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...