(Long comment)
After reading quite a bit on this forum and watching so many videos about the blues, I have come up with my own understanding of the blues. I don't know if this will make sense to anyone, but here's my take.
The blues is
not about a scale. It is not about a minor pentonic scale with an added blue note. It is not the major pentatonic scale either. Since the early 20th century, people have been trying to come up with various 'scales' or 'collection of pitches' to capture this blues sound. However, they are poor approximations of what the blues is. See Sherman Irby talk about the blues scale:
The blues is
not just about the AAB song form. Yes, it is the form we think of today; this form just happens to be the most played, most popular structure after WC Handy made it famous. However, there were plenty of tunes sung by Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith et al that weren't in AAB form. If we think that the blues is just about AAB form with a I, IV, V, then what these Vaudevillian Blues singers were doing with their music can't be called the blues, which sounds crazy, right? Because when they sing, it is recognisably the blues or blues-y. Check out Bessie Smith singing in a blues-y way. If you search the song below on Wikipedia, even the entry calls this form of music a 'dirty blues':
People say things like, "You know, Louis Armstrong's music is steeped in the blues, Lester Young's music is steeped in the blues, Charlie Parker's music is steeped in the blues, etc." If it's not the scale or song form, then what is the blues? What do people mean?
When people say "The Blues", to me, this is just shorthand for saying, "The Sound/Feeling of The Blues". This sound/feeling is more important than a scale or the song form. You can play a major scale and sound bluesy if you know what you're doing. I learnt this after listening to so much Frankie Trumbauer.
What is "The Sound/Feeling of The Blues"? To me, it is the sound of:
#1 - the African 6/8 rhythm
rubbing against the common 4/4 rhythm. This creates a 3:2 polyrhythm. You have to have/play/reference this rhythm in your playing. It is the thing that makes your music sound like the human voice. Also, saxophonist and educator Mike Titlebaum mentions the importance of this feel and meter in one of his books.
#2 - micro-rhythms (being ahead/behind)
rubbing against the beat or pulse. Check out LA and Nahre Sol discussing this at 6:49
#3 - microtones (sounds in between each chromatic note)
rubbing against the fixed 12 tones of music. I've read in some places that kinda recommend that jazz and blues guitarists do not bend a note more than a semitone or half step. When you bend, you should make those movements very tiny to get that microtone. Again, this sound gives your lines a vocal quality.
#4 - 'blue notes' (b3, b5, b7) in the melody
rubbing against the key’s major scale. There is a serious misunderstanding that just playing the minor blues scale (Root, b3, 4, b5, 5, b7) will give you an immediate blues sound. It does not. You can't just play the minor blues scale on its own; it has to rub against something like the major scale. E.g. You have to play the b3 against the 3 and the b7 against the 6. I can't find the video now, but Branford Marsalis talks about this too. This is EXACT reason why electric blues guitarists sound so damn flat and one-dimensional when compared to a half decent jazzer who knows the blues. The jazzer knows about the rub.
"The Sound/Feeling of The Blues" is about friction. It's about going against the oppression of 4/4 time, the oppression of the beat, the oppression of 12 tones, the oppression of the key. It was the musical language of resistance of the enslaved and disempowered African-Americans. Ethan Iverson talks about how swinging blues riffs both "deny" and "ignore" the harmony:
A “New” (meaning “Old”) Approach to Jazz Education | DO THE M@TH
I feel quite strongly about "The Sound/Feeling of The Blues".
Where I am, there are so so many guitar hobbyists at our local community club who think they are really good blues musicians just because they know all the minor pentatonic box shapes and standard electric-blues-guitarists licks over 3 chords. They don't even listen to blues standards; they just wanna show how much they can shred said licks. Every now and then when a saxophonist or a jazz musician joins their jam sessions, these guitar players always go, "WOW how do you do that? Why does your blues sound so different? What scales are you using?" To me, this is just wrong. It's so disconnected from the tradition.
It doesn't help that on YouTube you have an INFINITE number of "how to play this pentatonic blues box in this way or that way to sound like [insert famous electric blues guitarist]". So much talk about scales and shapes and boxes and licks and what to play, not how to play. It's just perpuating this dilution of a great American artform that has so much history.
Originally Posted by kris
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