --> r.m.jazz + r.m.blues (was: rec.music.jazz)
Date: 28 Sep 92 12:01:24
Organization: BBN, Cambridge MA
	<RSHAPIRO.92Sep25124826@kariba.bbn.com> <Bv9wJ6.9FM@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: kariba.bbn.com
In-reply-to: ujwb@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu's message of 28 Sep 92 05:28:18 GMT

In article <Bv9wJ6.9FM@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu> ujwb@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu (Jeff Beer) writes:

   Bird said you could never play too many blues.   As for the
   breakthrough, I don't think it "came with" those song forms you
   mentioned more than it "came with" the blues. 
 
When I said the innovations "came with" these non-blues songs, what I
meant was that he chose *these*, rather than blues, as his vehicle. I
didn't mean to suggest that it was the songs themselves that somehow
brought the innovations with them. On the other, I did mean to suggest
that blues form did not provide a good basis for his explorations; and
that much else, along with blues, went into his version of jazz. Blues
wasn't any more important than any other factor.

   If you are saying his
   innovative harmonic procedures did not come from the blues, that is
   correct. 

Yes, this was one of the claims I was making.

   But that is isolating the technique from the aesthetic.
   You could turn the argument on its head and say he expanded the blues
   aesthetic so it incorporated these advanced harmonic procedures.

One could say that. But what blues players picked up on this
expansion? None that I know of. The bebop revolution didn't have much
of an affect on blues musicians. Likewise other jazz innovations --
there was no free-blues movement, for instance (note that discussions
of Capt Beefheart's music, which might be described as free blues,
generally take place on the de facto rock newsgroup, r.m.misc). I
think this head-turning is pushing the bounds of credibility.

As for the breakthrough, I'm not sure we really disagree. Do you
really want to claim that the aesthetic of Salt Peanuts or Ko Ko is a
blues aesthetic? If so, you'll have to present some arguments, as it's
certainly not obvious. If not, then isolating the technique from the
aesthetic doesn't really matter, because the aesthetic isn't blues
anyway. 

This notion of using a "blues aesthetic" as a basis for r.m.bluenote
is kind of a tricky business. You haven't quite said what you mean by
blues aesthetic, but the way it's often described seems to imply that
any music with deep feeling or emotive expressiveness partakes of this
aesthetic. But that's awfully general, on the one hand, and too
restrictive on the other. Too general because it would imply, for
instance, that the great bulk of country music, which is deeply
expressive and often borrows blues forms, belongs on r.m.bluenote.
And too restrictive because it would imply that some contemporary
improvised music which explicitly rejects emotive expressiveness,
music which I think we all agree belongs on the jazz newsgroup doesn't
belong there. I don't think the very general notion of a blues
aesthetic can be used to sort out the Usenet hierarchy.

   I think there is some essence of the blues that is at the heart of all
   styles of jazz.

Unfortunately, if we try to identify what that essence might be, even
in vague terms, we run into the problems of the blues aesthetic
described above. I really don't think there is any such essence, not
least because jazz is such open-ended music. Jazz doesn't have any
single essence, blues or otherwise. Forcing it into a blues aesthetic,
even a very general one, is just a fetter; ask Derek Bailey. 




Newsgroups: news.groups,rec.arts.comics.misc,rec.arts.animation,rec.arts.tv