Skip to main content

Koko Taylor - Blow Top Blues

Jazz music is essentially a conversation. In classical music, by contrast, the musicians are expected to learn their parts perfectly and deliver consistently, according to a high standard of perfection. Jazz and blues, while also committed to high standards of performance, use a language that is more conversational, employing song structure, but with infinite ways to deliver a song. The song gives a context and excuse for conversation.

Is it possible that the way jazz musicians learn to speak with one another could offer new approaches for the way we speak to one another in organizations?

Every conversation you’ve ever had was improvised. You were unscripted. Someone said something and you responded in the best way that you were able, even if that response was silence. Herein is of course the joy and the risk. Because they are unscripted, conversations can go pear shaped. We can say the wrong thing at the wrong time, or we can listen with half a heart and suddenly we are in deep water. Yet jazz and blues artists take these risks all the time. And they do so in front of an audience that pays to listen to them.

Why would musicians take such a risk? There’s plenty of unimprovised music that is wonderful. And we can find analogies in business, certain keynote addresses work best when they’re delivered word for considered word.


Koko Taylor - Blow Top Blues
  • Produced by: Koko Taylor and Bruce Iglauer
  • Composed by: Leonard Feather
  • Genre: Blues, Chicago blues

"Koko Taylor's big, raw vocal style, led fans to crown her The Queen of Chicago Blues. Hit records and spectacular shows at the Montreux and Ann Arbor Festivals, constant touring and recording with her band, won her a string of Awards."

See previous Song of the Day


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Moondog - Behold

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...

Veronica Swift - A Little Taste

There has always been an uncomfortable tension between rhythm and blues and rock and roll, a cyclical influence that vacillates between inspiration, appropriation and separation. Popular music has broken off into categories of rock, pop, country, and R&B, each with their own origin stories. But R&B and rock, usually codified as vastly different, Black and white styles, have long been intertwined in ways our historical memory may have us forget.  Despite the innovation that comes from separation, rock and R&B always find their way back to each other. In recent years, rock veterans have turned to the genre’s classics for inspiration. Queens of the Stone Age veered from their typical hard rock with 2017’s Villains, a dance y album inspired by frontman Josh Homme’s love of 1920s jazz and swing, other Black genres that laid the groundwork for the popular music of today. The whitewashing of rock’s history has oversimplified music’s malleability and silenced the voices of Amer...

The Gap Band - The Sun Don't Shine Everyday

The Gap Band - The Sun Don't Shine Everyday Genre: RnB Released in: 1984 Duration: 5:14 "The Gap Band was most successful when working with producer Lonnie Simmons, with four consecutive gold records. Their party train soon slowed to a stop. They reformed in the 90s and occasionally toured and attempted a comeback album." See Previous Song of the Day