On Jun 20, 10:43 pm, "BestStudentViolins.com"
<SunMusicStri...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> I have an online friend, a working jazz pianist, who wrote me the
> following:
>
> This blues scale is entirely inaccurate because there's really no such
> thing as a blues scale. At best, certain cheap book authors have
> touted the minor pentatonic as a blues scale, possibly adding the
> diminished fifth or augmented fourth. But, actual blues music rarely
> uses this combination of notes in a recognizably scalar fa****on.
To keep your friends opinion in a good light, I have to assume that he
is referring to more modern Jazz tunes that use the variations of the
Blues Scale that he says doesn't exist. He is right in that most of
the Jazz blues tunes don't follow this pure form. Like Bach, Mozart,
Beethoven et al, the Jazz composers elaborate on this.
You will hear it more authentically used in early Jazz recordings
starting around the early part of the 20th century and you will still
hear it on ****ches in Mississippi and I believe that B B King uses it
in a pretty original form in many of his recordings. If he is indeed
talking about blues proper, I don't know what he has been listening
to, but he should get out more. You can even hear a lot of original
blues scales as you listen to many of the melodic lines in the Rock
and Roll and Blues tunes in the 50s and 60s. Many authors have "touted
the minor pentatonic" because they listened to recordings and
transcribed them and that is what they came up with. Then the
variations came as people wanted to do something 'bluesy', but
slightly different.
>
> I really don't understand what he's talking about. But when I played
> through Mark Levine's book, I didn't understand all the chord
> analysis, either...
lol,
I don't like the way he presents things either, but it is all pretty
much straight theory. I like to focus more on the 1% that can help us
to use what ever we already know to create music and once we learn how
to do that, then we can learn the techniques to create our own 99%
rather than to spend time studying his 99%. It is, however, a good
book that will help a lot of people do certain things.
LJS
|
