Blues

Abstract: This chapter investigates the issue of the role of the computer,in musical analysis. Starting with a survey of the main approaches in computer analysis, we focus on the particular problem of Jazz chord sequences harmonic analysis. We propose a theory of chord sequence analysis, based on an explicit conceptual hierarchy of analysis objects. We discuss the implementation,of the theory

Recent revisionist scholarship has argued that representations by white “outsider” observers of black American music have distorted historical truths about how the blues came to be. While these scholarly arguments have generated an interesting debate concerning how the music has been framed and disseminated, they have so far only told an American story, failing to acknowledge that in the post-war era the blues had spread far beyond the borders of the United States. As Christian O’Connell shows in Blues, How Do You Do? Paul Oliver’s largely neglected scholarship—and the unique transatlantic cultural context it provides—is vital to understanding the blues.


O’Connell’s study begins with Oliver’s scholarship in his early days in London as a writer for the British jazz press and goes on to examine Oliver’s encounters with visiting blues musicians, his State Department–supported field trip to the US in 1960, and the resulting photographs

and oral history he produced, including his epic “blues narrative,” The Story of the Blues (1969). Blues, How Do You Do? thus aims to move away from debates that have been confined within the limits of national borders—or relied on clichés of British bands popularizing American music in America—to explore how Oliver’s work demonstrates that the blues became a reified ideal, constructed in opposition to the forces of modernity.

To analyze the short film Bluesman (2018) this work brings together the concept of Sankofa-originally from the writing of Akan peoples from West Africa-with the concept of Afrofuturism through a methodology that articulates the ideas of circularity and inversion. We start by observing the trajectory of Brazilian rapper Baco Exu do Blues under the "exulic" perspective explained by Sàlámì (King) and Ribeiro (2015); then we discuss the peculiarity of racial issues in Brazil from the concept of "racism by denial" proposed by Lélia Gonzalez (1988); and we conclude using the concept of Afrofuturism to point out decolonial elements identified in the narrative proposed by the work, using the narrative itself as a guide to observing the game of inversion of meanings that is proposed with the notions of before, during and after in the course proposed by the short film. The methodology used is also circular and based on the proverbial ideogram Sankofa: looking for the past, projecting it in the present and providing a future. Therefore, Bluesman's descriptive analysis gains decolonial significance by articulating epistemologies outside the Eurocentric axis to highlight the logic of resistance present in the narrative proposal and in the themes addressed by the work, a logic that seeks the reverse of the sense indicated by hegemonic thinking.

Mixing facts and fiction, Hollywood screen biographies have told the lives of popular music icons at least since The Jazz Singer (1927). However, biopics construct narratives that deal problematically with issues of race. This article aims to describe how representations of African American musicians have changed from 1970s ‘black jazz biopics’ (Gabbard 1996) to more recent films on rock, hip hop and rhythm ’n’ blues acts. On one hand, I analyse the way 1970s music biopics constructed a peculiar new narrative about race and popularity. On the other hand, I show the extent to which films such as Tina (1993), Ray (2004) and Notorious (2009) have subtly modified the racialized distinctions of former biopics, placing black musicians within a cinematic mythology which historically had been reserved to white subjects. The shift from jazz to other music genres, thus, is related to significant changes in biopics’ narratives and visual strategies. However, I argue that music biopics still deal with a distinctive notion of ‘the popular’ (Williams 1983), which frames blackness as otherness and whiteness (Dyer 1997) as just ‘human nature’.

(first publication by Jazz Research Journal and Equinox)

Black singers in the United States of America emerged from
Spirituals and Blues to develop Jazz. Their free-spirited songs
delivered messages of liberation, signaling to Africans in America
that they could be free. On the continent, the African voice
inspired instrumentalists. Vocalese was a dialogue between
vocalists and instrumentalists. Each person had an individual
sound and instrumentalists imitated the voice’s cries, growls,
moans, slurs, whispers, shouts, and wails. Blues was the element of
the American subculture created by enslaved Africans, singing
European music. Considered crude by classical listeners, Blues
liberated singers from precise pitch and calculated rhythms of
European music. This book discusses how vocalists held a power
outside of the realm of instrumentalists and even orators in that
the musical accompaniment provides a foundation for their
rhetoric. From the masked rhetoric of minstrelsy through the
unmasked rhetoric of modern blues and jazz, Blues women spoke
out about racism in America. Blues women provided the primary
means of healing of the human spirit with their musical dalliance
that we can forever be delighted with and grateful for. The paper
concludes that Blues women Mamie Smith, Gertrude “Ma” Rainey,
Ida Cox, Alberta Hunter, Bessie Smith, Josephine Baker, Ethel
Waters, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Eartha Kitt, and Miriam
Makeba were the first civil rights workers because their lives and
songs symbolized liberty in its rawest form by tapping into the
human spirit. ISBN 9781387512478

VOODOOBLUES: Il misterioso caso di Robert Johnson. Incroci religiosi e musicali tra Africa, America e Italia”  unisce la religione al blues e la storia alla leggenda, in un particolare percorso attraverso atmosfere esoteriche, miti, tradizioni e ovviamente musica. A far da guida tra le pagine di questo libro c’è Robert Johnson, figura da sempre considerata misteriosa per il suo fantomatico patto col Diavolo in cambio della straordinaria abilità nel suonare la chitarra.
I capitoli riguardanti le canzoni di Robert Johnson si alternano a quelli che approfondiscono l’universo magico sacrale delle diverse religioni afroamericane come il Voodoo e il Candomblè. Trovano spazio anche le polveri magiche dell’Hoodoo, le divinità degli antichi Romani, il Tarantismo del Sud Italia e le società segrete haitiane.
Ma, alla fin fine, quanto c’è di vero nel patto diabolico più famoso del mondo del blues?

Dette er kapittel 2 fra rapporten Blues i det blå? Bluesbyen Notodden og bluesens status i Norge som kom i 2016 som nr 388 i rapportserien til Telemarksforskning. Rapporten ble utarbeidet av Mari Torvik Heian og Arnfinn Åslund. Kapitel 2 er skrevet av Arnfinn Åslund. Takk til Espen Fjelle, Richard Gjems og Øyvind Pharo for gode innspill. Rapporten i sin helhet kan lastes ned hos Telemarksforskning: https://www.telemarksforsking.no/publikasjoner/filer/3054.pdf

In his fırst novel Reservation Blues (1995), Native American author Sherman Alexie combines the transgression of physical and cultural borders with hybrid aesthetics to reflect on the inevitably blurring boundaries in the American cultural landscape. This paper argues that Reservation Blues constitutes a turning point in Native American literature by locating the roots of popular American culture in Native American narratives, and thereby establishing Native American culture as one of the founding elements of contemporary American culture. Also, by interpolating African American myth into this merger, Alexie aligns the fates of colonized cultures and establishes cross-cultural dialogue.

Abituati al mondo dei social network siamo anche condannati ad un eterno presente per cui la musica significa perlopiù postare un video, comprare un CD, al limite prenotare un concerto... ma senza un contesto storico qualsiasi forma d'arte viene spogliata delle sue radici e non resta che la cronaca perpetua della sua rappresentazione. Magari vale la pena dire che la parola "blues" oggi indica almeno due cose...

Most criticism considers W.E.B. Du Bois mainly as a historian and a sociologist, and Langston Hughes  essentially as a poet, yet some aspects of their multifaceted output require closer scrutiny. This book examines these seemingly marginal features – Du Bois’s short fiction and poetry, foreshadowing contemporary phenomena such as Afrofuturism and hip hop, and Hughes’s interdisciplinary approach and passionate interest in blues and jazz. Still relevant today, the literary contribution of these two remarkable men has had a crucial impact on the development of civil rights activism from the 1960s up until today’s Black Lives Matter movement.

304 pages | 3 color plates, 73 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2021
“Always,” wrote Philip Larkin, “it is by bridges that we live.” Bridges represent our aspirations to connect, to soar across divides. And it is the unfinished business of these aspirations that makes bridges such stirring sights, especially when they are marvels of ingenuity.

A rich compendium of myths, superstitions, literary and ideological figurations, as well as architectural and musical illustrations, Of Bridges organizes a poetic and philosophical history of bridges into nine thematic clusters. Leaping in lucid prose between seemingly unrelated times and places, Thomas Harrison gives a panoramic account of the diverse meanings and valences of human bridges, questioning why they are built and where they lead. He investigates bridges as flashpoints in war and the mega-bridges of our globalized world. He probes links forged by religion between life’s transience and eternity and the consolidating ties of music, illustrated in a case study of the blues. He illuminates the real and symbolic crossings facing migrants each day and the affective connections that make persons and societies cohere. In fine and intricate readings of literature, philosophy, art, and geography, Harrison engages in a profound reflection on how bridges form and transform cultural communities. Interdisciplinary and deeply lyrical, Of Bridges is a mesmerizing, vertiginous tale of bridges both visible and invisible, both lived and imagined.
Contents & Review Quotes: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/O/bo60514698.html

It is Langston Hughes who said that: ‘Whatever forms Negro poetry has taken in the last century...
the subject matter of Negro poetry... has remained more or less constant: the problems of freedom in a white dominated society’ (Hughes, “200 Years” 93). His own experiments with jazz forms, fusing street aesthetic with musical poetry, would eventually lead to fruition in the form of modern rap performance.
Hughes’ assertion that black art is more often than not unified by a conscious striving for justice and equality can be seen today even in some of the most commercial of works. I believe reading Kendrick Lamar’s ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’ alongside the work of Langston Hughes elucidates how this album works as a form of manifesto, not just for ethnic artistry but for the black community as a whole. Of particular importance to my argument will be Hughes’ landmark essay, ‘The Negro Artist and The Racial Mountain’.
By opening a conversation between these two texts, I hope to further explain the cultural relevance of Kendrick Lamar’s album as a modification of Hughes’ arguments for any ethnic artist, succeeding through hindsight and experimentation where Hughes was limited by time and place. As a modification to the ‘Langstonian’ argument of ‘The Racial Mountain’, the implications of a mountain transformed to something more tangible and accessible to a new generation is a welcome one, and one that can be found at the core of ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’ through its central metaphor of the cocoon.

In recent years, the world music scene has seen the birth of a new musical style, the ‘desert blues.’ This music, represented by musicians such as Malians Ali Farka Touré and Bassekou Kouyate, Tuareg Tinariwen and other desert cultures such as the Saharawi, claims to be key to discovering the origins of the African-American blues. Similar instrumentation, scales, melodies and playing techniques have led many to believe in a linear evolution, easily traced from Africa to America. However, the story of the blues, closely linked to slavery, is one of musical conversations and exchanges across the Atlantic. While its roots can be found in West Africa and the musical traditions slaves took with them to the new world, the term ‘desert blues’ appeared much later, when the desert musicians were fully aware of the existence of the blues and the rock ‘n’ roll. It was, thereforeThis paper is an exploration of the academic and musical theories that link Africa to the blues. It does so by analysing, first, to what extent the blues is an American creation and how much of it has its origins in West Africa, second, what elements of the African-American blues can be found in African music, taking examples from different cultures of the African Western Sahel, and third, the construction of the “desert blues” genre and Ali Farka Touré’s musical mediation.

Bu çalışmada amaç, özellikle 1900'lerin başında Amerika'da ve devamı olarak dünyanın farklı farklı bir çok noktasında meydana gelen politik, ekonomik, sosyal ve kültürel değişimlerle şekillenen popüler kültür olgusu içinde Blues müziğini incelemektir.
Blues müzik, sadece Amerika içinde değil, günümüz dünyasında şu anda var olan bir çok müzik türünün de temellerini atması bakımından önemli bir yere sahiptir. Afrikalılar'ın, zorla göç ettirilerek, bir çoğunun da gemilerde kötü koşullarda ölmesiyle beraber, Amerika'ya getirdikleri kültür, günümüz müzik dünyasının şekillenmesinde önemli bir rol oynamıştır. Bu araştırmada, Amerikan Popüler Kültürü'nde Blues müziğinin rolüne dikkat çekilerek, müziğin sadece söz ve melodilerden öte, sorunların aktarılması anlamında nasıl bir araç olduğu da incelenmektedir.
Toplumsal gerçekliğin çözülmesinde bir araç olarak kullanılan müzik eserleri, modernleşmesi sürecinde iktidarlar tarafından aşağılanmakla beraber, günü geldiğinde de iktidarların elinde, kendi çıkarları için kullanılmıştır. İnsanların, yaşanan sorunlardan rahatsız olup, o duruma karşı oluşan onu değiştirme çabası olarak görmek; insana yönelik her konu protestonun alanına girmesi, bu durumda haliyle, sanat eserlerinin içindeki protest temalara ya da toplumun takip ettiği bir sanatçının, ait olduğu toplumdaki sosyo – kültürel ya da ekonomik olgulara olan rahatsızlığını dile getirmesi, o duruma karşıt duruş sergilemesi gibi bir sonuç doğurması, protest müziğin karakterinin ortaya çıkmasına sebep oldu.
Çalışmada, Blues müziğin karakter yapısı ile, dertlerin iletilmesinde bir araç olarak kullanılması yanı sıra, özellikle müziğin şehirleşmesi ile birlikte, tüketim toplumu içerisinde şekil değiştirmesi de işlenmiştir. Tüketim toplumunun müziği yozlaştırması, tüket ve kenara at mantığının, müziğin önünde ne gibi engeller yaratılacağı da tartışılmıştır.

TOPRAK, Berkay. George Gershwin’in Rhapsody In Blue Adlı Eserinin Bestecilik
Teknikleri Açısından İncelemesi, Yüksek Lisans Sanat Çalışması Raporu, Ankara, 2018

Caz müziği ile sanat müziği, 20. yüzyılın başlamasıyla Avrupa ve Amerika’da birbirlerini
karşılıklı olarak etkilemişlerdir. Caz müziğinin oluşumunda Afro-Amerikan kültür
mirasının etkisi büyük olmuştur.
Amerikalı besteci George Gershwin (1898-1937), caz temalarının ve ritimlerinin müzikte
ciddi öğeler olarak kullanılabileceğini kanıtlamış bir besteci olarak bu doğrultuda
müzikaller için çok sayıda şarkı, film müzikleri, sahne müzikleri ve orkestra yapıtları
bestelemiştir. İçinde ağırlıklı olarak caz öğeleri barındıran 1924 yılında bestelenen
Rhapsody in Blue adlı eseri de bunun kanıtıdır.
Sanat eseri raporunda bestecinin hayatı, rapsodinin tarihçesi, yaşadığı dönemdeki caz
stilleri ve Rhapsody in Blue adlı eserin besteleme teknikleri alt başlıklarla incelenmiştir.

TOPRAK Berkay. Review of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue in terms of
Composing Techniques, Art study report, Ankara, 2018

Jazz music and art music, by the beginning of the 20th century, they mutually influenced
each other in Europe and America. The influence of African-American cultural heritage
has been great in the formation of jazz music.
American composer George Gershwin (1898-1937), a composer who has proven that
jazz themes and rhythms can be used as serious elements in music, has composed
countless songs for musicals, scored for motion pictures, stage productions and
symphonic works. The Rhapsody in Blue, composed mainly of jazz elements in 1924, is
also a testament to this.
In the artwork report, the composer's life, the history of rhapsody, the jazz styles that he
lived in, and the composition techniques of the Rhapsody in Blue were investigated by
the subheadings.

Although Sam Cooke's 'A Change is Gonna Come' is inextricably linked to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, it has an uneasy relationship with the genre of the protest song. Where protest songs enact the social change they seek to accomplish, Cooke's composition places its singer at a distance from an imminent, unspecified change. While protest songs are confident that the development they desire will materialize, the musical and lyrical structure of 'A Change Is Gonna Come' implies that the change in question may never arrive. Insofar as it depends upon contained progression - thematic and harmonic movement that is both linear and cyclical - the song could be described as a blues. Like many blues, moreover, it engages with the theme of human mortality: death, which every individual expects but never experiences, could be the 'change' to which the title and refrain refer. At the same time, change is the very word through which the lyric participates in the protest genre. If it were to be stricken from the text, the song would have no political referent, nothing to take its meaning beyond the confessional and personal.

A final version of this paper was later published as: Till, Rupert (2007) The blues blueprint: the blues in the music of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin. In: Cross the Water Blues: African American Music in Europe. University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, Miss., pp. 183-202. ISBN 1-57806-960-2

Just as Sunday in the United States is the time most reserved for sacred practices, Saturday night is perhaps most identified with secular forms of diversion. These moments, so close chronologically, are perhaps also not so far apart in terms of meaning. They are forms of communication and ritual that have more in common than might at first appear. New forms of sacred practices, in fact, can be tied to what were once quite secular elements—or which both might be seen as religious. Saturday night may well be intimately connected to Sunday morning. In the case of African American Blues music the connection is compelling: although the nature of the relationship is disputed, scholars agree that Gospel music is closely tied to the Blues. This is in spite of the Blues being seen as the " Devil's music. " The nature of the sacred-secular divide is a critical question for Pentecostalism, a religious movement deeply influenced by African American religious styles since its beginnings at Azuza Street in Los Angeles some 101 years ago, as well as in charismatic movements, including the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, now in its 40 th year. Catholic connection, global connection to 500 million Pentecostals worldwide. Such phenomena have occasioned a sacralizing of secular behavior as well as a secularizing of formerly sacral elements. Their exploration permits theoretical inquiry into the relationship between religion and social change.

Durante un brano Blues, solitamente, il 12 Battute viene ripetuto pressoché identico per tutta la durata della canzone, dando così un solido e ciclico sottofondo a parti vocali e strumentali (queste ultime perlopiù improvvisate).
È importante sottolineare subito questa tendenza ciclica e di continuo “richiamo” a ricominciare da capo che caratterizza la conformazione del 12 Battute, che sarà d’interesse per trovarvi all’interno una struttura narrativa.

Punk is an extreme manifestation of the rock project, meaning that it depends on an association of raw and authentic expression with blackness, musically represented by particular approaches to the blues, combined with processes of white appropriation, transformation and obfuscation of those blues resources. Punk's powerful affect largely derives from the tension between punk's blues foundations and strategies that obscure its roots. Punk treatments and transformations of the blues include: (1) moving from multi-part, three-chord harmonic schemes to riffs and one-and two-chord vamps; (2) taking a new approach to vocal performance styles; and (3) retaining certain melodic approaches, such as the use of pentatonic scales and monophonic textures. Punk's complex relationship to the blues, including the history of negation and erasure, continues to be a central part of the punk aesthetic.