Web 2.0 is probably a Good Thing, generally speaking - but I don't buy the whole packaged philosophy
 

Today I made some time to share a personal problem - the blues scale and I haven't been getting along too well...

when I get the time

Subject: Why not MySpace?

Dateline: 30/05/07

Using MySpace would be much easier than building and maintaining my own music site (like this).  So why not?

A few reasons.  First, I have nothing against Mr Murdoch making as much money as he likes (well, actually, that’s not true – I have deep objections, but this isn't the place to air them).  But I’m not prepared to help him make even more through my own unpaid efforts.  I can’t help thinking that future generations will look back on this age with disbelief as the time when the human race went collectively soft in the head and handed over the fruits of its creativity gratis to rich people and corporations in the name of “user-generated content”.

Second, looking at MySpace (and often listening to what’s on it) gives me a headache.  My own attitude to acceptable web design is about as primitive as it gets, but I think my site is at least legible, fairly literate and logically organised.  The frantic busy-ness and hucksterism of MySpace makes me feel like I’m trapped in some kind of freakish hybrid between a gigantic four-year-old’s birthday party, a teen girl sleepover and a souk.

Third, who are these people who hang around MySpace?  They seem to be a mixture of shrieking pre-pubescents, middle-aged losers and pederasts.

Finally, “friends” – what’s all that about?  Who are these idiots who post illiterate nonsense on each other’s pages?  Who needs it?  If anybody likes my stuff, they can email me and say so.  Ditto if someone wants me to listen to and comment on his or her stuff.  But don’t come over to my place and yell – it’s just not cool.

So that’s why not MySpace, and why I’ll never be rich and famous – but *meh*, I don't care.

Subject: Blues scale blues

Dateline: 03/02/07

Confession of a jazz musician: I have relationship problems with the blues scale. 

Why is this?  Two reasons.  One comes from experiences trying to teach people about jazz in workshops and one-to-one.  I'm too polite to say it out loud but it's a sorry fact that anyone coming to jazz from blues/rock too often arrives with a blues scale addiction.  If you can't break the blues scale habit, it's almost impossible to become a real jazz musician. 

The other reason is that I don't understand the blues scale, though I use it without too much trouble.  But I'm the kind of musician who can't feel comfortable with a concept or a tool unless I can fit it into some kind of rational framework or musical world view.  Intuition is nice, but mostly I have to manage without it. 

So I brood on the blues and here are some conclusions. 

First, there's this thing with blue notes.  Where do blue notes come from?  One answer was suggested by André Hodeir, who proposed that the African experience of scales is, like that of many non-European cultures, strongly rooted in the pentatonic. 

C D F G A C is the pentatonic related to the major scale C D E F G A B C.  Hodeir imagined that, to African slaves arriving in America, the major scale would have been an alien cultural experience.  To make sense of the major scale they filled in the gaps in the familiar pentatonic scale with notes they got by fishing around between D and F and between A and C.  The results of microtonal fuzziness in these regions of the scale are the blue notes - somewhere around, but not exactly, Eb and Bb.  Not everyone accepts this ingenious idea, but it sounds plausible to me. 

I also wonder if there might be an influence from the differences in intonation - the commas - between rational and tempered scales.  For example the syntonic comma, the difference between four justly tuned perfect fifths and the nominally enharmonic two octaves plus a third, is around a fifth of a semitone.  I can imagine that this is the kind of microtonal environment in which Hodeir's Afro-Americans went fishing. 

Which takes us to the blues scale.  To a classical musician like Leonard Bernstein (albeit a pretty funky one), the blues scale is simply the major scale with the 3rd, 5th and 7th flattened.  As often as not the 2nd and the 6th seem to go missing for some reason and C blues ends up as something like C Eb F Gb G Bb. 

(I've seen this referred to as the C minor blues scale, while C D D# E G A C is the C major blues scale.  You're confused?  I'm confused). 

Thinking about all this led me to wonder whether there might be some kind of relationship between the blues scale and the bebop scale. 

Bebop scales are like regular scales but an extra chromatic note is slipped in.  This has an important rhythmic effect, since the resulting 8-note scale fits better with the accents in standard 4/4 time.  Bebop scales (sometimes called diminished 6 scales) are the basis of a whole system of harmony and improvisation, developed by people like Barry Harris and Dave Baker. 

Bb major bebop is Bb C D Eb F Gb G A Bb.  Surprisingly (well, it surprised me when I first realised it), C blues turns out to be a "mode" of Bb major bebop, starting on the 2nd. 

But we're still missing the major 3rd.  This has to be in there somewhere, if only to validate perhaps the iconic blues chord, that of the 7 10b.  Going back to the microtonal origin of blue notes, I suspect the blues scale (and associated chords) include both the major and minor 3rd because they are groping for a note somewhere in between. 

Thus we arrive at the kitchen sink blues scale: C D Eb E F Gb G A Bb C.  And now the source of its horrible hypnotic power becomes clear.  From the 2nd to the 5th (D to G in the example of the C blues scale) is conventionally notated as a chromatic sequence.  But in reality this region is actually more or less a continuum, a slide, a smear, a portamento, a swoop on a Swanee whistle.  It includes all the intermediate microtones so that sonically it resembles one of those quantum models of the atom in which the positions of the electrons can only be represented by fuzzy probability fields. 

No wonder noodling around with the blues scale makes an improvised line that seems to fit any and every chord progression.  It ought to be renamed the Swiss Army Scale. 

The positive side is that it is a marvellously expressive and rather exotic ingredient in the general jazz mix, and it opens up interesting and unusual possibilities for chord voicings and playing outside. 

But it should be just that - an ingredient.  I mean, garlic's an essential constituent of many dishes, but you wouldn't want to make a meal of garlic and nothing else - and neither would anyone nearby. 

And that's the negative side: for anyone wanting to progress to real jazz, the blues scale is (to move on to a new metaphor) a prison and if you can't break out, or earn parole, you'll never be a real jazz musician.