There’s also sixteen bar blues, which usually repeats bars nine and ten of the twelve-bar variety, as in “Watermelon Man” by Herbie Hancock. Eight bar blues is the first two thirds of twelve-bar blues, as in “ Bemsha Swing” by Monk. There are some other widely-used blues forms other than the standard twelve-bar. We were able to keep the audience from getting impatient and leaving until Nicole arrived. To stall for time, the band played blues in various keys at various tempos, including “ Twisted” by Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, and “ Blue Monk” by Thelonious Monk. (In the jazz world this isn’t as unusual a situation as you might think.) The weather was bad, and Nicole was very late to the gig. Most of her band members were meeting for the first time on stage that night. I did a show at St Nick’s Pub a few years ago with a jazz and R&B singer named Nicole Bishop. The blues form is basic knowledge for American musicians, which makes it a reliable standby, especially for informal or ad hoc groups. Duke Ellington alone probably wrote hundreds of twelve-bar blues tunes. Some musicians return to the form again and again and never exhaust the possibilities. “Parker’s Mood” and “Standing Around Crying” hint at the staggering breadth of expression you can get out of the twelve-bar-blues form. Jazz musicians will usually play something more like this: | Cmaj7 | F7 | Cmaj7 | G-7 C7 |Īgain, to pick one example out of uncountably many, here’s “Parker’s Mood” by Charlie Parker. There are endless refinements and embellishments you can tack onto this basic structure. One of my favorites is Muddy Waters’ “Standing Around Crying” - the devastating harmonica is by Little Walter Jacobs. There are uncountable thousands of songs written in the twelve-bar blues form. Here’s a more common version, with a little more complexity. Here’s the simplest version of twelve-bar blues in C. All those 7th chords have unresolved tritones in them, a crucial ingredient in the blues feel. When musicians say “This song is a blues in C,” they mean that the song has a twelve-bar form using a particular combination of C7, F7 and G7 chords. Blue notesĪ lot of people incorrectly describe the flat third and seventh of the blues scale as “blue notes.” Blue notes are microtonal pitches that lie between the piano keys. See a full blog post about the blues scale. You can think of it as forming the basis for its own harmonic universe, which I call blues tonality. It sounds equally good over major and minor chords, and it flouts European conventions of consonance and dissonance. The blues scale descends from west African music brought to America by slaves. To make the blues scale, start with a minor pentatonic scale and add the sharp fourth/flat fifth. I’ve noticed that most of the singers I like infuse everything they do with blues feeling, from Aretha Franklin to Gregg Allman to Michael Jackson.Īside from the general emotion, the word blues refers to three specific technical music concepts: a scale, a set of pitches, and a song form. You can also slip in the blues scale more on that below. In rock, jazz, country or pop, you can get blues feel by playing slower, swinging more, using more expression and idiosyncrasy, playing repetitive and riff-based ideas, and being as emotionally direct as possible. It’s possible to invest just about any style of music with blues feeling. It’s an expression of adult regrets and sorrows, as opposed to rock’s more adolescent angst. To me, blues is more about persevering through the pain than the pain itself. Meanwhile, punk-influenced bands like Nirvana and Radiohead make music that’s full of anguish, but you wouldn’t call their material blues. There’s a whole category of bragging, sexually dominant blues by artists like Muddy Waters and Bessie Smith, the precursors to swaggering hip-hop MCs. But not all blues is depressing, and not all depressing music is blues. Blues music is a soulful, wailing expression of pain, heartbreak and yearning. The term descends from the “blue devils,” slang for depression. So what exactly is blues? Blues is a mood Two examples: “ Shuckin’ The Corn” by Flatt and Scruggs, and the theme from the sixties Batman TV show. Meanwhile, there are quite a few songs using the blues form that you might not think to identify as blues. John Lee Hooker was the living embodiment of blues, but a lot of his best-known songs aren’t technically blues either. There are many songs with the word “blues” in the title that aren’t technically blues at all, like “ Lovesick Blues” by Hank Williams. You probably have some idea of what blues is, but it’s surprisingly hard to define it specifically. Think of it more as a tasting menu.īlues is a confusing term. Blues is a big topic and this isn’t going to be anything like a definitive guide. Since I’m teaching the twelve-bar blues to some guitar students, I figured I’d put the lessons in the form of a blog post.
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