Playing the saxophone What are the unique aspects to playing blues compared with other genres?

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Pete Thomas said:
Thanks for that. Long time since I heard it and it brings home to me what I dislike when I hear people say blues is easy. I’ve called myself a blues musician for a huge chunk of my life but I still have to take my hat off to the likes of Jr Walker, Lee Allen…
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Well.....easy....in a basic sense. Although not particularly accurate, neither is it inaccurate to say "improvising on blues is easier than improvising on jazz because you can sound good just by using one scale and it can be applied to most blues tunes"

Pretty typical reputation among musicians, this...or some form of it...
 
cappers said:
Think I've got it now. The reference to 'pentatonic wankery' might mean those who just play the pentatonic or blues scales up and down over the chords without any variance or extra notes. I think many stick with pentatonics/blues because that is what many popular internet lesson sites tells them to do as it's easier and safer for beginners.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think as the smallest interval in the pentatonic scale being a whole step, it doesn't have any drive, and remains very static. Half steps in the scale generates tension and release, which pulls the melodic line. The leading tones like the natural 7th want to resolve to the tonic, and that gives the line motion. For me blues scales are more interesting starting points.
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Why is everybody talking about full and half steps when blues is about bending notes, being off by a quarter step and integrating those misfit notes into a frame and make them sound good? Or blue. Or whatever you want to call it.

It's one of the more challenging things about blues, when you have a rhythm in one key, a vocalist who is "off key", a drummer who is "off time" and they sound really good together. Until you try to fit in playing a blues scale.
 
LostCircuits said:
Why is everybody talking about full and half steps when blues is about bending notes, being off by a quarter step and integrating those misfit notes into a frame and make them sound good? Or blue. Or whatever you want to call it.

It's one of the more challenging things about blues, when you have a rhythm in one key, a vocalist who is "off key", a drummer who is "off time" and they sound really good together. Until you try to fit in playing a blues scale.
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This starts touching upon something that I have been cooking in my mind as to a "sorta answer" to the OP question...

It is an APPROACH as much as it is a reliance upon a particular scale.

Speaking in generalizations, which can always be dangerous as interpretation gets misconstrued...

I have found that blues tend to approach their solos differently...they are gonna use fewer notes, phrasing gonna be less rapid-fire, there is gonna be more space not filled in by notes. It would have a more soulful, plaintive quality to it. Note bending, holding notes more, etc.

Taking the OP question and applying it to a "real context" situation, might look something like this -

You are on a recording session. The form of a tune is a blues form, the progression is a blues progression.

Producer/director sitting in the booth, instructs you to play one take with a Jazzy solo. Then instructs you to play a take with a Bluesy solo. Unless you are an idiot...you are just gonna nod your head and say "OK, gotcha"....

How would they differ ? What would be going on in your music nerd mind to concoct one vs. the other ? What intentions would you be aiming for in one vs. other ?
 
This thread also reminded me of a short period of Miles albums. After his 70's stuff he made a 'comeback' in the 80's starting with a sorta meh album "Man With the Horn", which suffered from over-production more than anything else.
The second in that series "We Want Miles"... was a complete reaction to the first, live cuts with a very raw quintet including Al Foster, Marcus Miller, and a 300lb unwashed Mike Stern doing a great aesthetic Meat Loaf impression. That one lit up Jazz critical circles. It was pretty raw, laden with splats throughout, visceral, and compelling if not quite understandable.
The third one (best imho) synthesized the best aspects of the first two. His chops were also better re-established by then. "Star People". The title song on that album, which again really excited the critics ...is an 18-minute slow, 12-bar blues.
If anyone is unfamiliar with it, understand that...in its time...this was a HUGE recording in musician and critic circles. It was viewed as the "Miles is BACK" moment.
It was six musicians all completely capable of technical jazz wizardry, stretching out on a 12-bar blues and treating it as a blues in every respect....(Bill Evans on sax there, John Scofield on second guitar solo)
 
cappers said:
Correct me if I'm wrong but I think as the smallest interval in the pentatonic scale being a whole step, it doesn't have any drive, and remains very static.
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Tell that to John Newton composer of such stirring pentatonic masterpieces as Amazing Grace, or whoever it was who composed Swing Low. Or chastise Sonny Rollins for using the scale quite liberally in his later improvising. >:)
 
LostCircuits said:
Keep in mind that the folks who came up with the blues had, at least the majority of them, no idea what a pentatonic scale is. And maybe not even what a scale is/was.
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Maybe they didn't put a name to the notes in a pentatonic or blues scale, but they sure as hell played, or sang, those notes. It's also probably true that Bird & Diz didn't use the term 'bebop scale' or even think of it as a 'scale'. But they sure used it. These various scales get named 'after the fact'. Doesn't make it useless to analyze & use them.

I don't really separate blues & jazz. While it's true that jazz often goes well beyond the blues, jazz musicians use bluesy 'vocabulary' to a large extent, and they all can play the blues. Countless jazz tunes are written on the blues form and numerous jazz blues heads are constructed with notes from the blues scale. The blues is the foundation of jazz.

Of course, Pete is asking for 'unique aspects' of the blues. So, I guess it would be best to focus on that, leaving out the aspects in jazz that go beyond or differ significantly from the blues.
 
cappers said:
You mean the worksongs, hollers and call and response of plantation slaves?
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Close but not exactly, blues came a bit after the abolition, more like mid/late 19th century but the origins and elements go back to West Africa and of course the plantation and slaves.

Here is one of the better articles on the origins of blues, the role of Dockery Farms as "mothership" and how one thing led to another.

Of course you can always argue the chicken and egg paradigm but I personally think of blues starting in the mid 1860s.
 
JSL said:
These various scales get named 'after the fact'. Doesn't make it useless to analyze & use them.
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I totally agree. But the thing is that you can learn all about pattern and scales and still won't be able to play blues. Yes, more knowledge definitely helps but I might also argue that blues can be a good example for "for everything you learn, you forget 10 others"

I've heard folks play blues who did not know what they were doing and they sounded great and they got some formal education and they started sounding robotic.
 
LostCircuits said:
Close but not exactly, blues came a bit after the abolition, more like mid/late 19th century but the origins and elements go back to West Africa and of course the plantation and slaves.
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It is the earlier influences that are interesting to me.
From what I've read, many North American slaves were from the Sahel region of West Africa with Muslim cultures. They used stringed instruments and melodic solo singing with melisma (had to look that up!). Slaves to South America and the Caribbean tended to be from South West and Central Africa, with percussion based music and group chants.
Polyrhthyms, blue notes, a blues scale with flat 3rds 5ths & 7ths have roots in the traditional music of the Sahel region.
 
cappers said:
It is the earlier influences that are interesting to me
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You might be interested in

Africa and the Blues
Book by Gerhard Kubik

I've read a number of music history and ethnographic books. The one conclusion that's inescapable is "it's more complicated than that!" Where "that" is the potted histories you get in chapter 1 of popular jazz history books and the like.
Interesting, none the less.
I would recommend letting go of looking for simplistic thoughts. The pentatonic crops up all over the place. The 3rd is often problematic, the spread of cultures in North and central Africa etc. Is long and as compiled as anything... And ideas followed between African, the middle East and Europe for centuries
 
LostCircuits said:
I totally agree. But the thing is that you can learn all about pattern and scales and still won't be able to play blues. Yes, more knowledge definitely helps but I might also argue that blues can be a good example for "for everything you learn, you forget 10 others"

I've heard folks play blues who did not know what they were doing and they sounded great and they got some formal education and they started sounding robotic.
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Agreed. There is more to it than the notes. It's how you play those notes and the various inflections and overall 'feel' that helps make it the blues. And of course, in the general sense this is true for any genre, so not necessarily unique to the blues. What would be unique to blues are the specific techniques that give it the 'right' feel. Bends, growls, flutter tongue, rhythm, etc. That said, there is still some benefit to understanding the music theory involved.

One of the things I've discovered that may or may not be unique to the blues, but certainly seems to apply, are various ways of playing through the changes. For example, when soloing on a blues, I've found that in many cases, I can substitute a IIm7-V7 line (phrase) over the standard V7-IV7 in bars 9 & 10, even if the rhythm section is playing the V7-IV7 chords. And vice-versa (V7-IV7 when the rhythm section is playing IIm7-V7). There are situations where that might not be best, depending on the style of blues, but for the most part I find it to work. Certainly, over a swing or jump blues those subs can be made in the improvised solo line.

I think those substitutions work due to the nature of dominant chords. For one thing, the IIm7 and V7 chords are interchangeable because they share a lot of the same chord tones when including upper extensions. It's a little harder to argue using a V7 line over the IV7 chord, but if you look at the upper extensions of IV7, you get G Bb D. And G7: G B D F would translate over the IV7 chord as 9 #11 13 of IV7 (while F is the root of F7, obviously). That all sounds a bit convoluted, but I think it helps explain why you can solo with a IIm7-V7 line over V7-IV7. Maybe I have that all wrong technically, but it's how I interpret it.

Also, playing blues scale licks over the IV7 chord in bars 5 & 6, while sticking to the chord changes otherwise, can be very effective (Bird did this fairly often).

Anyway, the blues does tend to break some of the hard and fast rules of standard music theory. I hope I haven't taken this beyond where Pete intended this thread to go.
 

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