John L

Sorry, Lon. I must have assumed that it was a knock because it usually takes much more than a nudge to get my stubborn ass to budge.

For a long time, I really underappreciated "East Coasting." It took Jazzbo to knock some sense into me. Now it is one of my favorites.

Д.Д.: Do you follow what is currently going on in Russian jazz? I am currently based in Moscow for a while, but don't recognize all but a few names. Are there a few new Moscow names that I should be looking out for? I recently heard Chekasin with the gypsy group Lyoko. It was sublime.

Yes, hand and hand with both (Little) Johnny Taylor and Johnnie Taylor. Of course, both of them came from hard gospel. So go figure.

Absolutely. Different defintiions allow for different categorizations that allow for new and different insights. Whether we want a label that bunches Charlie Parker together with Robert Johnson, or Charlie Parker together with Paul Desmond, depends on what particular perspective we happen to be taking. Different perspectives can coexist peacefully and even complement each other.

I voted for Fulfillingness. I don't really know why. Maybe it was what was happening in my life at the time that made the music even more special for me than the spectacular Innervisions. Songs in the Key of Life is a great one too, as is Talking Book.

Ghost hipped me to this set a few years ago when we were discussing Freddie Webster, who probably has his greatest recorded moment here. I have really enjoyed the entire set ever since.

Allen: I agree with you very much on the Levine book.

I wouldn't really say so, myself. This is an example where the precise evolution of different manifestations of the "primal stew" gets hard to document correctly. Blues and African American religious music have cross-fertilized themselves several times in the 20th century. "Soul" involved an infusion of modern gospel elements into R&B and jazz. In the 1930s, the infusion was in just the opposite direction. So has it also been, to a large degree, since the 1960s. Some of the older bluesmen have associated the origin of blues with the revivalist camp meetings of the 19th century. These meetings encouraged the development of freer singing than was usually allowed in the church. I think that it is an interesting idea. There's a certain slipperiness to the stew idea that seems to allow one to sometimes ignore categorical distinctions between something like "blues" and something like "gospel" and sometimes to make free use of said distinctions as if we all know what the distinctions are. I'm not saying that you are being disingenuous--these are confusing matters. But we do quickly get to a point where we have to question why "gospel" seems to have a distinct identity and yet we steadfastly refuse to give one to blues--implying that, after all, all black music is suffused in the blues and all of it can be called blues or comes from blues and none can be said to be not blues. To me this seems a lot like a reaction to Murray and company using "blues" as a stick. By emptying the word of any real significance we take the stick out of their hands. But "blues" just doesn't equal "good." It's not an evaluational term. My reaction to most soul is that the blues elements in it are relatively small (and we have a show called "Blue Soul" here, mind, so I recognize there are exceptions) but soul music seems to me to come substantially out of church music traditions that in many cases explicitly repudiated blues and built a tradition that sounded disticntly different from the tradition they (the folks who helped create the gospel tradition) identified as "blues." So I guess I see the stew--life always seems to be a stew--but I don't acknowledge referring to the stew as "blues" as a useful or desirable practice. I'm not sure I want to go all the way down the AllenLowe road by adopting a strict contructionist chord-sequence definition, but I think we need to have a more limited definition for the term to have much use. --eric Eric: I think that the central point here is that we are dealing with an evolutionary process. For example, gospel music today is different than gospel music was in the 1950s. So one set definition beyond African American religious music is not going to work. The same is true for R&B, or "soul" as some still call it. Rhythm and Blues changed in the 1960s with the advent of soul, yet it remained Rhythm and Blues. Singers with gospel-rooted backgrounds and approaches were hooked up together with R&B bands. Personally, I would not say that there was less blues than gospel, but the distinction itself is already murky because gospel of that period was already blues-drenched (although recognizable as a distinct musical direction, nevertheless). I think that the process was more evolutionary than is often appreciated. In the early 50s, you already had Roy Brown, Guitar Slim, Sonny Til, and others bringing gospel feeling into R&B. So Ray Charles' "I Got a Woman" was not as huge a musical revolution in 1955 as is sometimes suggested. In fact, the distinction between R&B (soul) and gospel began to become very blurred toward the end of the 1960s. At that time, gospel began to borrow from Rhythm and Blues (soul) again, and the arrangements became often identical with different words. That was the blues again penetrating gospel, as it had done in a different way in the 1930s. Compare mainstream gospel quartet music in the 1950s and the end of the 1960s and you will hear the difference. The former is what influenced rhythm and blues to create soul. Much of the latter is essentially soul with religious lyrics. The complexity is in the dynamics over time.

I wouldn't really say so, myself. This is an example where the precise evolution of different manifestations of the "primal stew" gets hard to document correctly. Blues and African American religious music have cross-fertilized themselves several times in the 20th century. "Soul" involved an infusion of modern gospel elements into R&B and jazz. In the 1930s, the infusion was in just the opposite direction. So has it also been, to a large degree, since the 1960s. Some of the older bluesmen have associated the origin of blues with the revivalist camp meetings of the 19th century. These meetings encouraged the development of freer singing than was usually allowed in the church. I think that it is an interesting idea.

To give a bit more clarity of what I (and I think Jim) are arguing: Blues can be defined in different ways. There is no sense in arguing over a definition, as definitions, by their very nature, cannot be right or wrong, only more or less useful in various contexts. In certain musicological contexts, it should make sense to identify "blues" strictly according to the 12-bar form and discuss its emergence and evolution from that point of view. On the other hand, there is a musical phenomenon, sometimes referred to as "blues," which I believe to be one of the greatest of the 20th century, one that provided the backbone and power to much of jazz and other Amercian music. If we don't use the word "blues" to refer to this phenomenon, which has little to do with the 12 bar form in and of itself, then we need another name for it. "Pre-blues" doesn't really sound too compelling to me, nor does "African American pitch and rhythm." I'm with Jim. At the risk of abusing the term, I'm going to keep calling it "blues."

Allen: Thanks for your thoughtful comments. I agree with you that we should view the blues as being distinct from other African American musics, although where to draw the line is a complicated question. Certainly, it is possible to define "blues" by drawing the line at the 12-bar song form (although there are early European folk song forms that are very similar. Should we call them "blues" too?). But I worry that we are missing the essence of what really constitutes the blues when we do this. What is your opinion of all the recollections of Buddy Bolden in New Orleans as a "blues player?" There do not appear to have been 12-bar blues in his repertoire. On the taped Baby Dodds interviews, he recalled that Bunk Johnson played almost nothing but slow blues around the turn of the century. Sidney Bechet distinguished the music of the Eagle Band as "blues," as opposed to what almost other bands were playing in New Orleans at the time. Do you think that this is just an abuse of the term to mean simply "African American pitch and rhythm?" You mention Charley Patton. Yes, he played blues and non-blues songs. Yet very few of his songs that we usually identify as blues actually fit the 12 bar form very comfortably. When people like Mahalia Jackson, Rebert Harris, and Sally Martin were accused of bringing the blues into African American religious music in the 1930s, what did this mean? Was it simply a reference to the fact that they were singing newer songs of Thomas Dorsey and Reverend Brewster? I don't think so. It was the clearly manner in which they were singing, although completely outside of the 12-bar form. My own feeling is that the blues is indeed a distinct music that is closely related to, but not the same as, many other types of African Amercian music. Despite the absence of recordings before the 1920s (purely a commercial decision), I feel convinced that the distinct musical language of the blues had already evolved to a rather advanced stage by the early years of the 20th century. That interests me much more than the question of the exact time and place that the 12-bar form came into use. You may argue that, given the absence of recordings, there is no proof of what I am contending. OK, agreed. There is only limited evidence, and that the way that I interpret it. I will continue to believe what I believe until I see evidence to contrary.

That sounds right to me, Jim.

OK, I understand you now, Allen. For the purposes of this thread (the relationship between jazz and folk music), you might substitute "African American methods of pitch and rhythm" for "Blues" in my posts, although I would still argue that it is more than just pitch and rhythm. It is a whole complex language of musical communication that I like to refer to as "Blues."

Well, maybe we are using the word Blues to refer to two different things. To me, the Blues has nothing really to do with a particular song form, despite the fact that the 12-bar form became very popular at one time, and everything to do with a language of musical communication. It seems to me that the evidence is convincing enough that this language came from African Americans in the South, and has strong roots going back to the 19th century. By my definition, John Lee Hooker's one-chord drones are most certainly Blues.

Tin Pan Alley didn't have much to do with what they were playing in the Mississippi Delta and rural Texas in the early part of the century, or what Buddy Bolden was playing in New Orleans for that matter. We don't have recordings from before the 1920s, but we do have studies, memoires, interviews, the Lomax archive, and song lists. More precisely, I would say that the Blues is an artistic music that is based on African American folk music.

Good news. I didn't even know that it was in the making. I hope that they had time to rehease the songs this time. Personally, I didn't like Don't Give Up on Me for that reason. Solomon now does the songs on that album great live. He owns them now. But they didn't give him time to learn them in the studio before they recorded.

Now that I have to hear!

But what did he cover Monk with?

Given the close relation of the Blues to African American folk music, I would say that classic jazz also has a close relation.

If even they mislabeled it, the sound quality on the Pablo Bird live box for those tracks exceeds anything that I had heard previously.

Well, look at the bright side. At least Columbia isn't doing what Universal did with Coltrane. First release a complete box set of Coltrane's studio Impulse! recordings and then release each of the albums separately, although each with one or two tracks that somehow didn't get on the box. Then release a multi-disc Coltrane "greatest hits" collections with still a couple more new tracks.

If you ask me, the first one is still one of the very best: Spirituals to Swing!

What about a museum? Muscle Shoals is where it was happening for so many years. All of the members of that classic studio band should be enshrined.

Now you all Texans just have to get one of these!