Blue note (i).

A concept used by jazz critics and musicians from the early decades of the 20th century onwards in black American music, notably in Blues and Jazz, to characterize pitch values perceived as deviating from the western diatonic scale.

1. Definitions.

It was already observed in the 1920s that blues and jazz singers, as well as instrumentalists tend to present the 3rd and 7th, sometimes also the 5th degree in a diatonic framework by pitch values a semitone lower, often with microtonal fluctuations. From this observation musicologists have tried to construct ‘blues scales’. The earliest proposition was that blues singers were using minor-3rd intonations or ‘blue 7ths’ such as E and B respectively over a C major triad. Although its origin is unknown, by 1925 the term ‘blue note’ was established in the literature (Niles, 1925–6). It is significant, however, that ‘downhome’ blues musicians do not use it, unless influenced by jazz critics. Generally, blues singers in the Deep South speak of ‘worrying’ or ‘bending’ the notes. Against the background of a strong central tonality, blues singers develop themes and melodic variations largely independently of the guitar chords used in the accompaniment. The intonation, often with glides and considerable melisma, sometimes deviates by microtonal values from the standard tunings of the guitar or the piano. Jessie Mae Hemphill, for example, is known for a pronounced melismatic style.

From a western viewpoint, blue notes have been described in terms such as ‘deviations’, ‘inflections’ and ‘lowering’, taking the western tonal system as a yardstick. In search of underlying ideas, musicologists have systematized some of these deviations, proposing ‘blues scales’ with ever-increasing numbers of notes, from eight tones to fifteen (Titon, 1977, 2/1994, p.153) within the octave. More recently this approach has been challenged (Evans, 1982, p.24). By the mid-1970s, Titon (op. cit., p.154) had already proposed ‘E’, ‘G’ and ‘B’ complexes , leading to his ‘Downhome blues scale’. Evans (op. cit., p.24) suggested that blues musicians proceed from an awareness of ‘flexible pitch areas’. Tonemic analysis of blues singers’ concepts and behaviour, in which all possible intonations together constitute the same toneme, has reconciled present-day ethnomusicological views with statements by blues singers (Kubik, 1999). If blue notes are considered intra-systemic as part of a non-western tonal system, they vanish as separate entities and become those points where the deviations between western and non-western systems of pitch are greatest.

2. Origins.

Explanations of the blue note as originating ‘from the American slaves’ difficulties in adapting West African pentatonicism (lacking the 3rd and 7th degrees) to European diatonicism’ (Grove6) have been universally disproved. Research has shown that no degrees were lacking (Waterman, 1952 and Kubik, 1996) and, since Paul Oliver's findings (1970), it has been generally accepted that the cultural genealogy of African-American music in North America – in contrast to that of the Caribbean – points predominantly to the savanna and sahel zone of West Africa, rather than the coast. While blues is most certainly an African and American late 19th-century development with no single link to any specific African musical genre, a majority of the blues' traits can be firmly traced to areas in West Africa that represent a contact zone between an ancient sub-Saharan culture world of agriculturalists and an Arabic-Islamic culture world that became effective from c700 ce on. Many traits in the tonal world of blues can be better understood as a thoroughly processed and transformed Arabic-Islamic stylistic component. For historical reasons and from the performing practice of ‘downhome’ blues, the theory of an equiheptatonic origin of the blue note (Jones, 1951, pp.9–10, Dauer, 1955, pp.v, 6, and Dauer 1958, p.78) can also be discarded. In an equiheptatonic system the 3rds are ‘neutral’, neither major nor minor. A memory of such tonal systems, as found in the tunings of balo xylophones in Guinea and those of the Asena of the Lower Zambezi valley, lingers on in North America, but not in ‘downhome’ blues. If it had continued in the blues, then blues singers would regularly intonate the upper blue note between B and B; they tend, however, to flatten the B rather than sharpen it. In addition, very few blues are heptatonic, which also invalidates theories considering the blue note as ‘neutral 3rds’. Some authors have linked blue notes to a ‘neutral mode’ in Anglo-American folk music of the Appalachian mountains, with a possible Scottish and Irish background (Buchanan, 1940, p.79). One of the most prominent theories encountered in the literature (for a summary see Mecklenburg and Scheck, 1963) was that blue notes could be explained by the superposition of an (African) pentatonic scale over a heptatonic (European) framework of chords.

As it now stands, the origin of the blues tonal system (see illustration), is more complex, connected with the structure of various penta- to hexatonic systems across the west-central Sudanic belt and possibly northern Mozambique. Benjamine V. Boone (1994) and Gerhard Kubik (1999) have both suggested that the tonal system behind the blues derives from pitch patterns ultimately rooted in the formants of speech as articulated by speakers of certain West African languages. The most recent theory about the nature and origin of the tonal system behind the blues (Kubik, 1999) postulates that its salient pitch values result from a merger of a common west-central Sudanic pentatonic pattern extrapolating partials 4 to 9 with its own transposition a 5th down or a 4th up, as if the same melody were articulated first by a woman and then a man.

3. Global diffusion.

Reinterpretation of the blue note within the western tonal system has become a prominent feature of most western popular music, as well as some art-composed music, such as in that of Gershwin. Jazz harmony has largely placed the concept of blue notes within its own western-oriented theoretical framework. Brothers (1994) and Kubik (1999) have suggested that jazz harmonic practice, however, was predominantly non-Western in its underlying structures and concepts. Although the idea of equidistance, prominent in one set of African tonal systems (as in the equiheptatonic system described above), was not generative in the development of the blues' tonal system, it resurges as a shadowy structure in bebop, as evidenced by common descending progressions of some chord clusters in narrow intervals. Bebop harmony has incorporated elements of blues tonality as well as structural elements of harmonic parallelism in narrow intervals inherited from equiheptatonic African tunings. It was developed by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and others from a background different from that of western composers such as Schoenberg and Hindemith, with whose harmonic devices bebop harmony can only be superficially compared. As in the blues, pitch perception by musicians in bebop is also heavily entrenched in the concept of pitch areas within an essentially heptatonic framework that is ‘elastic’ with frequent tendencies towards equidistance. It is the pitch area concept inherited from the blues and ultimately from African traditions that steered developments in jazz during the 1940s in the direction of ‘altered’ and ‘substitute’ chords.

Thus, a non-Western analysis of the characteristic pitch-values prevalent in blues and jazz, described as ‘blue notes’ in the literature, leads to an assessment of this music’s historical, audio-psychological and aesthetic characteristics, with results that diverge sharply from those obtained by any approach based on classical European music theory.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Grove6

A. Niles: ‘Blue Note’, The New Republic, xlv (1925–6), 292–3

A. Niles: ‘The Story of the Blues’, Blues: an Anthology, ed. W.C. Handy (new York, 1926, 2/1949 as A Treasury of the Blues, rev. 3/1972/R by J. Silverman under orig. title), 12–45

W. Sargeant: Jazz: Hot and Hybrid (New York, 1938, 3/1975)

A.M. Buchanan: ‘A Neutral Mode in Anglo-American Folk Music’, Southern Folklore Quarterly, iv (1940), 77–92

A.M. Jones: ‘Blue Notes and Hot Rhythm’, African Music Society Newsletter, i/4 (1951), 9–12

R.A. Waterman: ‘African Influences on the Music of the Americas’, Acculturation in the Americas, ed. S. Tax (Chicago, 1952), 207–18

A.M. Dauer: ‘Grundlagen und Entwicklung des Jazz’, Jazz Podium (1955), no.4, pp.7–8; no.5, pp.5–6; no.6, p.7; no.7, p.7, 10; no.9, pp.7–8; no.10, pp.11–12

A.M. Dauer: Der Jazz: Seine Ursprünge und seine Entwicklung (Eisenach, 1958)

A.M. Dauer: Jazz – die magische Musik: Ein Leitfaden durch den Jazz (Bremen, 1961)

C.G.H. zu Mecklenburg and W. Scheck: Die Theorie des Blues im modernen Jazz (Strasbourg and Baden-Baden, 1963)

G. Rouget: ‘Sur les xylolphones équiheptaphoniques des Malinke’, Revue de musicologie, lv/1 (1969), 47–77

G. Kubik: ‘Transcription of Mangwilo Xylophone Music from Film Strips’, African Music, ii/4 (1965), 35–51; corrigenda in iv/4 (1970), 136–7

P. Oliver: Savannah Syncopators: African Retentions in the Blues (New York, 1970)

J.T. Titon: Early Downhome Blues: a Musical and Cultural Analysis (Urbana, IL, 1977, 2/1994 with new foreword by A. Trachtenberg)

D. Evans: Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues (Berkeley, 1982)

B.V. Boone: ‘A New Perspective on the Origin of the Blues and Blue Notes: a Documentation of Blues-Like Speech’, paper presented at the conference on America's Blues Culture and Heritage, U. of North Florida, Jacksonville, April 1994, unpubd ms

T. Brothers: ‘Solo and Cycle in African-American Jazz’, MQ, lxxviii (1994), 479–509

D. Evans and V. Abold: The Spirit Lives On: Deep South Country Blues and Spirituals in the 1990s, Hot Fox Records HF-CD-005, LC 5740 (1994) [incl. disc notes]

G. Kubik: ‘Multipart Singing in sub-Sahran Africa: Remote and Recent Histories Unravelled’, Symposium on Ethnomusicology XIV: Grahamstown 1996, 85–97

G. Kubik: Africa and the Blues: Connections and Reconnections (Jackson, MI, 1999)

See also bibliographies to Blues and Jazz.

GERHARD KUBIK