From: mingus@cbnewsl.cb.att.com (Damballah Wedo)
Subject: Re: r.m.bluenote --> r.m.jazz + r.m.blues (was: rec.music.jazz)
Organization: The Poto Mitan in the Houmfor
Distribution: na
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 1992 04:19:38 GMT

> rshapiro@bbn.com (Richard Shapiro):
> In article <Bv9wJ6.9FM@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu> ujwb@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu (Jeff Beer):
> 
>    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

Bird "chose" ``Cherokee'' because that happened to be the tune he was
jamming to, in 1939, when he finally was able to crystallize the ideas
he'd been having into actual music. It could just as easily have been
a blues tune. Indeed, his first recording sessions as a leader have
a generous helping of blues tunes. Pick any twenty or so Charlie Parker
compositions, you'll find at least half that are overt or disguised blues.

The musics of people from Count Basie and Duke Ellington to Ornette
Coleman, Dewey Redman and Booker T. Williams simply *cannot* be
conceived or understood or heard or appreciated without taking
the blues into consideration. Surely you know this, Richard?

> 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.

Stuff and nonsense. Go listen to Cleanhead Vinson, and compare
his alto solos to those of Lou Donaldson. Vinson himself has said
many times that he dug Charlie Parker, and modeled his playing after
Bird. Few people realize this, because they stop with his funny
lyrics.

As for a free-blues movement, there was no need for one. Free blues
had been done, by people like Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson,
Mississipi John Hurt, who played in essentially free verse that
only occasionally approximated the familiar 12-bar structure.
Besides, Ornette has called himself a blues player for most of his
career. The blues and jazz are mirror imagers of each other in that
the commonly known idiom of former started out very unstrctured
and progressively tightened up, while the commonly understood form
of the latter did exactly the opposite. That's history. So what?

You've been harping on the point that there is no cross-fertilization
between blues and jazz. Tell me, then, how you would classify people
like Jay McShann, or Jimmy Rushing, or Wynonie Harris, or Big Joe
Turner, or Jimmy Witherspoon? If you're going to lump all of them
into the blues, I'll have to ask you about the music they made with,
respectively (and to pick only these examples) Charlie Parker, Duke
Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie, Eddie Harris, Art Tatum and Ben Webster.
If you're wanting to ignore these as exceptions, I'll give you a longer
list. Then what will you do?

And while you are doing the categorizations you seem so comfortable with,
please explain to Rahsaan Rolanf Kirk why he and Sonny Boy Williamson
should be in different newsgroups (go listen to the Mercury Rahsaan
box for the music these two played together, and for the stories
Rahsaan had to tell about Sonny Boy.)

You've made the point that John Coltrane did not play much blues.
So much for "Cousin Mary", "Syeeda's Song Flute", "Blue Train",
"Traneing In", "Mr. P.C.", "Up Against The Wall" (aka "Trane's
Slow Blues").... And while I'm at it, it's a bit silly
to use "My Favorite Things" as an example of Coltrane's favored
tune structure, when his achievement was precisely to throw away
the song's form and keep just the music. Unless you believe
his, say, 1965 or 66 versions of that song are straight recitations
of the tune's chorus structure?

In short, I claim, as supported above (LOTS more data available
on request), that it is IMPOSSIBLE to split blues from jazz and wind
up with two pieces that make sense.

What I see on r.m.bluenote, and what I believe is the reason for the
small level of cross-discussion, is the apparent belief of some of
the blues fans on the newsgroup that "blues" is the musical form
that encompasses only the small-group (solo or duet) acoustic Delta
idiom and the larger-group Chicago style, as exemplified, respectively,
by Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters.

Well, yes, the blues is certainly those idioms. The blues, however,
is *also* the boogie-woogie style of Albert Ammons and Meade Lux
Lewis, and the acoustic finger-picking Piedmont style, and
a huge chunk of the Harlem stride school (which BTW spawned such
not-usually-thought-of-as-blues-players Duke Ellington and Count
Basie, to say nothing of Willie The Lion Smith or James P. Johnson).
And then you had the individuals (see above) who reached outside
these idioms, and created their own. Individualistic creation in
every performance is pretty much the essence of jazz, don't you think?

The reason why there is not more cross-discussion is *too much*
compartmentalization in people's minds, *not* too little. There are
some people people who automatically skip over anything that is
not about European free-jazz types, some others who ignore anything
that is not about guitar-led blues-structure. I think it would be
sad indeed to break up the newsgroup because these various groups
are so tied to their petty little categories that they are unwilling
to listen to each other.

Splitting the newsgroup would mark the elevation of narrow-mindedness
to the level of an institution. 

Personally, I rarely have time for this newsgroup anymore (tonight
is the first time I've read it since around August 20), so I really
don't care what gets done to it. I just wanted to register my
opinion that the arguments being advanced for splitting it are
misguided and/or factually incorrect.

P.S. You make the point that blues and rock'n'roll should be
in the same newsgroup. YES THEY SHOULD BE, for virtually any rock
recorded before the late 60s deliberate attempts to borrow (or
steal) from other musics, which in turn led to early 70s art-rock.
Rock never really returned to its roots after that, the punk
movements and one-shot wonders like the Stray Cats notwithstanding.
Before r.m.bluenote was created, I opposed the splitting of
r.m.bluenote several times, at least until that newsgroup started
receiving several hundred messages per day. r.m.bluenote is nowhere
neear close to that level: After six weeks away, I've read most
of it in about three hours. So much for having to "wade through
a bunch of uninteresting articles."
-- 
Marcel-Franck Simon             	mingus@usl.com, usl!mingus

	" Papa Loko, ou se' van, ou-a pouse'-n ale'
	  Nou se' papiyon, n'a pote' nouvel bay Agwe' "