In his autobiography, referring to pre-1914 Southern folk music, W. C. Handy wrote:
[Black Southern folk musicians were] sure to bear down on the third and seventh tones of the scale, slurring between major and minor. Whether in the cotton fields of the Delta or on the levee up St. Louis way, it was always the same...Handy speaks of the flat third and seventh, but does not mention the flat fifth.
Looking at the earliest blues (by Handy and others) that appeared as sheet music pre-1915, I don't see any "blue note" use of the b5 (see the books on early published blues by Peter Muir and Vic Hobson, reviewed here earlier).
Listening to Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue (1924), I don't hear any blues use of the b5. Gershwin was not a blues musician, but as a bright young music industry insider, he would have been quite aware of blues usage in his time, at least the commercial and big-city type (Gershwin was born in 1898; the "blues craze" in popular music began c.1914). If the b5 had been part of what constituted "blues" for him in 1924, he surely would have exploited it in "Rhapsody in Blue."
To me, "blue note" usage of the flat five consists of either scooping the note in the same way and to the same extent that the third was traditionally scooped and bent, or incorporating the b5 into this sort of lick. This is from the opening of the melody in Tadd Dameron's The Squirrel (1947):
This kind of usage doesn't seem to have been there, in the earliest days of blues.
So when did musicians begin to use the b5 as a blue note? The earliest recorded example I could find was this 1925 Bessie Smith recording of "St. Louis Blues," featuring Louis Armstrong:
The b5 licks here are used liberally - in Louis' vocals and cornet solo, and in the clarinet and piano parts as well (Earl Hines was the pianist). The trombone contributes a b5-5 scoop.
You can hear similar b5 licks in later jazz standards like Ellington's "It Don't Mean a Thing" (1931) and "In a Sentimental Mood" (1935), and in Matt Dennis' "Angel Eyes" (1946).
Interestingly, the b5 licks in these Bessie Smith, Armstrong, Ellington, and Matt Dennis examples all occur in a minor-key context. This might seem to suggest that b5 blues usage started in the mid-1920s, in minor-key tunes.
On the other hand, the mid-20s time frame only reflects minor-key examples that I could find recordings for. "St. James Infirmary," for example, is a very old tune (see this Wikipedia entry). Perhaps Louis was just playing it the way New Orleans players had played it decades earlier, before recordings.
By the 1940s, b5 licks were commonplace in major-key blues as well. (Note: blues usage of the b5 by the bebop players was a different phenomenon than their use of the b5 for harmonic color.)
Some years ago, I researched blues scales for a college course. Surveying books and articles, I found no less than ten different "blues scales." The earliest proposal of a "blues scale" that I could find was by Winthrop Sargeant, in his 1938 book "Jazz - Hot and Hybrid." Here's Sargeant's diagram, as reproduced in Gunther Schuller's "Early Jazz":
The arrows indicate prevalent melodic motion. Sargeant stated that this diagram related more to early or traditional blues (from a 1938 perspective).
If this scale is based on C as tonic, it is our present-day "major blues scale" with an added b7, and does not include the b5.
I'm not sure when our present-day "minor blues scale" (1 b3 4 b5 5 b7 1) came into the picture. If a blues scale involving the b5 had become commonly known by the 1940s, could it have influenced b5 usage? It's an interesting thought, but I have a feeling that it didn't happen that way.
I emailed this question to a few jazz musicians who who had learned their stuff in the late 1930s or early 1940s: When you were learning to play, were you aware of any concept of a "blues scale?" I heard back from two of them. One well-known NY pianist had this to say:
When I was learning to play, in the 30's and 40's, there was no "jazz education" to formalize matters, but there were soloists such as Lionel Hampton, Pete Brown, Lester Young, Harry Edison, Buck Clayton, Charlie Christian, and the boogie-woogie pianists (Ammons, Lewis, James P. Johnson) who employed the blues scale in their solos and their pieces, and we followed what they did without labeling it systematically as "the blues scale."Maurice "Dr. Bugs" Bower's answer was, "Never heard of it."
7 comments:
Gershwin harped a lot on the b5 blue note in "It Ain't Necessarily So"
True. Great example. "It Ain't Necessarily So" was written in 1934, and is in minor, consistent with the time frame and minor-ness of the other songs I mentioned
How interesting. I must say I didn't know this. All the recordings I have studied are post 1925.
I always wonder if the b5 isn't actually a harmonic influence. It fits the #ivo7 and bVI7 chords so well, and both these harmonies are extremely common in 20's and 30's jazz.
Yes, the b5 fits those chords great, e.g. bar 6 of a blues, where one might use a #ivo7, and where soloists often use the b5 blue note. However - the earliest uses I found were not in bVII7 or #ivo7 situations. I don't think the b5 blue note was so much harmony-driven as melody-driven - then it gets harmonized. If you find any early uses over those chords, please let me know!
The b5 emerges if you think of the blues scale as the second mode of the major 'bebop' scale (i.e. the major scale with interpolated b6). Thus C blues arises from Bb bebop: [Bb] C D Eb F Gb G A Bb.
Thanks for the comment! That strikes me as kind of just a coincidence, though, and surely has nothing to do with how the b5 emerged in jazz history. I'm absolutely certain that Louis Armstrong was not thinking in those terms. In fact, I really don't think that the bebop players of the 1940s had any concept of a bebop scale either. The "bebop scale" was a concept introduced by David Baker (1960s, maybe, at the earliest?).
Check out Gershwin’s arrangements of I got rhythm and who cares. He certainly using the bebop language that would become popular 13 years later with dizzy bird and Monk, flat fives and 13s ninths you name it it’s all there! stacked fourth chords as well
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