Anomale Used Blog

My journey from Berklee's hallowed halls to the vibrant world of jazz has been an odyssey of discovery, with the blues serving as my guiding light. The intertwining of these genres is not just a historical footnote but a living testament to the evolution of American music. The blues, with its emotive simplicity and authentic storytelling, remains the beating heart that fuels the intricate dance of jazz... musical education is not just about mastering technicalities, it's about embracing the emotional depth that resonates through every note. The blues taught me to listen with my heart, respond with intuition, and let the music unfold organically. It became the bridge connecting past and present, tradition and innovation. So, with immense gratitude for the educators, mentors, and the rich musical legacy they shared, I carry the spirit of the blues into every improvisation. As a jazz enthusiast, I understand that the blues isn't just a genre, it's a foundational language, ...

A few more years and Rock and Roll will no doubt be washed back half forgotten into the sea of jazz. Jazz is a great big sea. It washes up all kinds of fish and shells and spume and waves with a steady old beat, or off beat. And Louis must be getting old if he thinks J. J. and Kai, and even Elvis, didn’t come out of the same sea he came out of, too. Some water has chlorine in it and some doesn’t. There’re all kinds of water. There’s salt water and Saratoga water and Vichy water, Quinine water and Pluto water, and Newport rain. And it’s all water. Throw it all in the sea, and the sea’ll keep on rolling along toward shore and crashing and booming back into itself again. The sun pulls the moon. The moon pulls the sea. They also pull jazz and me. Beyond Kai to Count to Lonnie to Texas Red, beyond June to Sarah to Billy to Bessie to Ma Rainey. And the Most is the It, the all of it. Now, to wind it all up, with you in the middle, jazz is only what you yourself get out of it. Louis’s famous q...

In the mid 1800s, a German harmonica manufacturer named Hohner started exporting his product to North America. Being relatively inexpensive, relatively easy to play and extremely portable, the harmonica, commonly called a harp, was the perfect instrument for a nation on the move. Everybody from Abraham Lincoln to Billy the Kid had one. Over time, its popularity has waxed and waned, and it's now heard most often in the context of blues music. But ever since Marion Little Walter Jacobs began playing saxophone lines on his harmonica in the late 1940s, the instrument has occasionally crossed over into the jazz world. Source: Beyond The Blues: The Blues Harmonica In Jazz by Nick Morrison and Robin Lloyd Cedar Walton - Summertime Written by: George Gershwin First recorded on: October 31, 1986 Released on: Up Front album "Cedar Walton was an American hard bop jazz pianist. He came to prominence as a member of drummer Art Blakey's band, The Jazz Messengers, before establishing a l...

In 1920s appeared first blues bands and blues began to be not as it was before. It turned into something like show and popular trend. Many people felt that they could earn money both on blues music and musicians who played it. So they became popular and many recording studios want to see these blues musicians writing some songs. However unlike jazz blues was music of black people and the situation was so for many years. There existed pubs for black people where blues was played. Many black people though that white population can’t play blues and it is really so. Afro American people have all right to say that blues is their music, as it describes their hard life and conditions in which they were. Their situation was harder that Austerity. You may get to know what austerity is and compare this policy with policy towards Afro American people. At this stage, blues didn’t stop its development of course and gradually, new genre rhythm and blues and other ones appeared. Among popular and rel...

It is no wonder, then, that literary critics intent on analyzing musical elements in Wilson’s plays, but who are not, after all, professional musicologists, tend to pursue the seemingly reasonable shortcut of consulting secondary scholarly sources about the blues, rather than daring to dive into what is, for most people, a vast, obscure, and forbidding ocean of pre World War II music... Yet there are inevitable and profound limits to any mobilization of secondary scholarship or theoretical frameworks that is not also rooted in solid knowledge of, or basic research into, the pertinent primary material. When literary critics address the pervasive blues and jazz elements in Wilson’s plays, armed with a handful of secondary sources and generalizing abstractions but without substantial awareness of the relevant music, they frequently stumble into error... The protagonist of this drama may indeed be a composite of several historical sources, including Jefferson, but one might reasonably wond...

The very institutional acceptance that many musicians sought in the mid to late 20th century has hitched jazz to a broken and still segregated education system. Partly as a result, the music has become inaccessible to, and disconnected from, many of the very people who created it, young Black Americans, poorer people and others at the societal margins. Of the more than 500 students who graduate from American universities with jazz degrees each year, less than 10 percent are Black, according to Department of Education statistics compiled by DataUSA. In 2017, the last year with data available, precisely 1 percent of jazz degree grads were Black women. The education is the anchor... We should be questioning our education system. Is it working? Is there a pipeline into the university for indigenous Black Americans to play their music, and learn their music? I don’t think that exists. Source: Jazz Has Always Been Protest Music. Can It Meet This Moment? by Giovanni Russonello The Pat Moran Q...

The word Jazz means pep or energy. This style was born in the taverns of New Orleans at much the same time and with the same influences as blues and ragtime. But jazz had an added element of Cuban/Spanish culture. Habanera rhythms, blues forms and ragtime drive blended together to form something new. Eventually the rigid rhythms of the beat relaxed to allow a feeling we call swing. Swing is hard to define and difficult to notate... The prohibition of the 1920’s saw the rise of The Jazz Age in the U.S. cementing this style and sound into American culture. Ragtime... style takes traditional march form, much like the music of John Philip Sousa, and adds the syncopated, or ragged, rhythms of African music. The style fell out of favor in the early 20th century with the rise of jazz but many compare the American rag to European minuets, mazurkas and waltzes... American orchestras and conservatories were slow to recognize these styles, but their European counterparts embraced them openly. So...

Jazz is a broad musical style, notoriously difficult to define, but with a general foundation of improvisation, syncopated rhythms, and group interaction. Considered a wholly American musical form, jazz originated during the late 19th century within black communities of the Southern United States. A jazz ensemble usually plays a predetermined tune, with each musician adding their own interpretations. This improvisation is the defining element of jazz, and is based on the mood of the musicians, the interaction of the group, and even the audience’s response to the music. Jazz performers try to create a unique and expressive tone for their instrument, also known as a voice. Skilled jazz musicians play and interact with a swing rhythm, a propulsive groove or beat that creates a visceral response of foot tapping or head nodding. These rhythms have roots in traditional African music, using the off beats of syncopated rhythms to create the groove. Blues is a genre of music based on traditiona...

During the 1920s, many Americans had extra money to spend, and spend it they did, on movies, fashion and consumer goods such as ready to wear clothing and home appliances like electric refrigerators. In particular, they bought radios. Cars also gave young people the freedom to go where they pleased and do what they wanted. Some pundits called them bedrooms on wheels. What many young people wanted to do was dance, the Charleston, the cake walk, the black bottom and the flea hop were popular dances of the era. Jazz bands played at venues like the Savoy and the Cotton Club in New York City and the Aragon in Chicago, radio stations and phonograph records, 100 million of which were sold in 1927 alone, carried their tunes to listeners across the nation. Some older people objected to jazz music’s vulgarity and depravity, and the moral disasters it supposedly inspired, but many in the younger generation loved the freedom they felt on the dance floor. Source: The Roaring Twenties by Amanda Onio...

The Graystone Ballroom, meanwhile, was the city’s cradle of jazz. Opened in 1922, it was once Detroit’s largest and grandest ballroom. In a 1974 interview with The Detroit News, clarinetist Benny Goodman said he drove all night to catch Bix Beiderbecke play at the Graystone, calling it a great mecca in those days. During the height of big band jazz, the Graystone often hosted a battle of the bands, with one in particular... that drew a record breaking crowd of around 7,000. Detroit’s jazz scene, by this point, reached across the city. The now vacant Blue Bird Inn on the city’s west side eventually pulled the bebop crowd from the El Sino as blacks migrated west in the 1950s. The Blue Bird was where jazz musician and trumpeter Miles Davis cultivated his career. In his autobiography, Davis writes about moving to Detroit after quitting heroin, where he befriended the club’s owner Clarence Eddins. Eddins gave him a job with The Blue Bird house band, and as Davis’ solo career blossomed, he f...

Jazz music is an incredibly important part of American culture. There is a rich jazz history that has had a ripple effect on nearly every aspect of American life from style and social movements to the music that came after. Learning more about the importance of jazz music in America may just give you even more appreciation for the genre. For many fans of jazz, New York is the best place to go... a tradition that continues today in many of the area’s best jazz clubs. You don’t have to look far to see the influence acts as these had on the best music from the 20th century... The genre has permeated musical culture to the point where it is nearly impossible to find someone who wasn’t influenced by jazz at some point... If you are looking for a jazz club, New York does not disappoint... the oldest New York jazz clubs around, to truly experience the legacy that jazz music has left behind. Source: Why Jazz Music is Important to American Culture by Birdland Jazz Club David Allan Coe - Why You...

In the early 20th century, the blues was considered disreputable as white audiences began listening to blues. Blues came into its own as an important part of the country’s relatively new popular culture in the 1920s with the recording, first, of great female classic blues singers and, then, of the country folk blues singers of the Mississippi Delta, the Piedmont of the Carolinas, and Texas. The first copyrighted song was in 1912, the Dallas Blues. As huge numbers of African Americans left the South at this time due to failed Reconstruction, dismal economic conditions, oppression in the South and the hope of better treatment in the North between 1915 and 1940s, the blues went with them, and settled in the urban centers of the North, especially Chicago. A more urban, electric blues developed as a result, which eclipsed the rural blues of the South and eventually became both rock and roll and what would become known as rhythm and blues. Blues fell somewhat out of popular favor until the l...

When it comes to music, jazz and blues are two distinct genres with their own unique characteristics. However, many people make the mistake of using these terms interchangeably.  One of the most common mistakes people make is assuming that jazz and blues are interchangeable terms for the same type of music. While both genres have roots in African American musical traditions and share some similarities, they are distinct genres with their own unique characteristics. Jazz is characterized by its improvisational nature, complex chord progressions, and use of swing rhythms. Blues, on the other hand, is characterized by its use of simple chord progressions, call and response patterns, and use of the blues scale. To avoid this mistake, it’s important to take the time to listen to both genres and familiarize yourself with their unique characteristics. This will help you to better understand and appreciate the nuances of each genre. The mood and atmosphere of an event or place can greatly ...

Evidently, music was a central aspect of the African American culture... As most music scholars would put it, jazz music was among the first American genres that influenced global music. In essence, many share the ideas that this form of music developed after the civil war especially in America. On the other hand, jazz musicians also used this music genre as a platform for advocating for civil rights and equality for the African American minority group. It was a subtle way of dealing with social injustices for which others considered as stereotyping since it mainly targeted those of white color. In essence, music serves as an avenue for communicating across one’s ignorance’s and hatreds hence connecting people for the betterment of the society. With this attribute in mind, many jazz musicians played their music for a purpose that was greater than entertainment but as a way of bringing unity for the oppressed. Ellison’s use of Jazz and Blues in the book Invisible Man serves as a way of ...

Oliver himself had come up in traditional brass bands but then leaned toward the new hot music, beginning with his matriculation into the gutbucket Eagle Band, probably around 1908. Later, after playing the district with his Magnolia Band, he joined the top line Onward Brass Band under the Creole Manuel Perez. One observer wrote that when the Onward played a march, dirge, or hymn it was played to perfection, no blunders. Yet even in that rarefied company, Oliver began playing monkeyshines, improvised figures around the score. He straddled the Uptown/Downtown fence. There were likely a couple reasons. First, like any Crescent City musician, he needed to cover all styles and repertoires, especially to follow new trends and suit an international audience. Second, more than anything, he wanted to be a band man. He needed camaraderie. The musicians he knew from New Orleans were plagued by feelings of inferiority so crippling that they could not succeed professionally. For Oliver, the police...

The blues is generally understood as a secular music of loss: lost women, lost jobs, regrets, and defeat. But it has a more profound, spiritual side, defying despair. In the 1950s, Ralph Ellison, while writing about flamenco, another Islamic influenced music, remarked that the blues voice mocks the despair stated explicitly in the lyric, and it expresses the great human joke directed against the universe, that joke which is the secret of all folklore and myth, that though we be dismembered daily we shall always rise up again... the blues is a secular spiritual. In this spirituality, perhaps one may find an echo of one of the blues’s roots in Islamic practices and music. The blues is not African music; there is no traditional African blues. Nor is it Islamic music. The blues is an African American creation, born of American circumstances and various influences. What makes it unique is the prevalence of a number of Sahelian/Islamic stylistic elements that became dominant due in part to h...

Although harmony by itself generally does not receive copyright protection, '07 Tempo Music Inc. v. Famous Music Corp. indicated that harmony might suffice. Duke Ellington's estate, namely his son Mercer and the Famous Music Corporation, sued the executor of Billy Strayhorn's estate claiming that Strayhorn did not have a protected interest in his harmonic contributions to subsequent arrangements of Satin Doll, a song by Ellington... Examining the issue of harmony, Judge Sand acknowledged harmony as inherently derivative because it usually accompanies an already created melody. Rejecting the Ellington Estate's argument that harmony cannot itself give rise to a copyright, the court held that, although certain chords occur inevitably from a given melody, composers especially in jazz and contemporary music sometimes make especially creative use of harmony, which necessarily influences the mood, feel and sound of a piece. Instead of relying on the proposal of novel results a...

Couldn't find anything interesting to share today, will find something for tomorrow. Peace to theworld. ✌️☮️ Toto - Falling In Between Vocals by: Bobby Kimball Genre: Rock, Prog Rock Released in: 2006 "Toto is an American rock band formed in 1977 in Los Angeles, California. Having released 14 studio albums and sold over 40 million records worldwide, the group has received several Grammy Awards and was inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum in 2009." See previous Song of the Day

Jazz uses a more theoretical approach. You’ll find Bebop Scales, Chord Tone soloing, Pentatonics, but on a different level, Triadic/Intervallic playing, and more. Melodic Minor is a scale used often in jazz that you probably won’t hear in bluegrass music much at all. Overall, the choices and approach are more exotic and deeper.  The length of jazz solos tends to be longer. Hence, why they need more tools in their toolbox. They might take one solo with chord tones, the next with the bebop scale, or one with it all mixed up. Overall, I’d say the variations on a theme approach is less prevalent in jazz. The topic and theme of bluegrass songs is much different than jazz. They focus on songs about the old home, cabins, rural living, etc. There are songs about mom & dad, trains, and gospel songs. Of course, there are the usual songs about losing a woman, or fights between a woman and a man.  With jazz, a lot of the songs are about city living. A lot of jazz’s repertoir...

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. Contempt is as ordinary as a son not giving full attention to his mother, thinking, I know what she’s going to say. But it is the cause of all unkindness, including racism and economic injustice, which so many African American blues artists suffered from, and people suffer from right now. But no one can like themselves for having contempt. Years ago, while I could act cheerful and make people laugh, I o...

The hope beneath the despair of the blues is what Martin Luther King, Jr. heard, and his success as a reformer is due, in part, to his appreciation of the blues. His strategy of direct action through non violent resistance was an elegant example of the signifying, the practice in African American culture, involving a verbal strategy of indirection that exploited the gap between the denotative and figurative meanings of words, that goes on in the blues. The blues is seldom associated with Martin Luther King, Jr. but its idiom was foundational to his life and career. In an opening address to the 1964 Berlin Jazz Festival, King offered remarks that give us insights that, in true blues fashion, circle back to where we began by considering the relationship between the blues and religious faith. Indeed, King began by identifying the blues as originating from a divine source. What makes the blues effective as an agent for social change is its ability to show us how to live with integrity whil...

Within and without music we each know the balancing act between autonomy and the placation of authorities. The popular music industry is wrought with struggles between its structures and participants agents. Blues, though it can be structured and formalized too, allows for transition between other genres. After all, blues lies at the roots of all American popular music, arguably all North American popular music... adopting a phenomenological stance favoring the socially informed experience of live performances, and suggests that one should focus on performers’ and listeners’ interpretations of the signs of a historical musical culture out of which musical works arise. As I consider Dawn and the ways in which a blues singer must wrestle with the frustrations of structure, I wonder about the way I’m writing this ethnography, too. The negotiations of structure and agency, as a blues singer in Quebec or as a ethnomusicology student in New York, are as opaque as genre or improvisation. What...

A significant number of them took part in WWI, offering their lives and their strength for their country, willingly choosing to do so, an experience that greatly changed these men’s sense of belongings and expectation. African American regiments proved to be particularly fierce and brave during the war, as was the case of the famous Harlem Hellfighters. True, these were segregated regiments, yet this very situation made it harder to deny African Americans’ achievements. It was a duality that became commonplace in the interwar years, especially in the 1920s.  Prohibition unexpectedly gave African Americans the opportunity to show their culture, especially in the show business. Previous to Prohibition, only African Americans played and listened to jazz. But the pass of the 18th Amendment opened up the underground bars where jazzmen played to the general public, and suddenly, everyone was exposed to jazz and found they liked it. It was a form of expression that spoke of the African Am...