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Session 4 - Area of Study 3 -Popular Music in Context

Overview of the set works and analysis


Set works

Miles Davis: All Blues from Kind of Blue Only available as a whole album from iTunes 7.99 or CD from Amazon.co.uk
for 4.98. Also available is a 5.1 Dual Disk version that contains DVD footage and a documentary of the album. This costs 9.98

Moby: Why does my heart feel so bad from the album Play on Mute Records (CDStumm172) also available as a single
track on iTunes for 79p

Jeff Buckley: Grace from the album of the same name on Columbia Records also available as a single song download
from iTunes for 79p
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Miles Davis All Blues


The legacy of Miles Davis is an unprecedented journey of music, creativity, innovation and personal charisma. His
career spanned nearly five decades and he left an indelible impression on how we think about jazz and the jazz trumpet. Miles
was responsible for or contributed heavily to five major movements in jazz from the 1940s to the 1970s: bebop, cool jazz, hard
bop, hot jazz and fusion.
In 1944 the eighteen year old Davis moved to New York to pursue a career in music. He enrolled at Julliard, but his real
incentive was to be part of the new jazz being played: bebop. Bebop was music for listening rather than dancing and featured
extended improvisation, frenetic tempos, complex and often dissonant harmonies and intricate rhythms. Davis formed
friendships with two of the greatest exponents of bebop, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, who had been foremost in reshaping
the style of jazz being played. Small groups (trios, quartets and quintets) would replace the popular big band format. The bebop
music used fast tempos, favoured swing quavers and triplets and added several new elements to the jazz solo. Their use of
alterations1 and chromaticism would become a trademark for the style.

Bill Evans

John Coltrane

Cannonball Adderley

Miles Davis

By and large, bebop songs were either a blues, an altered show tune or a composition based on the chord structure of a
show tune. For example, How High the Moon formed the chord structure of Ornithology and slightly more loosely Four,
Honeysuckle Rose became Scrapple from the Apple and I Got Rhythm became the basis of Anthropology. Bebop
melodies usually had complicated themes, more or less like a solo, or sometimes, like Four used simple repetitive phrases or
riffs in the melody.
The rise of bebop coincided with the invention of the LP (long playing) vinyl record in 1948. Prior to 1948, records were
1

Alteration is the technique of sharpening or flattening one of the tones or upper partials of a chord, e.g. b5, #5, b9, #9, #11 or b13.

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made of a resin called shellac, which was made from the ground up shells of the shellac beetle. According to Howard Goodall in
his book Big Bangs

The Second World War moved recording technology on with renewed vigour. The Japanese blockade of Malaysia
had led to such an acute shortage of shellac (derived from those Malaysian beetles) that people in America could only
be issued with new records if they brought the old ones back. The American military were also using shellac to coat
the instrument panels of their bombers (it wasnt prone to condensation, apparently), putting further strain on the
already short supply. Eager to find a replacement, the American record company Columbia developed a new plastic
material vinyl no doubt to the huge relief of the beetles. Vinyl records were first issued commercially in 1948.
These long playing (LP) records gave a much better frequency response (high-fidelity). They rotated at 33.3 times a
minute allowing more than 20 minutes of playing time per side (rather than the 3 minutes of the old 78rpm shellac discs). This
was enough to allow a complete substantial work such as a symphony or a selection of bebop tunes, with extended solos, to be
released on a single 12-inch disc for the first time.

Kind of Blue
In early 1959, jazz trumpeter Miles Davis laid down the foundation for a whole new style of jazz music. Through his
"Kind of Blue" modal jazz was born. This record became a classic, at times showing its complexity through the soloing, but also
allowing the educated listener to revel in the simplicity of the modes. Davis planted the seeds for this new style in his album
"Milestones" but "Kind of Blue" showed that the style had matured and was more developed. From the introductory piano/bass
duet to the final notes, it is clear that Davis captured something original.
The album was recorded in only two sessions and went on without any prior rehearsal or music written out. Davis only
provided general "sketches" of each song for the musicians, which they read and improvised over. For the task of recording,
Davis put together an all-star lineup with some of the greatest jazz musicians in music history. The rhythm section was
composed of Paul Chambers on bass, Jimmy Cobb on drums, and Bill Evans on piano, except for "Freddie Freeloader", which
featured Wynton Kelly on piano. To round out the band was the horn section, led by Davis himself, and completed by alto
saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, and tenor John Coltrane. The individual band members were great musicians in their own
respect, but when shepherded by Davis for the "Kind of Blue" sessions, the music they produced was incredible.
If "Kind of Blue" is a musical journey, then surely the rhythm section is the flight crew, insuring that the passengers
have a smooth ride. Throughout the entire album, the beat is kept steady, the comping never clutters or inhibits the soloist,
and the chord changes are right on the money. With a tight rhythm section laying a solid foundation, Davis, Adderley, and
Coltrane are free to take their solos in any direction they choose.
The third song on the album is "All Blues", which is a 12-bar blues, but unusually has a 6/8 time signature and has an
overcast mood assisted by Davis' use of a Harmon mute and the piece's minor modal tonality even though the underlying chords
are based around G major.

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Students should realise that the 6/8 time signature is unusual as is the use of entirely 7th chords. The structure of All
Blues is simple in that the piano/ bass vamp repeats throughout, providing a 4 bar introduction into each solo and/or chorus
segment. This creates the hypnotic, floating quality of the piece where the listener is almost unaware of the robust 12-bar chord
structure over which the brass explores modal based improvisation. The vamp is echoed by the 2 saxes at the start of the piece.
Students should understand the rhythm section consisting drums, piano & bass and its work as a unit.
st

It would be beneficial for students to have 1 hand experience of improvisation through activities in the classroom and they
should be encouraged to compose in the jazz idiom showing awareness of swung quavers, repeated chord sequences, solo-ing,
blue notes and modal harmony.

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Where does Jazz & Blues Come from?


The journey started in 1619 when the first slaves arrived in the colonies from places we now know as Sierra Leone, the
Ivory Coast, the Gambia and Cameroon. The first shipment docked on the East coast of colonial America that same year. On
board were twenty African slaves. A Dutch trader sold them to the governor of the English colony of Jamestown, Virginia, in
exchange for food.
Jamestown soon became a boomtown, as the successful planting and growing of tobacco brought riches. This boom
created an urgent need for labour and that need led to the legalisation of slavery in Virginia and Maryland. By the 1680s, African
slaves were mass imported to all the English colonies lining the East coast. By the time Britain forbade the trading of slaves, an
estimated 600,000 Africans had been sent to North America.
Unlike the Spanish and Portuguese, the English colonies forbade slaves to bring any of their heritage with them. It was
demanded that they abandon their native language, faiths, customs, in short; let go of all culture. Any musical instruments,
primarily drums, were confiscated by the ships captain before arrival in North America.

On arrival, slaves were forced to attend the Christian services and ceremonies of their slave owners and masters. Aside
from prayer and instruction, the slaves also had to learn and sing European psalms and hymns, whilst in their minds the music
and traditions of their homeland sang on defiantly.
The psalms and hymns started to move to the format and structure of the music the slaves had left behind. The slave
owners, hearing only successful conversion, were oblivious to the cultural traditions operating beneath the surface and more
and more ways were subtly found to Africanize the Christian music, particularly when slaves stayed in the chapel after the slave
masters had left and covertly adapt the music . Rhythm in particular became synonymous with rebellion and change.
The slaves also crafted approximations of the instruments they had left behind. By nailing a wire to the side of a
building they created an instrument called the diddley-bow (a name later used by the American blues guitarist Bo Diddley),
which some consider to be an early form of guitar. Also created were primitive forms of the banjo, which started off as an
approximation of the West African gonje instrument. The most common however was the use of their bodies as percussion
instruments.
At these after service meetings and at secret camps or bush meetings, where they also discussed their suffering and the
cruelty of their masters, they fell into the habit of grafting these feelings to the European tunes and the African rhythm and
delivery. And so a new form of ecstatic, religious music was formed. Without hymn books to refer to, a new tradition of
spontaneously composing, many as call and response chants, first surfaced in the late 1700s and developed into the negro
spiritual by the late 1800s.
Ever since the slaves arrived in the English colonies, song and labour had been intertwined. The music was a distraction
from the boredom and the suffering of hard labour, and different chants developed for different chores. The lyrical content was
mostly to do with suffering, hope and protest and the texture was grinding and repetitive. A worker would sing out a solo line
and then the rest of the labour team would repeat it back, all in time with the rhythm of the work they were doing. The slave
owners permitted these work songs as they led to increased productivity.

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A diddley-bow

Gonje

Slaves in transit

The Blues
The Blues came from this music. It journeyed through spirituals, field hollers, work songs and boat songs and
with emancipation in 1865 it became the music of the free African-American. Free to move as they pleased, travelling musicians
called songsters began hopping from plantation to plantation, performing hollers, moans, shouts and songs which were now
considered traditional African-American music. Other singers joined minstrel shows also travelling the country. Through both
pathways, the music of the slavery era quickly became a new music in which songs were sung about the hardships of life after
emancipation.
With access to instruments such as the banjo, harmonica and guitar, the same blue notes that slaves had sung were
now used on the instruments to form a backing for the songs in a 12 bar structure, which along with bent, blue notes became
the basis for blues. The blues spread across North America in the late 19th century and the first blues recording was taken by
Thomas Edison in 1895. The man who played the biggest part in popularising the blues was cornet player and band leader WC
Handy, with his song Memphis Blues, that was the first blues song to be published by a white publisher in 1912, that brought
blues to the attention of both black and white Americans.
A black American singer called Mamie Smith recorded the first blues hit Crazy Blues in 1920. It sold 100,000 copies in
the first month and by the end of the year had sold a staggering million copies, mostly to African-Americans. When the record
eventually peaked at sales of around the two million mark, the white recording industry sat up and took note of the new trend.
Commerce spoke louder than the racial codes of the day and white labels began hunting for other Mamie Smiths.
White record labels rushed to record popular club singers like Alberta Smith, Ma Rainey and most notably Bessie Smith.
Bessie Smith was signed to Columbia Records in 1923. Her first recording, Down Hearted Blues, sold 780,000 copies in six
months. For a time she was the highest paid African-American performer with a string of hits like Backwater Blues, St. Louis
Blues, Taint Nobodys Bizness If I Do and Aggravatin Papa.
However, the impact of the Great Depression and the decline in the fad for female blues singers led Bessie Smiths heyday to
crash. By 1931 the Depression had crushed record sales from just over $120 million to just $6 million. Bessie Smith was dropped
by Columbia and for the rest of her life she struggled to make ends meet. In 1937 Smith was involved in a fatal car crash and
died from her injuries. Rumour has it that she was turned away from a whites only hospital and bled to death from her injuries.

Bessie Smith

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Ma Rainey

WC Handy and his band

Robert Johnson

As the female African-American blues singers peaked, deep in the south, Robert Johnson was recording some of the
most influential blues songs in the history of the genre. There are six things that everyone should know about Robert Johnson:
1.

Many call him the Grandfather of Rock n Roll.

2.

He was dead at the age of 27, poisoned in mysterious circumstances.

3.

The Rolling Stones covered his song Love In Vain on their album Let It Bleed.

4.

Johnson is reputed to have sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads of highways 61 & 49 in Mississippi, in exchange
for his remarkable musical talent!

5.

He only wrote 27 songs in his lifetime and made 42 recordings before his premature death.

6.

When introduced to Johnsons music, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones asked who the second guitarist was. When
told that it was Johnson on his own, Johnson became a major influence in Richards playing and therefore a major
influence on the future of rock music.

Ragtime and Swing Jazz As Bessie Smith and WC Handy fell from popularity and Johnson went to his grave murdered by
poisoning, swing jazz started to emerge. It was the latest fad in jazz, which entered the American vocabulary in 1915. Like Rock
n Roll, jazz was believed to have started life as a slang term for sex (at first spelt jas), it emerged out of the ragtime era.
th
Ragtime was a style of piano playing which had in turn emerged in the late 19 century, when march tunes were all the rage.
Ragtime is a style of music with a 2/4 time and a syncopated melody popularised by Scott Joplin. During ragtimes
popularity, pianist, composer and bandleader Jelly Roll Morton later claimed to have invented jazz in the red-light district of
New Orleans in 1902. In 1915 Jelly Roll Blues became what many people believe to be the first piece of jazz sheet music. In the
same way that WC Handy and Bessie Smith introduced blues. And later Elvis Presley introduced Rock n Roll to a mainstream
audience; Jelly Roll Morton performed this function for jazz and the New Orleans and Dixieland style.
The influence of jazz on Rock n Roll is clear to see. They are structurally similar, have cultural similarities, both genders
and races participate as musicians, composers and audience members and both have rebellious attitudes. The AABA form or
rhythm changes is present in both, prominent soloing and the rhythm section are dominant in both and both emerged as a
result of societys problems such as racism and gender oppression.
Jazz came together in New Orleans, on account of it being a busy port that many different cultures travelled through.
The Creole music from the Caribbean, European classical music brought by immigrants from France and Italy, music travelling
with minstrel and vaudeville shows, the ragtime that had been typified by Scott Joplin, African-American parade music, the blues
and their origin in field hollers, work songs, hymns and spirituals all combined to form Jazz.
During the 1920s jazz flourished and spread across the USA (as a result of the migration of African-Americans looking
for work) through the popularity of artists such as Morton, Louis Armstrong and white cornet player Bix Beiderbecke and
became known as Dixieland jazz, after the success of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band from 1917. Danceable, suited to good
times and characterised by scintillating live performances, it introduced the public to the tastes that would also make rock n
roll so popular.

Scott Joplins Music

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Jelly Roll Morton

Bix Beiderbecke

Louis Armstrong

Swing jazz came about after Dixieland jazz gradually morphed in the 1930s into the new trend for bigger bands. The
bands became bigger to deal with larger venues, without amplification and so numbers rose from bands of five and seven, up to
twelve or even sixteen members and to prevent members of these larger bands playing across each other, arrangers and
bandleaders emerged, acting in the same capacity as an orchestral conductor.
By 1935 the USA was coming out of the Great Depression and the new mood of optimism and swing jazz captured the
mood of the nation. The arrival of radio pushed the music hard and gave the record labels an easy way to reach new markets.
Suddenly, arrangers and bandleaders such as Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Chick Webb and Cab Calloway were the new stars.
Just as important were the musicians who became known as great soloists, capable of improvising brilliant solo breaks.
The invention of the jukebox played an important role in the spread of swing jazz as it enabled the public to sample
music without buying. Members of the public found themselves enjoying music, mostly without their knowledge, that crossed
the race divides.
Once the idea of music being good or bad rather than black or white entered the public consciousness, listeners
followed up on music they liked, often in the process finding themselves buying music that crossed the race barrier, something
that would not have been possible in the flesh due to segregation.
The Blues continues, Gospel and Boogie-Woogie
Back in the Mississippi delta blues music continued to develop and by the mid 1930s had taken on a looser and yet
harder and faster style. It was a raw sound but contained the prototype guitar riffs and stomping beat that would underpin Rock
n Roll later on. The style was called rocking and reeling and featured vocals that were reminiscent of the, now elaborate
music of the black churches in the southern states.
The development of the spiritual was also key to events later on. After the American Civil War ended, African-American
colleges, such as Fisk University, began to collect the oral repertoire and handbook of Negro spirituals. They also had choirs that
began to tour the north of the USA and Europe, singing them, and spreading the cultural history and traditions.
From the popularising of the spiritual and the spread of the Pentecostal churches came a new style of black religious
song, gospel, a combination of spirituals, Christian hymns rearranged with blue notes, syncopated rhythms and call and
response vocal technique. Black gospel music helped create the vocal portion of Rock n Roll.
Boogie Woogie was a piano playing style that developed between 1910 and 1930. The style involved a driving
percussive rhythm played using the blues scale in the left hand, leaving the right hand to improvise over a melody.
Boogie-Woogie became a big craze in the 1930s and the biggest stars were Chicagos Jimmy Yancey and Albert
Ammons. Although the style faded from popularity by the outbreak of the Second World War it was later a key ingredient in the
rock n roll style of Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis.
Another key moment in the history of Blues was the first manufacturing of a prototype electric guitar in 1933 by Adolph
Rickenbacker.

Cab Calloway

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Count Basie

The Rickenbacker 1933 frying pan guitar

Jimmy Yancey

Be-Bop and Electric Blues


By the mid 1940s, both Boogie-Woogie and swing were fading out in terms of popularity and in their place was a
hunger for the new jazz sound of Be-Bop, as played by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonius Monk. Be-bop was a new
hard, fast and minimal form of jazz that called for smaller bands and placed an immense importance on virtuosity.
With the introduction of commercially available electric guitars and amplification in the mid to late 1940s, blues
underwent a transformation becoming electric blues. Blues musicians, in northern cities, particularly Chicago, started playing the
blues with an electric guitar, creating a harder, harsher sound. They used rhythm sections, bands consisting of bass, keyboards,
drums and harmonica. Vocals and harmonica were amplified, again creating a more abrasive sound.
This style of blues became synonymous with Chicago as it flourished in the early 1950s, typified by the music of artists
such as John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters.
Rhythm and Blues (R n B)
Rhythm and blues came into being as a popular term for a certain style of music in 1947 when Jerry Wexler, then a
writer for Billboard magazine, used the phrase rhythm and blues instead of the common term for African-American popular
music, race music. A year later the former race music chart was renamed the rhythm and blues chart.
In rhythm and blues, all the elements fused. In its most superficial meaning, rhythm and blues was exactly what it
sounded like: blues played with a lively rhythm speeded-up blues. More simply, it came to denote any music made by AfricanAmericans. Although segregation was still in force, within the musical community the race barriers were disintegrating.
Jazz in the 1950s
With the birth of Rock n Roll in the 1950s, jazz ceased to be the popular music of the day. Jazz musicians either
became Rock n Roll players or they stayed with jazz and started to experiment with more extreme forms of the genre. The
modal cool jazz of Miles Davis, John Coltrane and friends is an example of this experimentation.

Charlie Parker & Miles Davis

Eddie Cleanhead Vinson

Thelonius Monk

Dizzy Gillespie

Resources
The Music of Miles Davis by Lex Giel (Hal Leonard). An American import but fantastically detailed analysis of Davis music.
Video performances of All Blues on You Tube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJSemoMujQY and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEvqGVV3qsA
A MIDI file of All Blues is on your course CD-ROM
There are many valuable resources on the internet, including Wikipedia amongst others.

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