Anomale Used Blog

Despite or because of its formal starkness, the blues is infinitely variable. It provides a universal framework within which instrumentalists and singers with little else in common can carry on an extended musical conversation. Without artful improvisation and microtonal note bending, the latter cannot be executed on the piano, one of the least blues friendly instruments, blues sometimes seems monotonous. Blues may be America’s greatest cultural gift to the world, if not, it’s certainly on the short list. It was the key contributor to the origins of jazz, rock and roll, funk, soul, R&B, and hip hop, and it deeply influenced country and western and bluegrass music as well. Without blues, it’s fair to say, there might be little recognizably American music. Blues embodies human resilience in the face of adversity and suffering. It’s therefore the perfect musical tonic for a nation founded on slavery and genocide... and a country of extreme economic inequality whose fossil fueled luck ...

Jazz is a genre of music like no other. It is a combination of cultures, elements, and vibrations that embrace the soul. It is a range of sounds and emotions in styles that can be characterized as ebullient, cool, enthusiastic, doleful, or any of a thousand other sensations, pulsations, and long bluesy notes. Like jazz artists improvising to differentiate and discern, books about jazz for young readers stand out and away from other genres. Perhaps because of the broad yet exceptional and exclusive canvas of sounds and emotions in jazz, certain illustrators and authors for young people have capitalized on the unique relationship between text and image. Picture books often weld images and sounds, words, yet jazz often creates dissonance. While words and art each contribute a portion to the ideas readers use to interpret or make sense of picture books, the words and art may not always reflect reciprocity... there is a dissonance between text and illustration. In a picture book, words and...

Music is an integral part of human life. Music is not simply a distraction or a pastime, but central to our identity and evolution as a species... music influences cognition by calling attention to powerful ways music is harnessed in advertising, films, ceremonies, and everyday human interactions. Humans create music and art in order to represent ideas that are important in life. Music plays an important and ongoing role in shaping people’s cognitive, social, and cultural understandings, which in turn, influences how people navigate their lives. The inclusion of people with a wide variety of skills and interests during performances is important for encouraging participation. The differentiated musical tastes and abilities of the participants cultivates a unique dynamic, and some constraints, during performances. By the same token, musical interaction among novices and more skilled players provides scaffolding and ongoing musical challenges. In a participatory framework, having an ever ...

Despite the retention of traditional instruments, the years immediately preceding World War II brought a definite change in the sound of the south Louisiana blues as it did throughout the states. The south Louisiana blues musicians started imitating the amplified sound of the bestselling artists of the day that they were hearing on the radio and recordings... With wailing harmonica and electric guitars booming over the wallowing sound of muffled swamp beat, the local musicians started to make their mark in the juke joints and bars. The 1950s saw the beginning of the development of south Louisiana urban blues, and by the end of the decade, the bluesmen begun to establish their warm recognizable style from the borrowed sounds. The style became known as Swamp Blues, and Baton Rouge became its home. Exactly when the term originated is unclear, but there exist several origin narratives... it refers to the Devil's Swamp, just on the edge of Scotlandville, where most of the bluesmen had l...

Record Shops With Deals Under $5 Successful record store businesses serve as a resource for individuals with a deep interest in a particular musical style or styles and an enthusiastic love for music. Below is a list of record shops that offer online record deals and a selection for under $5 and packaged deals. 5DollarRecords 5DollarRecords is run by a Chicago area record collector and dealer. Records are minimum, Very Good (VG) condition record and cover. 5DollarRecords is an online record store where you can buy VG or better vinyl record albums from Rock, Pop, Oldies and more. They sold over 10,000 records online and in person to over 1,400 buyers with 450 buyers becoming returning customers, all since 2018. Shipping in $, 5DollarRecords pay all shipping above. All records are shipped in record mailers, via USPS Media Mail, every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. 5DollarRecords will refund you upon successfully shipping back. They will pay shipping up to 5 records returned. Volup...

It’s worth mentioning that the blues isn’t entirely dominated by the guitar, the keyboard gets a look in too. Primarily the piano and Hammond organ... Unlike most blues guitarists, better known blues piano players almost always mixed in other styles of music at some point in their careers. Typically, an accomplished blues pianist would dabble with or even wholeheartedly embrace styles like jazz, soul, rhythm’n’blues, gospel or funk, or some combination of any of the above... Piano blues was even more directly linked to gospel and spiritual music, since these were the kinds of instruments used in churches. In the mid and late 1980s a more commercial, harder blues emerged that arguably crossed over a little with country music... Since the 1990s the blues as a core genre hasn’t changed massively, but then it never really did. What it has done, like so many other kinds of music, is melded and morphed with other kinds of music from around the world to create some really interesting takes on...

The history of jazz has been one of fusion. Its musicians and composers have continually drawn upon a huge range of different musics to create the rich and diverse tapestry that is world jazz today. Jazz is an evolving tradition of music making. And how often, in the life stories of individual jazz musicians, do we see these same patterns operating at microcosm? The richness of Turkish music and culture sometimes seems at odds with its turbulent and cruel history. In 1979... the country suffered its third military take over in thirty years... Every kind of music was in Turkey at that point. But it was not appreciated. To understand the culture of the country, with those three military takeovers, Turkey could not go anywhere. Musically, it was very difficult. But things were beginning to happen. Traditional Turkish music is essentially monophonic, rich in melody and rhythm but with little by way of harmony. The contrast with western music, with its beautiful harmonies but rhythmic weakn...

The blues points to a critical question for every person, what do we do with our sadness, pain, and disappointment? Do we use them to see more meaning in things and people? Do we use them to be kinder? Or do we use them to feel the whole world is bad, and to retreat from or lash out at other people? This, Aesthetic Realism explains, is the central fight in the mind of every person between the desire to like and respect the world, and the desire for contempt, which Eli Siegel defined as the disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world. The blues as musical form is against depression, even as the lyrics may describe that depressed feeling. This is explained greatly in a paper titled Feeling Bad, Good Will, and the Blues by Ellen Reiss, who is the Chairman of Education at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York City. By looking throughout the history of music, we can see how deep is the desire in humanity to relate pain and pleasur...

The history of blues in America is fraught. The genre in the U.S. was created out of pains many in the Black community felt from being subjugated and marginalized. Born from the spirituals sung during slavery, the blues became a cathartic style, a way to artfully express sadness and create a sense of commiseration amongst a hurting community. Soon, the genre’s best players began getting a little bit of recognition and were able to cut a few records. Those albums weren’t as respected in the United States as they were in other regions of the world because of the inherent prejudice baked into the American social fabric. When those albums made it across the Atlantic Ocean, however, British musicians, who didn’t have the same history as Americans, began to honor and cherish the sounds. They tried to emulate them, too. That’s when bands... began to be global forces. They loved... artists who, in America, were barely making enough to get to the next gig. But in the U.K. they were gods. Later,...

Blues music can trace its roots back to the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s, where it evolved from the oral tradition of African American work songs and spirituals. Its recurring chord progression, microtonal notes, and lyrical content often focusing on love and sadness set it apart as a unique genre. Early blues instruments, such as the banjo, guitar, harmonica, and piano, were used to create the distinct sound that would later evolve into a variety of subgenres, including rural blues and urban blues. The blues band is a fundamental element of blues music, providing the basis for the sound and allowing for improvisation and artistic expression. Each instrument in the band plays a specific role in creating a unified sound, with the drummer maintaining the tempo, the guitar and bass providing accompaniment and solos, and the harmonica and vocals providing the melody. The significance of the blues band in the genre cannot be understated, as it serves as the foundation fo...

The original country or rural blues did not come to be recorded until around 1925, when the record com­panies realised they could make quite a profit by asking black farmers, who were at best semi professional musicians, to record a few songs for them in return for a little whisky and about $5 per song. The lady singers, being professional entertainers, of course requested more. Thanks to this fortunate circum­stance, we are now rea­sonably certain that the country blues originated from the Mississippi Delta, an area in the state of Mississippi which must not be confused with the Delta of the Mississippi river in Louisiana. Blacks here once made up over 90% of the population, and were heav­ily exploited and oppressed. Typic­ally in this original form of the blues, a black sharecropper would sing about his hardships, while accompanying himself on the guitar. The rural blues also developed in the cotton growing region of East Texas, and through much of the South Eastern part of the USA. ...

Jazz cool concerned the recuperation of individuality in the arts against the century’s totalitarian ideologies. And the embodiment of cool was the improvising jazz musician, creating and recreating his individual voice nightly. Along with jazz cool there was also a subgenre called cool jazz, a romantic melodic sensibility that valued restraint, flow, and self expression over sonic power, rhythmic emphasis, and even virtuosity. Jazz was the dominant subculture of the post war era, and its influential slang was cool’s first rebel code. In effect, cool was a password for an unstated code of ethics, when it crossed over in New York’s jazz clubs, every Beat Generation writer noticed. Jack Kerouac wrote a letter to Neal Cassady to explain his new theory of cool in 1950... it meant pleasant, somewhat meditative, and without tension, young people were acting cool, unemotional, withdrawn. Within a few years, the phrase play it cool, meaning, keep your emotions suppressed, appeared in hit songs...

The music of Hawaii, which is located in the Pacific Ocean, has strong Polynesian and European influences. Portuguese and Spanish sailors and vaqueros, cowboys brought instruments that are now very popular, such as the guitar and the cavaquinho. The cavaquinho became the ukulele. One of the most popular styles is Hawaiian slack key guitar. Dancing Cat Records specialized in this typically Hawaiian guitar style. Appalachian music is greatly influenced by English and Celtic, Scottish and Irish ballads, religious songs and African American music. Musical genres in the southern Appalachians include old time, bluegrass, Gospel and country music. The most common musical instruments are the fiddle, which came from the British Isles and Ireland, the banjo, which is of African origin, and more recently the guitar, which is originally from Spain but has become widely used internationally. Polish, German, Slovak, Czech and Hungarian immigrants who settled in eastern and central Texas during the l...

The blues is a genre and a form, but it is also a feeling. You’ve probably heard the phrase I’ve got the blues or I’m feeling blue. Being blue refers to feeling sad, melancholy, downtrodden, heartbroken, down, guilt, despair, or other gloomy emotions. Although there are happy and uplifting blues songs, blues music is focused around harsh realities of life. Love is also a central subject, love and loss, being mistreated, and romance gone wrong are frequently sung about. The presentation of the subject matter is expressive, honest, and straightforward. Since the blues is expressing pain, the performer should have and understanding of and be able to communicate that pain. The language used in that communication is simple and down to earth. Lyrics are accessible and tend to avoid embellishment, convolution, picturesque descriptions, or grandiose settings. When blues artists share their truth, both artists and audience feel that deep meaning. Not every blues artist has had a rough upbringin...

With similar roots to blues, and blues as one of its roots, jazz also took from another American art form, ragtime, to create its unique syncopated sound. Its early detractors were many, from Henry Ford to Thomas Edison, but racism was often the reason for cries of it's immoral. Yet the insistent, danceable, heartfelt sounds quickly spread American culture to the far corners of the globe. Its ever mutating style turned itself into swing music, soul and cool jazz. Jazz's knock on effect was further seen in rock and roll's development in the United States in the 1950s. Artists from Elvis Presley to Chuck Berry created their rock and roll using the musical influences of boogie woogie and blues, along with jazz. Rock's popularity quickly spread around the world. Soul music, which grew up alongside rock and roll, also developed out of African American gospel, and rhythm and blues traditions... The end of the century saw the birth of hip hop music and culture. In the mid 1970...

The blues have been called chronicles of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically and endured with grace and dignity... It’s the combination of despair and hope that gives the blues such an approachable quality, as these two things often live together in the hearts of everyday people. The music acknowledges the truth of trouble in the world around us and in our own hearts. To call out such despair for what it is and then to undercut it with hope is what makes the blues so powerful. Sadness and lament are emotions familiar to all people, and songs, when rightly written, have always been a place where these emotions can safely be expressed... Allowing the nature of the blues to have a seat at the table of church life is good for the congregation. Reflective sadness has a place in the life of a congregation. It’s good for us to be shaken by the losses in our world that have taken place at the hands of injustice, inequality, poverty, depression, disease, and war... the blues can teach us t...

New Orleans’s blues heritage encompasses two related traditions, small band, jazz based blues and piano professors who delighted audiences with their combination of artistry and showmanship. Both traditions trace their origins to the turn of the twentieth century, when solo pianists could earn good money by playing in labor camps, informal drinking establishments, and legalized houses of prostitution in Storyville. As the century progressed, New Orleans pianists absorbed the newer boogie woogie and stride piano styles while remaining faithful to the Spanish and French influences that filtered into the city through the Caribbean. These styles flavored early R&B and rock ’n roll with relaxed tempos and strong, syncopated rhythmic patterns that came to be known as the New Orleans sound. At the same time, traveling medicine shows, vaudeville, and neighborhood dance halls fostered a small band tradition that shaped early jazz. In fact, early blues and early jazz were so thoroughly inter...

In the 1920s, the centre of the jazz world had shifted from New Orleans to the speakeasies of Prohibition era Chicago.. A new style of solo improvisation earned trumpeter, cornet player and gravelly voiced singer Louis Armstrong worldwide acclaim... Standards of musicianship reached a pinnacle, and the decade as a whole became known as the jazz age. The end of Prohibition in 1933 forced many musicians out of the illegal drinking clubs and into the open. Jazz adapted its style for wider appeal, tailoring itself to the dance hall in the form of big bands and swing... The smoothness of swing provoked a jazz rebellion in the form of bebop, or hot jazz, an experimental form with complex rhythms and harmonies, led by saxophonist Charlie Parker, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and guitarist Charlie Christian, the first to use electrical amplification. Songs such as This Land is Your Land, caused a quiet revolution in folk music, expressing popular sentiments about the Great Depression and the suffe...

In the beginning the blues was purely the music of the black people of the south, had several forms, and was generally played slow and sad. But by the twenties, due to the popularity of African American blues singers like Bessie Smith, the 12 bar blues became the standard form of the blues and sub genres... Since that time many hybrid forms of the blues have developed including rock blues and even punk blues. Jazz came out of those same southern African American communities at the same time, but was the result of the combining of African and European music. From the beginning jazz has always incorporated popular music of the time, and it is characterized by the use of blue notes, improvisation, syncopation, and what was coined the swung note. The term jazz encompasses early New Orleans Dixieland jazz, the big band music of the swing era, bebop, Latin jazz, fusion, acid jazz, funk, hip hop, and of course, the blues. In the early part of the 20th century jazz and blues quickly spread up ...

We don’t know what kind of music, exactly, was first called blues. Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith were singing slow, sad songs about their troubles in love and life by 1910 or thereabouts, but no one seems to have called them blues singers until the late teens, and by that time blues had already come and gone as a hot dance craze, played by brass bands and ragtime orchestras, and been supplanted by jazz. In 1915, the first newspaper article to mention jazz as a musical style was headlined Blues Is Jazz and Jazz Is Blues, which makes perfect sense if you look at how many early jazz bands relied on the basic 12 bar blues form. But there was also a lot of blues that was not jazz, and some jazz that was not blues. A century later, it is even harder to sort out what blues means, or more to the point, what it doesn’t mean. We often hear that blues is the root of all American music, from country to rock to rap, and it doesn’t stop there, the haunting music of northern Mali is frequently described...

During a 1975 interview, B.B. King told William Ferris, director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, how bricks were used to make a one string. Once you nailed this nail in there, put that wire around these two nails, like one on this end and one on the other and wrap it tight. Then you’d take a couple of bricks and you’d put one under this side and one under that one that would stretch this wire and make it tighter. And you’d keep pushing that brick, stretching this wire, making it tight until it would sound like one string on the guitar... Blues musicians also used baling wire to make one and two stringed instruments similar to those found throughout West Africa, where they are fashioned with resonators made of carved wood, a gourd, or a tin can. When I was about ten years old I made a fiddle out of a cigar box, a guitar out of goods boxes for my buddy Louis Carter, and we would play for the white people’s picnics. Big Joe Williams recall...

A Short History of Radio Events Radio continues to be a relevant form of mass communication and remains one of the few free services to anyone with a receiver. Image by Jose Pedro Santos The first commercial radio broadcast in 1920, Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company in Pittsburgh, under the call sign KDKA, broadcast the live returns of the Harding/Cox presidential election. Within just four years of the initial KDKA broadcast, 600 stations existed in the U.S. and radio’s rapid popularity contributed to our shared national identity by providing syndicated news, sports, and music. Radio stations gradually phased out vinyl single and LP records in the mid 1980s and went to CDs. Huge turntables and tape recorders disappeared, replaced by smaller CD players. Radio program formats differ by country, regulation, and markets. For instance, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission designates the 88 - 92 megahertz band in the U.S. for non profit or educational programming, with ...