Anomale Used Blog

The blues can be detected throughout modern music, from the way lyrics are written to the way songs are performed. Blues plays a huge part in R&B music, inspiring the use of music breaks, personal lyrics and call and return rhythmic styles. Modern artists also still use the extremely expressive singing style to entertain audiences during live shows. Hip hop artists have often sampled blues music to create new songs that get an emotional boost from the original piece. Modern blues artists still record in the raw singing style that originally defined the genre more than a hundred years ago. Across modern pop, R&B and hip hop, you can hear the influence of blues as singers bend certain notes for greater emphasis and impact. The legacy of blues shines through as modern writers work to put together emotionally raw work that can touch an audience rather than creating direct narratives in their songs and music. Appreciating music starts with exploring all genres, and understanding how...

Jazz, they’ll tell you, is a living, breathing American genre. It has no specific definition. It can withstand anything from the rhythms of an African tribe, to the swing of a big band, to the soaring vocals of an operatically trained singer and beyond... it can absorb almost any other type of music, dress it up or down, or turn it inside out and make it a part of the jazz label. Many artists who’ve made a name for themselves in other genres have successfully crossed over onto the jazz stage, and jazz has welcomed them with open arms. With all of the freedom and flexibility of jazz music, it’s no surprise the evening’s master session focused largely on improvisation. After all, being able to weave in and out of melody and emulate rhythms and sounds coming from surrounding instruments is often considered the hallmark of jazz singing. But, as it turns out, improv isn’t just about spontaneous noise. Improvisation should tell a story... to encourage aspiring jazz singers to consider improv...

Southern music entered the nation's consciousness late in the nineteenth century. Until that time national audiences had heard only caricatures of Southern music in the performances of the black face minstrels,  Northern, White song and dance men who roamed the country sporting corked faces and grotesque darky dialects. In 1865, however, a small group of African American entertainers, the Georgia Minstrels, inaugurated a brand of minstrelsy that, while still suffering from stereotypes of the genre, enabled Black performers to slowly develop a form of entertainment more truly representative of their culture and music. At least as late as World War I, minstrel troupes featuring African American performers such. Country music has become America's favorite. Its styles and themes seem to appeal to much of the nation's adult White population. This trend may reflect a southernization of the North, but it also suggests the musics and the cultures that created them are becoming part...

The musical vehicle for lament was appealing, aside from the words, which only increased the appeal to the audience and, therefore, the reach of the message. White audiences started listening, and the messages began to reach people who might otherwise not pay attention. Commenting on the role of music in the South African battle against Apartheid, a struggle that mirrors the American experience in many ways. Indeed, the music of protest can be, and has been, enormously powerful in changing public opinion, and consequently, improving the guarantees of rights, justice, and the rule of law for minority populations. For this reason, perhaps most emphatically, musical expression is protected as speech by the First Amendment. Historically, it appears that the idea of suppressing blues music because of its message simply never came up. While there are some prosecutions targeting the speech of radical political movements, those cases usually focused on whether the speech incited violence. Blue...

The personalized, solo elements of the blues may indicate a decisive move into the twentieth century American consciousness, but the musical style of the blues indicates a holding on to the old roots at the very time when the dispersion of Negroes throughout the country and the rise of the radio and the phonograph could have spelled the demise of a distinctive Afro American musical style. While it is undoubtedly true that work songs and field hollers were close to the West African musical archetype, so much of which had survived the centuries of slavery, blues with its emphasis upon improvisation, its retention to call and response pattern, its polyrhythmic effects, and its methods of vocal production which included slides, slurs, vocal leaps, and the use of falsetto, was a definite assertion of central elements of the traditional communal musical style. The fact that the blues remained wholly traditional, yet forward looking at the same time is reflective of the collective African Ame...

Most theories on modern popular music center on the premise that this music is controlled to serve the economic and political interests of the businesses that create and distribute it. Such an early influential treatment was offered by Theodor W. Adorno. Adorno placed popular music within the capitalist state as a product that is mass produced for public consumption. For his examples of popular music, he used popular songs from his native Germany and Tin Pan Alley songs from America. Adorno theorized that music mediated between the state and its citizens. The corporate apparatus created music that affirmed government hegemony, packaged it as a commodity, then mass produced it. Popular music stripped the audience of power by making them passive receptors of its sounds. Blues music’s rhythms give a good example of its oppositional quality. Blues songs feature syncopation, the accenting of beats or pulses typically unaccented in metric music. African music had long cultivated polyrhythms,...

Sound Preservation and Different Audio Formats Image by Mick Haupt The process of transferring of information to other sustainable and accessible formats is known as digitization, bearing the challenge of transcoding all media content, as well as related information such as metadata in a proper way. This means managing file based digital data in a sustainable way, so that access, documentation and authenticity can be enabled and preserved in the long term. Sound Preservation The Recorded Sound Collection at the Library of Congress is an Audio Visual Conservation in Culpeper, VA. Items date from the late 1880s to the present day and include everything from music to radio broadcasts to spoken word recordings to field recordings of traditional music, oral histories and actualities. Each year, donations, acquisitions, and copyrights are added through formats from cylinders, 78, 45, or 33 1/3 RPM records, reel to reel audio tapes, 8 tracks, cassettes, CDs, or even wire. For shattered cylind...

This indefinite role of the creator further complicates the role of the artist and what impact they may have on the creation of particular works... their impact comes within a particular historical horizon. The artist is limited by his or her place in the world and to some extent is at the mercy of what they can create. The artist may have the knowledge of how to create these works, but their impact cannot be known without the communities that make the works possible... because they cannot control the impact of the art that they create after it is completed. They may be responsible in part for the work’s revealing qualities, but are not the sole reason why a work may impact the world as it does. The truth or its unfolding has a much richer process than simply applying paint to a canvas or in playing particular notes. These creations must resonate within a community in order to make a profound impact upon its people... Often times, it is not one, but many artists who create multiple wor...

When the British beat boom struck in the mid 1960s, blues songs entered the repertoires of countless local bands, though many of the musicians barely realised the origins of the music they were playing. Distinguishing themselves from the more commercial, and less bluesy, sound of The Beatles... which had in turn been learned from black American blues artists.  British blues bandleader John Mayall was promoting the music with an almost missionary zeal, drawing attention to its black origins in articles, interviews and liner notes and making converts like Marsden aware of the blues as a genre in its own right, not just a tributary of British beat music. Many others took up the cause... Local blues performers continue to emerge in the new century... And the old ones keep on going... blues remaining the foundation if no longer the sole ingredient of their music. For the most part, though, New Zealand’s blues performers adhere to the music’s blue collar ethos, playing in bars more often...

It seems there were 25 or 30 records by blues artists on or related to the 1927 flood. The songs present a variety of commentary on the flood. The ones by the few artists that were from the area, who might have actually experienced the flood, like Charlie Patton or Alice Pearson, tend to be the most realistic in their descriptions, the most accurate in their details. Some of the others are inaccurate, based on hearsay, some sentimentalize the flood, some even trivialize it, or find some way to connect it to the man woman theme, or sexual double entendre, getting back to more standard blues themes. There had been generic flood songs in the 1920s... On the religious side, in gospel music, there were some recordings that saw greater significance in this flood... A black preacher in Memphis, the Reverend Sutton E. Griggs, saw the flood as a metaphor of black white cooperation, the people trying to shore up the levees, something that led to better race relations, although the historical fac...

Thus, as cultures develop and change, specific dances, folk art, songs, or history are sometimes lost to progress. Efforts to preserve cultural artifacts are often difficult, if not impossible. Information about blues singers’ lives is often unavailable or lost because many of the blues singers were mostly rambling sorts who didn’t leave behind much in the way of estates, memoirs, letters, or other personal papers or belongings. Fortunately, performances are a means to preserve specific songs, dances, and history... the emergence of a tourist market frequently facilitates the preservation of a cultural tradition which would otherwise perish. The performance of native dances in Hawaii, for example, allows that community to retain an important aesthetic component of its culture. In the same way, blues festivals preserve one of the Delta’s best known cultural artifacts. Interviews with festival spectators seem to support the theme of preservation... Festival promoters create themes or slo...

By the mid 1960s, popular music in Brazil had been influenced by, and or at least had incorporated some elements of rock and roll... blues influences such as the famed blue note broadly to address a few examples in Brazilian music. However, this does not mean that Brazilians had been playing the blues, far from it. In fact, Bossa Nova music... popular in the late 1950s and 1960s among the Brazilian upper socioeconomic cohort, hardly fit into the musical genre universally recognized as blues. That is, Bossa Nova and its musical and sociocultural frameworks... were worlds away from blues culture and from the musical landscapes of Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, or Howlin’ Wolf for example, former cotton sharecroppers who in turn, had a specific tonality, instrumentation, with different musical and cultural languages and styles inherently tied to the African American Mississippi Delta blues world or the Chicago blues world. Among other Brazilian artists and bands... were no...

In the U.S., folkies took a leadership role in the exploration of blues roots. They worshipped authenticity, which was taken to mean an aged black man playing an acoustic instrument... Contemporary white performers were acknowledged only if their work focused on pre World War II forms. In the United Kingdom, black American blues became available in appreciable numbers after World War II through records left behind by American G.I.s and sold in secondhand stores, product mail ordered by young enthusiasts, and pressings leased by English jazz labels. The trad jazz fad of the 1950s represented a pale, but enthusiastic, attempt to recreate the Chicago and New Orleans styles popular in the 1920s, best known as dixieland in the United States. The Stones, formed in 1963, went on to become the British blues revival band both to achieve broad based popularity and advance the genre beyond the mere imitation of old models. Source: Blues Revival by Frank Hoffmann Manic Street Preachers - Everythin...

To grasp the significance of that, you have to bear in mind how fantastically few record collectors possessed such an interest at the end of the 1930s. Early jazz was a thing in certain hip circles, but only a few true freaks were into the country blues. There was twitchy, rail thin Jim McKune, a postal worker from Long Island City, Queens, who famously maintained precisely 300 of the choicest records under his bed at the Y.M.C.A., had to keep the volume low to avoid complaints. He referred to his listening sessions as séances. Summoning weird old voices from the South, the ethereal falsetto of Crying Sam Collins. In the ’50s McKune would become a sort of salon master to the so called Blues Mafia, the initial cell of mainly Northeastern 78 pursuers who evolved, some of them, into the label owners and managers and taste arbiters of the folk blues revival. An all white men’s club, several of whom were or grew wealthy, the Blues Mafia doesn’t always come off heroically in recent, and vita...

Photography tells one story of American roots, and the way that it is preserved and displayed will tell another side of that story. Both stories deal with the value of content. One is from the beginning, and the other is for the future. The BCAH is now charged with the preservation of Susan’s photography. Because the center is neither strictly a museum nor strictly an archive, there is constant confusion about what to do with some of the remarkable materials housed there. I believed her photography could combine blues music and public history, creating a cultural narrative of the Austin blues scene... To archive these photographs was not enough. They needed an exhibition that drew on the lore of Austin cultural history and told the often lesser known story of musicians who had paid their dues for years before getting the recognition they deserved... The project is ongoing, and includes a photography exhibit, a small book of photos, and a digital oral history project that includes inter...

The blues is a blending of African and European traditional music characterized by its melancholy, or blue, notes expressing suffering and deprivation... many of the country blues musicians had ceased playing music or lived in obscurity until blues revivalists searched them out. Jesse Fuller from Jonesboro, a one man band, and harmonica player Buster Brown from Cordele benefited from the renewed interest in their music. From the mid 1920s into the early 1930s, artist and repertoire, known as A&R, staff scoured the South and northern cities in search of talent for the race record subsidiaries of major record companies, and in Atlanta they recorded a distinct style of country blues performers. The use of twelve string guitars, more strumming than picking, irregular rhythms, and a nasal vocal technique typified the Atlanta sound... By the time the blues began to have an overt influence on white musicians,... in the late 1960s and early 1970s, white performers had overtaken their Blac...

There are plenty of times where simple is better, but if you’re looking for some inspiration to break out of the same melody... look no further than Bebop. Bebop melodies are known for dynamic contrast, astonishing speed, and dense complexity. A good bebop melody can be exhilarating and yet still catchy enough to be memorable. Charlie Parker’s Ornithology is a great example of a melody that is chromatic, complex, longer, and yet, extremely catchy and memorable. Learning to use chromatic tones, voice leading, melodic contrast, and more will be time well spent for any producer. Syncopation is the art of accenting notes that are between the beats. If you are counting in eighth notes, in a One and Two and Three and Four fashion, the and words would get accented if you were playing a syncopated rhythm. Rhythmic hits and accents that are syncopated can help to show cultural roots as well as to make a piece of music seem like it is in an exotic time signature or setting. Source: Music Theory ...

Though it began as a general term for African American music, the synthesis of styles that became what is now called rhythm and blues caught on among a wide youth audience during the post war period and contributed to changing the racial divide in American society and music of the mid twentieth century. Initially, white artists such as Elvis Presley performed and recorded, or covered, rhythm and blues works by African American composers in order for those songs to be marketed to white audiences. But the effect was to bring both audiences and artists with an interest in this style of music together... and mixed groups of youths sang doo wop together on the street corners of many urban centers. This provoked a strong reaction of proponents of segregation and was one reason why rhythm and blues and early rock and roll were often seen as dangerous to America's youth. But with young people of all backgrounds identifying with these new musical styles, a generation was becoming ready for ...

The string playing techniques used by blues guitarists are akin to those developed in the Sahel. The kora, a Mandinka 21 string harp, is played in a rhythmic melodic style that uses constantly changing rhythms, often providing a ground bass overlaid with complex treble patterns, while vocal supplies a third rhythmic layer... similar techniques can be found in hundreds of blues records. The same holds true for the vocals. The emblematic song coming from the Sahel is a solo, no call and response there, moaning kind of song, done by an individual with a raspy voice, in a declamatory vocal style. Blues expert, Alan Lomax, called it a high lonesome complaint. The typical blues, a high lonesome complaint of its own, is also sung by one individual with a string, guitar, or wind, harmonica instrument in a throaty style. In addition, the long, blending and swooping notes of the blues... And so are producing a note slightly under pitch, breaking into a vibrato or letting the note trail off and f...

After its origins in New Orleans, jazz music spread to other major cities throughout the U.S. In the early 1900s, the first jazz recordings were made, which helped spread the genre's popularity. In addition, New Orleans jazz performers moved or ventured to other locations and brought their music with them. A few other notable cities with an early jazz culture or proliferation were New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Kansas City, MO, and Denver. Some distinctive jazz styles developed in each of the cities and took on particular characteristics of their own. Brass bands originated in Great Britain in the early 19th century and flourished with the invention of a better valve for brass instruments, they were developed from an earlier culture of musicians gathering together in communities with various groupings of instruments. In addition, military bands and musicians helped facilitate the popularity of brass bands. Industrialization and a rising middle class also led to the growth of ...

When it comes to music festivals, few genres have as much history and cultural significance as jazz and blues. From New Orleans to Paris, these festivals bring together musicians and fans from all corners of the world to celebrate the rich traditions of jazz and blues music. Attending a jazz or blues festival can be an incredibly rewarding experience, both culturally and musically. These festivals provide an opportunity to see some of the world’s best musicians perform live, and to experience the rich traditions and history of jazz and blues music. In addition to music, these festivals also offer a range of cultural events, including food, crafts, and workshops. Jazz and blues festivals around the world are a celebration of music and culture, bringing together musicians and fans from all corners of the globe. From the historic streets of New Orleans to the picturesque towns of Europe, these festivals offer a unique opportunity to experience the rich traditions and history of jazz and b...

That sound draws thousands to Clarksdale each year for the annual Juke Joint Festival. They come for the familiar licks and wails. Over the years, the town of around 14,000 people, nestled among the cotton fields of northwestern Mississippi, has produced some of the world's most famous blues stars. Many blues greats, including Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, worked the surrounding plantations. A mix of slide guitar with a howl to the human condition. Blues houses, known as juke joints, opened up. By the 20s and 30s, the first stars emerged, including Robert Johnson, who, per legend, sold his soul to the devil just outside of Clarksdale in exchange for his guitar chops. These kinds of experiences are what helped forge the blues in the Delta, where places like Clarksdale were built into boomtowns on the backs of slaves and later, sharecroppers. But as musical tastes changed over the years, local blues houses closed down. Farm work dried up. Today, Clarksdale sits in one of the poor...