Blues Riffs

 

Creativity can start anywhere for me. Sometimes I loop back and review my collected aphorisms (Dynaxioms). It's a way to refine them, and get other ideas in the process. It's always been like sitting down with an instrument working with ideas in progress, then getting sidetracked into something else while riffing. Blogging is a form of cultivation just for the sake of itself. 

 

Blues got into everything at one point, and still does for me, such as when I want to "blue" a phrase, which is harder to do when things are too digital. Blues is the antithesis of digitization.  

 

Dynaxioms containing "blues":

• Even the best performances on the best instruments doesn't mean the they are the best ideas, whereas blues written on $10 acoustic could have influenced several generations.
• Too much "music" can sometimes get in the way of telling stories. This may be why we have delta blues, rock 'n roll, punk, hip-hop, grunge, and so on. None of that music was really about musical rudiments or music theory. Delta blues players used open tunings as a shortcut, based strictly on the sound of the chord and the ease of fingering. The stories and the feeling in the music were more important, and the basic chords and riffs they learned to play were sufficient. But the odd thing about blues is that it gradually adopted a more sophisticated harmony, fusing it with the harmonic complexity of jazz and its classical parentage. The natural tendency may be for music to gather complexity as it matures; and consequently the cultural narrative or stories may get drowned out. The more you know, the more complicated it becomes, and we collectively devise ways to winnow it down. Complexity is not an end, but a means to simplicity.  
• Louis XIV's Jason Hill: "I had to find the white blues guys to get to the black blues guys who were doing it better". This is how inspiration works: you discover the copy, which leads you back to the original influences. (This is how one discovers classical music as well.) You can never expect that people will appreciate music history if they don't see the context. When you tell people that Stravinsky's Rite of Spring caused riots at its premiere--then they listen more closely.
• The blues scale is largely a horizontal phenomenon, used melodically. But it can also be turned 90 degrees for a new harmonic perspective.I realized this recently when I was listening to Goodbye Pork Pie Hat by Charles Mingus and reviewing the chord changes. The melody is essentially derived from a blues scale, but is harmonized with a mixed bag of chord types taken from the major mode, minor mode, the blues scale, and borrowed chords from closely related keys. It was a harmonic "remix".
• Blues is not ambient music. As background music, blues naturally interferes with thinking. As a blues musician would use music as anodyne, the listener should as well. It's not a background music at all.
• When you listen to eastern and Indian music, you hear what the blues was trying to do.
• On the "Equinox Paradox": Coltrane's melodies are stripped down to a simple blues motif, whereas McCoy Tyner adds dense harmonic complexity. There is an ironic tension there that adds to a sense of depth and texture, as in a Jackson Pollock painting. It's no wonder abstract expressionism has a circularity with jazz. They were cut from the same cloth.
• It's the narrative and storytelling that people are attracted to, for example the statement "I grew up as a musician in Chicago". People already have pre-conceived notions as to the connection of music and Chicago, and may assume you have blues or jazz roots, when in fact that might not be true.