American Music is Self-Absorbed

American music is self-absorbed. The obsession on the experience, personality, skill, and individuality of the performer is rooted in the DNA of most vital early styles, most notably in solo blues performances, instrumental jazz solos, and the spotlight placed on the multitude of musicians who entered into the celebrity wing of popular music. This ubiquitous use of “I” and the first person lyric style can be traced back to “ I woke up this morning” themes in the blues, (epitomized by Son House in “Walkin’ Blues”) Where the “I” approach is used as the gateway often to larger themes of love, infidelity, and the multitude of social realities surrounding life in the rural south. It has reached new peaks in the last ten years, at least according to Dr. Nathan DeWall, who’s 2011 study determined: “a statistically significant trend toward narcissism and hostility in popular music.” As was hypothesized, the words “I” and “me” appear more frequently in the last few decades, along with what are labeled “anger-related words”, while there’s been a corresponding decline in “we” and “us” as well as the expression of positive emotions. “Late adolescents and college students love themselves more today than ever before.”

Hip-hop is no more or less self-obsessed than any other genre, but is the most striking. This may have something to do with a still relatively young genre that shifted so dramatically and quickly in terms of content and depth of purpose. Early artists created music that functioned for parties, large crowds, dancers, and often downplayed the participation of MC’s. It was also drawing on many influences from the contemporary dance and punk practices of the period, and self consciously trying to cast the widest net possible in the emergent national radio market. It also may be unmatched to the degree that un-broadcast-able self-aggrandizement of monetary, physical, and sexual attributes raised the ire of a mainstream public while simultaneously exploding into global music phenomena.

Grandmaster flash introduced the idea of biographical realism, graphically describing the brutal realities of the segregated south Bronx in 1982’s “The Message.”  The success and influence of this piece rests in the ability for listeners to relate to Flash’s delivery, whether they were living in the Bronx or not. For subsequent artists, a biographical account, even if not entirely real, provided an intense reservoir of personal experience that would resonate with others with similar experiences, but also for a global audience that would be able to adapt the specify of the approach as an adaptable metaphor for their own background. This of course is a similar phenomenon to many other forms of music, especially rock and roll. Teen angst is universal, regardless of background, and a new musical language offers a similar catharsis to blocks of culturally underrepresented listeners. The forms may change through the decades, but the function for the listener, especially if they are going through predictable modes of psychological development, is similar.

The outer world gives way to the realities and necessarily complex communication of the inner as a musical style develops. This transition is seen in its nacent stages in “The Message”, but has taken center stage with pieces like Kendrick Lamar’s “What a Dollar Cost?” The track has been lauded, and combines a relatable metaphor of success, guilt, and imperfection with an invitation for the listener to engage in a kind of emotional and cultural voyeurism. The track describes Lamar’s experience with a fictional homeless person, taking the listener through various confessions of the rapper’s proposed arrogance toward a crack-addicted panhandler. The slow, dark Phrygian 12/8 groove is punctuated by moments of harmonized melody, and integrates past and present tenses as the narrative flips between panhandler and Lamar. Lamar describes the track as “…me talking to him was simply a thank you from God. And I felt God speaking through him to get at me.”

This inner world is where a listener will determine whether the track succeeds or not.   Lamar’s descriptions in the track are those of a young man, confused by his own success and an apparent lack of cultural authenticity. Not as beguiling as the inner turmoil of other artists perhaps such as Charles Mingus, and even the “homeless person is god” metaphor comes off as a tired cliché, that is unless one has never heard it. To this extent Lamar’s rap is perhaps relatable to a young audience, but the track succeeds when the delivery consumes the message itself, filling in holes within the ego driven narrative with a musical substance that supplants the occasional lack of universality of the metaphor with a groove and orchestration that communicates meaning that the biography and the metaphor leave out. Here Love Dragon’s production is a vital component. The track creates a world inside the head of Lamar’s character, oscillating between looking out and looking in, dialogues and introspections. Even if one finds the content somewhat lacking, the delivery is certainly not. In this regard the sophistication of Lamar’s lines is such that the dizzying amount of energy emanating from his structure and delivery eclipse the simplicity of the narrative. The relatability of “I” story becomes real on a musical level first. Ironically, the obsession of the track in Lamar’s pious life lesson leaves the beggar as invisible and unrecognized as Lamar faults himself for making him.

 

‘Kendrick Lamar Breaks Down 8 To Pimp A Butterfly Tracks – MTV’. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Mar. 2016.

Kendrick Lamar (Ft. James Fauntleroy & Ron Isley) – How Much a Dollar Cost. N.p. Audio Recording.

Tierney, John. ‘A New Generation’s Vanity, Heard Through Hit Lyrics’. The New York Times 25 Apr. 2011. NYTimes.com. Web. 21 Mar. 2016.

 

 

Aretha Franklin: Queen of Soul, Jazz, Blues…

 

Aretha Franklin has earned the mantle of the Queen of Soul, but her influences and her talents transcend any single genre, with the diversity of her recordings often freely crossing boundaries. These boundaries are consumed in the individuality of her personal mastery and amalgam of jazz, blues, soul, gospel, R&B, and pop influences. This is evident on her recording of “Ramblin’” from the Soul ‘69 record. The track mixes heavy doses of these elements in an incredible pyrotechnic display of all that was right with American music in 1969.

Even with the insulting beginning to his March 1^st 1969 review[1], Stanley Booth labels Soul ‘69 as “the best record to appear in the last five years.” The album features a stellar jazz orchestra, with arrangements by Arif Mardin that would not have been out of place on a Count Basie Recording, or amongst Oliver Nelson and Thad Jones’ work of the period. Even with the presence of such soul icons as King Curtis, Tommy Cogbill, and Jerry Jemmott, this is a jazz band, and one that represents the height of talent working in the genre that were just at home helping Atlantic records produce studio hits as crafting cutting edge musical movements with Miles Davis and Gil Evans. The wealth of jazz talent is staggering:

 

Aretha Franklin

Soul ‘69

Released          January 17, 1969

Recorded         April 17–18 & September 24, 1968

 

Aretha Franklin – vocals, piano (on #2,7,9)

Junior Mance – piano (1,3-6,8-11)

Spooner Oldham – organ (2,7)

Joe Zawinul – organ (5), electric piano (6,12)

Kenny Burrell (1,3-6,8-11), Jimmy Johnson – guitar (2,7)

Ron Carter (1,3-6,8-12), Jerry Jemmott (2,7) – bass

Tommy Cogbill – electric bass (2,7)

Bruno Carr (1,3-6,8,9,12), Roger Hawkins (2,7), Grady Tate (10,11) – drums

Jack Jennings – vibraphone (5,7,9,12)

Louie Goicdecha, Manuel Gonzales – percussion (5,7,12)

David Newman – tenor saxophone, flute

King Curtis, Seldon Powell – tenor saxophone

George Dorsey, Frank Wess – alto saxophone

Pepper Adams – baritone saxophone

Joe Newman, Bernie Glow, Richard Williams, Snooky Young, Ernie Royal – trumpet

Jimmy Cleveland, Urbie Green, Benny Powell, Thomas Mitchell – trombone

Evelyn Greene, Wyline Ivy – backing vocals

Produced by Jerry Wexler and Tom Dowd

Arrangements by Arif Mardin

As the lineup suggests, the ensemble on the opening track “Rambin’” swings hard, as does much of the rest of the session. In that regard it is amazing how naturally and exceptionally Aretha leads this group in that groove. Not merely being accompanied, she strikes out and pushes the rhythm with vocalisms that would not be out of place coming out of one of the instrumental solos. Indeed, during the saxophone solo on the track Aretha reverses roles, and sings her own obbligato part as accompaniment. She invents her own riffs and counter melodies during the out vamp that, aside from not using identifiable scat syllables, match the bands when needed and consume them when she wants to. This is not surprising from a singer raised as much on Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughn as the richest of gospel traditions.

The blues element in the track is directly traceable to, amongst many other places, the original recording of Big Maybelle Smith from 1957. Smith’s version can trace a straight line back to Mamie Smith’s original blues recording, both with the informal yet virtuosic improvisations in the rhythm section and the upfront presentation of her volcanic and versatile interpretation of the lyric. Drums are placed far in the back of the mix, except for a decidedly insistent backbeat snare drum beat. The lyric of this 8-bar blues becomes more minimal as the piece moves on, leaving increasingly large amounts of space for her amazingly varied approach to coloring words and contrasting dynamics.

Aretha also takes advantage of this space, with expressive phrasing that at times serenades and alternately roars out of the arrangement. Huge crescendos and dynamic shifts play with emphasis on particular lyrics, including a delivery of the line “sick of your funky ways” that should be heard to be believed. The stop time break at 1:53 allows Aretha’s back phrasing to be heard alone, buoying the pulse but leaning back to create a pocket so deep you could drive a car through it. She effortlessly matches the world-class trumpet section, both in timbre, intensity, and often in volume. This is Aretha Franklin at her peak, both in terms of jaw dropping vocal ability, but comprised of a blues component that seamlessly integrates the jazz elements coming from the band and the arrangement.

The recording is amazing for these amalgamations, but not surprising given the influence of the singers named above, as well as Ray Charles, Nat King Cole and Sam Cooke, LaVern Baker, Ruth Brown, Little Willie John, the Falcons, and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. What is equally amazing that after a 6-decade plus career we tend to forget how incredible her singular contribution is. Recordings like this help shine the spotlight on Aretha as a crafter of groove that defies any simplified label, perhaps just the moniker of “Queen” should be enough.

 

[1] “It does no good to say Aretha Franklin can’t sing as well as Ivy Anderson; Ivy Anderson is dead, and not a dozen of the dedicated music-lovers who read this journal remember the great Duke Ellington vocalist. We must make do with what we have, and the best female singer we have now is Aretha.”

: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/soul-69-19690301#ixzz42pgW9fa3

 

Feeling as Form and Feet: James Brown’s “I Got The Feelin”

By the late 1960s James Brown was well into his most innovative and influential period as the pioneer of funk. His recording of “Cold Sweat” in 1967 hit number one on the R&B chart, and was to be followed up by, amongst other landmark recordings, “I Got the Feelin” in 1968.

The feeling that James Brown might be referring to is audibly and visually manifested in the studio recording, as well as live footage captured at the Apollo theatre in March and the Boston Garden[1] on April 5th. In particular, Brown’s irrepressible dancing is both a manifestation of the structure of the groove, as well as the traditions of the blues that influenced all of Brown’s output.

The Apollo performance begins with Brown asking his congregation if they have the feeling’, singling out each area of the theatre before asking the question of the band. Suddenly the band pops into the signature groove. The footage from Boston here is illuminating, featuring a long shot that makes most of the band and all of Brown’s body clearly visible.

The first phrase, featuring the first line “I Got the Feelin” ( about 10:10 in on the video below) features a driving rhythm section and horn riff. Brown’s feet alternate, close to the ground, alternating in quick succession. The second phrase, where the band moves to the IV chord, features a unison hit by the band that Brown chooses to acknowledge with a sudden twist of his head down and to his left. The largest accent of the tune is left without a vocal, instead maximized with Brown’s exaggerated gesture. A few measures later, upon returning to the I chord, Brown returns to a variation of his earlier moves.

When the band hits the V chord and the “Baby baby baby…” break, Brown turns his back to the audience, accenting his right foot.

This template is expanded, with wilder variations of the IV chord hit showing Brown creating wilder moves, mimicking the growing intensity of the band, and eventually Brown showing it off at 12:45 during the saxophone solo,. The performance continues to build into the last chorus with Brown manipulating the mic stand, catching it along with his continuously intensifying performance. The last break, Brown sings “Baby Baby Baby…” facing the audience before turning it all loose at 14:00.

The story of this tune is in as much of Brown’s physicality as his vocal. And while It builds throughout the 4-minutes shown in the video, it uses the ebb and flow of a modified blues form to create peaks and valleys where he can build and fall from each successively higher plateau.

The otherwise tune is a blues form, using a 12-bar first phrase, and a 6-bar turnaround and break. The piece foreshadowed other Brown classics such as “Sex Machine” where an audible cue to “take it to the bridge” sees the groove leave the I chord to move to a second section built on the IV chord. This second section ends with short hits on the V chord before starting the next chorus.

These tunes show how the flexibility of phrasing often noted with early blues pioneers such as Robert Johnson or John Lee Hooker that resulted in a malleable number of bars re-exerts itself at in the foundations of funk, with Brown often audibly conducting his band as to when he believes the next phrase should be played.

“I Got The Feelin” (1968)

|           I           |                       |                       |                       |

|                       |                       |                       |                       |

|                       |                       |                       |                       |

|           IV        |                       |                       |                       |

|           I           |                       |                       |                       |

|           V         |                       | break ………|………………|

|………………|…………     :||

 

“Sex Machine” (1971)

||:          I           |                       |                       |                       :||

on cue

||:          IV        |                       |                       |                       :||          V         ||   D.C.

 

[1] This April 5^th performance is outlined for its significance to the civil rights movement and to the city of Boston in the documentary The Night James Brown Saved Boston.”

Composition as Process: Charles Mingus’ “Folk Forms I”

What is the jazz “process” as it relates to spontaneous performance and improvisation? When does the process involved of creating improvised music become indistinguishable from what one would recognize as a preconcieved compositional product?

Charles Mingus is unmatched as an improviser, leader, and diverse musician that could create music relying on the artistry of a method often more so that compositions that used traditional preconcieved elements such as written melody and harmony. The art of Mingus’ mastery in this regard reaches a new creative peak beginning with the inclusion of Eric Dolphy in 1960, and notably on the album Mingus at Antibes, recorded July 13^th, 1960.

The material documented with his working bands, especially those recorded live in concert, offer the best glimpse into Mingus’ mastery not only of composition, spontaneous arrangement, double bass virtuosity, but also a cumulative mastery of different expressive methods drawn from blues, folk, and gospel musics, and an ability to employ them in real time.  As Robert Palmer[1] summarizes:

This is one of the great Mingus albums. It was recorded live at the Antibes Jazz Festival in 1960 with a group many listeners feel was Mingus’s best, during one of the bassist/composer’s most productive and boundary-stretching periods. At a time when Ornette Coleman’s free jazz was just beginning to be heard and the avant-garde movement which would follow his example was still gestating, Mingus and his musicians, particularly the incandescent Eric Dolphy, proposing a brand of freedom built on the black folk forms and the skeletal remains of popular song structures. This album captures their freedom-with-order, which was to become a principal influence on Anthony Braxton, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and the other structuralists of the Midwestern avant-garde almost ten years later, at the peak of inter active intensity. There is nothing quite like it in the rest of the Mingus discography.

While many later concerts actually do capture this freedom, and often a more intense, evolved form[2], the Antibes recording is the first live document of the Mingus quintet to feature Eric Dolphy with Booker Ervin, arguably two musicians who were essential to the realization of Mingus ensemble ideal.   It goes without saying that the contributions of drummer Danny Richmond are  irreplaceable and that the unprecedented rhythmic flexibility the bassist and drummer developed in the ensuing years is a milestone in the idiom.

The processes Mingus draws upon reflects the bassist’s extensive musical experience up to 1960, and the well documented personal, psychological, racial, religious, and societal forces that shaped the aesthetic of one of American music’s most dynamic figures. Where these elements start and stop are often difficult to measure, although sometimes they leap out of the music in a way that’s belies the complexity that lies beneath Mingus’s expression. As Palmer states:

Although his transmutation of Black folk music into modern Jazz must have been inspired, at least in part, by similar alchemy’s in Ellington works such as black, brown and beige, Mingus brought a profoundly original understanding of folk process to his Jazz workshop performances of this period. He preferred working orally to writing melody lines or even court progressions on paper, and together with his drummer, Danny Richmond, he developed an unprecedented rhythmic mobility. To judge from the sound of the music, he was seeking to duplicate within his groups the freely responsive relationship between black preacher and congregation or blue singer and audience, a relationship which allows for abrupt changes of tempo and meter, stop time, dramatic pauses, and other devices, according to the shared feelings of the participants in the sensitivity of the preacher/singer/group leader as a chancellor of collective energies.

The piece Folk Forms I epitomizes this approach, with nothing  pre-composed except for master musicians drawing upon various tradition of blues and folk music, the  emotional disposition of its composer,[3] the archetypal structures of the blues, and a reoccurring riff played by the drums:

Mingus’ approach to bass in this track is rooted in riffs and blues improvisation, flexible in all regards, and less concerned with any bebop-esque outlining of harmony or traditional execution of a regular quarter note pulse. Each musician draws extensively from this perspective as well, leaving out many of the devices that were characterisitc of the hard bop idiom prevelant at the time.  Mingus’ solo lines develop the aab phrase structure of the blues, and often take advantage of the sole role as a harmonic instruments to vary placement (and duration) of the I,IV, and V harmonies, while maintaining a strict 12-bar form. The groove becomes an amalgam of concurrent improvisations drawing from upbeat that has equal parts coming from New Orleans, Kansas City, and New York. The band begins with a minimal bass solo, building thorugh a layering of instruments and textures  in both orchestration and percieved tension. It flirts initially with releasing this tension before the tenor solo, but that release is denied. This ebb and flow of extreme amount of tension is released four times throughout the performance, and results in  intense and long crescendos, and sudden drops in dynamic as if the floor had just fallen out from beneath your feet.

The composition of this track is then rests in Mingus’ acute sensitivity and skill to create a spontaneous arrangements within a form, and the ability to create a spontaneous orchestration and dynamic arc built upon a minimal rhythmic idea, rather than a more traditional melody and chord progression. It is the process here that is preconceived; a series of crescendos, denied or resolved rhythmic tensions created by strategic fleeting eruptions of 4/4 swing in the rhythm section, the space for individual solos from everyone in the band, and the dynamic arc that reaches its ultimate climax in the out head of the performance. This arc alone is a singular example of one of the most challenging of jazz compositional elements. There are few examples in the jazz cannon of performers who can successfully create such an epic dynamic arrangement, exceptionally few who can do so out of an extreme minimum of “composed” elements.  The detailing of this arrangement is shown in the chart below.

The irony of this extreme level of ensemble freedom rests in the necessity of a strong (perhaps even authoritarian) bandleader who can make a moment to moment decisions within ear towards rhythm and dynamic, and the process of developing those as primary compositional elements. While the performance is virtue are obviously collective in its execution, this collective improvisational virtuosity stems from the singular direction of its strongest personality, and done so in real time.

“Folk Forms I” (Mingus) – 11:08

Charles Mingus, bass; Dannie Richmond, drums; Ted Curson, trumpet; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone; Booker Ervin, tenor saxophone.

[1] Mingus, Charles. Passions of a Man: Complete Atlantic Recordings. Atlantic, 1997. Audio Recording.

[2] See Jazz Icons: Charles Mingus Live in ’64. Jazz Icons, 2007. Film.

[3] Also on display on the Candid Label’s version of the piece recorded later in the year: Charles Mingus. Presents Charles Mingus. Wax Time, 1960. Audio Recording.

Blues as Experience

“That it was the history of the African American people as text, as tale, as story, as exposition, narrative, or what have you, that the music was the score, the American life, our words, the libretto, to those actual, lived lives…the music was explaining the history as the history was explaining the music. And that both were expressions of and reflections of the people!” (Amira Baraka, Blues People)

 

Intense

Expressive

Personal

Physical

Vocal

Cultural History

Call and Response

Audience participation

Dancing

A “negation”(?) of elements

Individuality

Uncensored

Groove

Story

Slide Guitar

Coded language

Heavy Metaphor

Locality

Work Song/Rhythm

Poetry

Poverty

Slavery

Segregation

Migration

To make sophisticated/to make raw

Not two, not one

Irony

Mississippi

New Orleans

Kansas City

St. Louis

New York City

Aural

Gospel Music

Baptist

Congregation, Choir, Minister

Water, Trains, Highways, Guns, Women, Men, Work, God, Devil, Crazy, Abuse, Love, Fine and Mellow…

 

 

Blues First

“Jazz as it developed was predominantly a blues-based music.”  (Baraka 1963 p.78)

 

The case can be made that the defining element of African American music comes from not the various forms of instrumental music flourishing in New Orleans in the early 20^th century, but primarily in the expressive dynamics that was being made by country blues musicians simultaneously in the Mississippi Delta. While much has been made of the early jazz beginnings in Louisiana, comparatively less dialogue amongst jazz historians has been placed on the folk and country blues origins that contributed some of jazz’s most enduring characteristics. Understanding the sociological and segregated elements that produced this music, along with the intricacies of musical expressions and the expressive freedom essential to the style, fundamentally changes conventional wisdom about American music, and the evolution of jazz in particular.

 

The Blues

The blues has its roots in Mississippi, epitomized by a style that often used a single singer that would accompany himself, usually with a guitar. The music takes root following the civil war, when African Americans began to utilize a new freedom to travel and migrate as they saw fit, seeing larger portions of the country than enslavement had allowed. This spread the early country blues music through out the region. Along with travel, There was a degree of leisure time, unsupervised by captors, and an ability to construct music not censored by a slave owner. New societal conditions, extreme segregation and the economic realities faced by the limited opportunities afforded African Americans meant the subjects involved in these expressions reflected the realities of life in the Jim Crow south, and the complex expressions of a culture rooted in displacement and the effects of racism and emancipation. With roots in shouts, work songs, and spirituals[1] early country blues was epitomized as an interactive vocal music that interacted with guitar responses that would answer a lyric, or add polyphony underneath.

The term itself may draw from many sources. Blue was feeling of sadness. related to rain, or storms, and in Greek mythology, as the god Zeus would make rain when he was sad. There is also the 17th-century English expression “the blue devils,” which refers to the intense visual hallucinations that can accompany severe alcohol withdrawal, but also used to describe melancholy or sadness as in an in George Colman’s one-act farce Blue Devils (1798). The term became slang for “drunk” by the 1800s, leaving behind a connection to the “blue laws” that still prohibit Sunday alcohol sales in various states. Most commonly the term is used to refer to a state of sadness, as in the journal of 19th century artist John James in 1827 he writes that he “had the blues.” The term was first used in published music in 1908, and would be used in many works that used ballad forms as well as 12-bar AAB form.

Expressive elements of the blues would dramatically influence numerous composers and performers, W.C. Handy is a notable example. Handy was directly influenced by musicians he heard in Missisipi in the composing of the seminal “St. Louis Blues” although the piece consciously creates a more “sophisticated” compositional structure by which to showcase blues expressions (Gioia 2008).

The compositional codification of blues was not as significant however as the shift that occurred in the presentation of what would become “classic” blues epitomized by recordings of Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Mamie Smith, which shifted in the self-consciousness performances would use to gain a piece of the exploding market for easily digestible “race” recordings. The more personal expressions of often intensely emotional content surrounding subjects that were not ready for mainstream considerations, were made more general, comprehensible, and safe compared to the often brutal and explicit metaphors used by country blues musicians. Metaphors not understood by a national audience were minimized, and overt references to sex, death, abuse, and alcohol were mitigated to a degree acceptable to the emerging social segregations and all important record selling business model.

 “22-20 Blues” Skip James  (1931)

Oh, Mr. Crest, Mr. Crest
How in the world you
Expect for me to rest?
Oh, Mr. Crest, Mr. Crest
How in the world you
Expect for me to rest?
You’ve got my 22-20
Layin’ up across my breast

Oh, if I send for my baby
An she act a fool
An she don’t never come
If I send for my baby
She act a fool
An she don’t never come
All the doctors in New York City
I declare, they can’t help her none

You know, sometimes she gets unruly
An she act like she just don’t wanna do
Sometimes she gets unruly
An she act like she just don’t wanna
But I get my 22-20
I cut that woman half in two

Oh, your.38 Special
Buddy, it’s most too light
Your .38 Special
Buddy, it’s most too light
But my 22-20
Will make ev’rything, alright

Ah-or, your .44-40
Buddy, it’ll do very well
Your .44-40
Buddy, it’ll do very well
But my .22-20
I declare you, it’s a-burnin’ hell

I was stranded on the highway-hi
With my 22-20 in my
I was standin’ on the highway
With my 22-20 in my
They got me ‘cussed for murder
I declare, I never have harmed a man

Lord, oh I measured my gun
An it’s just a-long as my right arm
I measured my gun
An it’s just a-long as my right
I’m gon’ raise me some sand
And back down the road, I declare.

 

Crazy Blues

“Crazy Blues” was one of the most significant pieces of the 20^th century, and apart from Smith’s virtuosity, this was the first by a performer who could perform what could be described as classic “blues”. It was begrudgingly recorded by Okeh Records but quickly became an unintended smash hit, breaking sales records by moving 75,000 copies in the first month alone. This recording launched the rapidly expanding industry of “race records” by recording black musicians for a black audience, a practice that would see predominantly white record companies tapping into the enormous interest and revenue involved with black music and a drive to find and record the extraordinary talent rooted in the south.

The first recording by an African American singer, Mamie Smith’s 1920 rendition of Perry Bradford’s “Crazy Blues” offers the first important recorded example of a blues vocal performance and elements that would form the heart of American jazz and popular music. On display is a myriad of expressive devices and interpretations that that would permeate melodic interpretation for the rest of the century. These lie in the vocal interpretation, Smith’s interactions with the instrumentalists, and delivery of the lyric, rather than any formal or what would become pedantically described as specifically scalar characteristics.

 

“Crazy Blues” Mamie Smith (1920)

I can’t sleep at night
I can’t eat a bite
‘Cause the man I love
He don’t treat me right.

He makes me feel so blue
I don’t know what to do
Sometimes I’m sad inside
And then begin to cry

‘Cause my best friend . . . said his last goodbye.
There’s a change in the ocean
Change in the deep blue sea . . . but baby
I tell you folks there . . . ain’t no change in me

My love for that man
Will always be.
Now I’ve got the crazy blues
Since my baby went away

I ain’t got no time to lose
I must find him today
Now the doctor’s gonna do all . . . that he can
But what you gonna need is a undertaker man
I ain’t had nothin’ but bad news

Now I’ve got the crazy blues.
Now I can read his letter
I sure can’t read his mind
I thought he’s lovin’me . . .

He’s leavint all the time
Now I see . . .
My poor love was Iyin’.
I went to the railroad

Hang my head on the track
Thought about my daddy
I gladly snatched it back
Now my babe’s gone

And gave me the sack.
Now I’ve got the crazy blues
Since my baby went away
I ain’t had no time to lose

I must find him today
I’m gonna do like a Chinaman, go and get some hop
Get myself a gun, and shoot myself a cop
I ain’t had nothin’ but bad news

Now I’ve got the crazy blues.
Those blues.

 

Perry Bradford remarks about the looseness of this arrangement:

“When my jazz band played for Mamie Smith to record the “Crazy Blues, we had no arrangements. They were what I called “hum and head arrangements.” I mean we would listen to the melody and harmony of the piano and each man picked out his harmony notes. …It was crude, but the sound that Mamie and my Jazz Hounds planted that February morning in 1920 had such “down home” original corn in it that it has sprouted, grown and thrived all down through the years.”

While it is clear there is a strong melodic outline to Bradford’s song, Smith uses an incredible number of unpredictable vocal nuances, colorations, articulations, vibrato, dynamics, and changing of pitches within the melody, and by emphasizing various words to add dimension to the lyric. While Bradford describes the accompaniment as “crude”, it is actually a remarkable level of ensemble improvisation and interaction. The constant instrumental polyphony behind her is echoed throughout other pieces such as the guitar riffs in Robert Johnson’s “Crossroad Blues”, demonstrating instrumental interjections not just occurring during breaths and vocal pauses, but underneath as well. These levels of polyphony occur simultaneously with and apart from Smith’s melody.

Rhythm is the most striking element of Smith’s performance, and despite the primitive groove coming out of the band, Smith’s melodies contains a simultaneously wide 8^th and 16^th note pocket, slightly varying between the articulations with a virtuosic subtlety that gives the feeling of both simultaneously. In addition subtle changes in tempo, leaning back and singing on top, add another layer of interpretation to her performance. This level of polyrhythm from a single voice, even when she is not singing reflects the depth of an African rhythmic tradition that, until this recording, had never been captured before.

Freedom of Expression

Many of the best examples of this early blues style can be heard from the 1930s, recordings that could seem oddly non-conforming to 21^st century ears. For contemporary musicians raised on the fixed idea of fixed forms it is a revelation to discover that although the music feels like the familiar 12-bar structure, many performances rarely are. It is misleading to hear this style of country blues, perhaps through perhaps the 1937-8 recordings of Robert Johnson and think that Johnson exemplifies a freedom within the blues form by varying chorus lengths, and doing so seamlessly. Freedom is the blues form. The length of a chorus is not necessarily set, therefore there can be no variation from it. Perhaps a infantile comparison would be to say “Happy Birthday” has a fixed tempo, or key, and be quick to point out “incorrect” versions that are performed. It just isn’t on the radar. Listeners accustomed to hearing a 12-bar form repeated may remark that that many of Johnson’s performances use anything fro 9-13 and ½ bar choruses, and find that to be an unusual departure, but the flexibility in all elements of the blues, least of those the number of bars, is what the blues is, not the other way around. The idea of 12 bars being a goal was likely completely alien to a singer more concerned with the rhythm, feeling, expression, and interplay between voice and guitar. The analytical conception of “Crossroad Blues” as being loose in regard to form is incorrect if one takes the fact that there is no fixed form to begin with. As a formalistic element there is no necessity for any self-conscious and predetermined number of bars. Instead, the length of a chorus takes an improvised form, using a general feeling of phrase lengths, changed in the moment by nuanced expression and spontaneity, intensely varied pitches and articulation, rhythms, and tempo that may evolve on alternate takes. Even lyrics may or may not be improvised or embellished and can be heavily interpreted or repeated and changed at will.

The conceptual constructs that would be notated by W.C. Handy in 1914 with “St. Louis Blues” is one of the first and best examples of a codification of the style for the necessary needs of notation and eventually the needs of more than one performer to play together. The number of bars becomes fixed (although Handy adds a bridge) but in performance this again becomes a guide rather than the rule. In Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong’s 1925 version all elements of the piece are interpreted, the essential quality that would influence all of the music coming from places like New Orleans.

If a comparison is drawn from flexibility of form to the evolution of a groove, it can be easily shown that swing as a performance practice is based in a nuanced rhythmic expression decidedly NOT based in a mathematically consistent reproduction of either pulse or hierarchical arrangement of rhythmic layers. It is a flexible system of the creation of musical motion, which grooves specifically because of this expressive flexibility. The overt vocal expressions of tempo from Robert Johnson are not a variation of pulse and formal structure because those elements don’t exist! The intellectual abstractions and notational necessities that created the ubiquitous 12-bar form were variations of a malleable vocal and instrumental expression that took advantages of phrasing opportunities that changed in scale with the adaptation by groups needing an agreed upon and consistent tempo and form.  It lived most obviously in the soloist, who could push or pull, play on top or lay back, play across a bar, or change speed without disrupting the groove produced by a rhythm section. But even bass and drums took advantage of expressive rhythmic phrasing, by doing all of the techniques described above but in a more subtle way.  Examples abound, in fact the greatest rhythm sections often are so “incorrect” by pedagogical standards (how would a state jazz “competition” score Ray Brown, or Tony Williams, players who were notorious for speeding up and by doing so making the music groove much harder) yet these “imperfections” still described by educators as such, and somehow ironic for being so?!?

These lines hint that African American music, or perhaps all music, isn’t about the music itself but why that music is what it is.  The late David Bowie astounded critics by proclaiming he was not a rock star but instead using the medium to another purpose.  If one extrapolated upward, past the genre, individualistic idiom, to time, place, culture, history, and technique as well, where can we find a glimpse of what it’s really all about?

[1] See Baraka (1963) and Gioia (2009) for exceptional musical and cultural descriptions of early black music and blues.

Bradford, Perry. Born with the Blues. First Edition. Oak Publications. Print.

Gioia, Ted. Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music. 10.3.2009 edition. W. W. Norton & Company, 2009. Print.

Jazz Styles. 11 edition. Boston: Pearson, 2011. Print.

Jones, Leroi. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. Harper Collins, 1999. Print.