This is not my writing. Cathy saw a book at a bookshop out in McGregor, Iowa, and bought it for me just because it looked cool, and it is. It's called Sitting In by Hayden Carruth, my new favorite guy who I had never heard of. He was a poet and had a great command of the language, plus Tao and subjectivity and music. I couldn't find this chapter online anywhere so I took pictures of each page and asked Google Gemini to convert the images to text. Then I stuck some HTML into it for this presentation, by hand as usual. If you see any errors in the text, let me know — I think Gemini did a good job. Carruth is saying something important here about the blues scale, and about musical traditions in general. C'mon man, it's blues, it comes from the people, from the ground up. Like, it's hilarious to think of reading blues sheet music.
A friend of mine in Vermont is teaching himself to play the tenor. He is by no means new to music; he played trumpet for years, until an accident with a chainsaw—too common in the woods over there—notched his upper lip in such a way that when it healed the scar tissue could not make an embouchure for brass. Seems to work ok for reeds, though. Recently he went down to Boston and shelled out upwards of $1,600 for a Paris Selmer Mk VI, so you can see he is serious. And like a lot of us he has been meditating more about jazz than we did in the days when we played any old way, mean, dirty, righteous, hard, cool, it made no difference, as long as it sounded good to us.
My friend sometimes plays with a musician trained in the conservatory, a pianist. A month ago my friend wrote, saying that the pianist believes the blues scale goes like this:
He asked what I thought. Well, I've been brooding about this since childhood, though for years merely in the manner of brooding about a mystery. Then at a later time I'd have said that the pianist's scheme is the product of an academic mind and a fixed-tone instrument, and that the blues scale is more like this:
In other words I'd have said that the blues third, seventh, and sometimes fifth, played in the diatonic or modern European scale, are remnants of a quite dissimilar African mode. They must be slurred; on the piano they must be played flat and natural at the same time, or in quick succession. Some say the blues cannot be played on the piano, or the vibes, or any other fixed-tone instrument. But only in this way, by bending them, can we make these notes "fit" in the diatonic scale, whether major or minor.
But if the third, fifth, and seventh, why not the second, fourth, and sixth? And what, in that case, is the root? What is the scale?
These thoughts have led me now to believe that the whole apparatus of European musical conceptualization is inadequate to the blues, radically so. The idea of the scale does not apply. The ideas of note, tone, intonation, playing in tune, and so on, all are antithetical to the African element in Afroamerican music, to such an extent that they must be abandoned, done away with, repudiated. Which, granted, is a very difficult thing to do for most people, including black American musicians, whose musical sensibilities have been trained from childhood in the modes of European hearing from the fifteenth century to the present. Even that favorite term of the musicologists, microtonality, does not work, because the slurring or bending of jazz is never an arrested sound for more than an infinitesimal instant, like the last moment of the flight of Zeno's arrow before it plunges into absurdity: you can't hear the one any more than you can see the other.
Once when I was living in a confined situation for a long time I listened to Chinese opera broadcast on station WEVD from New York. At first I could make no sense of it. The operas went on for hours, days, in a way that seemed to my Euroamerican ear totally random. Yet I found myself more and more responsive. That music was expressing a purely musical substance—for I had no idea what the operas were about—in which my sensual apprehension could function. And did, at least tolerably. Perhaps this has helped me now to overturn my thoughts about jazz and the blues.
Every musical person should be required to listen to Chinese opera for a week each year.
A story is told about Eddie Condon that when someone pointed out to him how musicians of the younger generation, meaning the generation of Parker, Gillespie, Powell, etc., played flatted fifths, Condon retorted: "We don't flat our fifths, we drink them." I suspect the story is untrue; but if it is true, then Condon's witicism is simply the kind of nonsense any of us might utter in a foolish moment. One need only listen to the recorded performances organized by Condon himself to hear plenty of flatted fifths and flatted everything else. On some of the records made by young Chicagoans in the late 1920s and early 1930s, featuring such musicians as Teschemacher, McPartland, Freeman, etc., one can find passages in which practically everyone is playing "out of tune." This is what those musicians were famous for, their avid, rugged, headstrong disregard of musical convention in general.
What we are left with then is pitch, pitch alone, vibrations per second—the primordial root of all and any musics. And in many of them this means, practically speaking, variable pitch. (The analogy with W. C. Williams' variable foot is useful if not pressed too far.) The European idea that fixed tones are an advance, a rationalized refinement, a sophisticated methodization, as compared to the "primitive" musics of Asia, Africa, and so on, is cultural chauvinism at its worst (akin to Margaret Mead commanding the "natives" to build her a house), though precisely because we are so "attuned" to it we have difficulty perceiving the unreason of it, the outrageousness. Yet as so often in other sectors, the only view of human mentalism which will serve us here is the one we take sub specie aeternitatis.
The "blues scale" therefore cannot be talked about in what are for us conventional terms. It cannot be objectively "notated"—see how I must keep using quotation marks to signify the words no longer meaningful?—except perhaps by some impossibly complicated, computerized oscillograph. It is subjective. It is an understanding that is felt. Is this a monstrous obstacle? Not at all. The understanding can be transmitted by the simplest means, i.e., from ear to ear. Our "notation" is the phonograph record or the electronic tape, the performance. How wonderful! From subjectivity to subjectivity the music of the blues flows unimpeded and, what's more, even assisted by the versatility of mere engineering. If you need a visual equivalent, picture the "blues scale" to yourself as a glissando, a slide, beginning anywhere, ending anywhere, and attached to duration, the rhythmic component, by the subtlest imaginable architectonic diversities.
What does this mean for jazz today? I broach my feeling tentatively, because I know my lack of training. But I do think that jazz musicians who have strayed from the blues root, who have been impressed unduly by European conventions in the conservatory, so that they cannot see around them or behind them—which may mean simply those who have been too much influenced by the piano, the instrument of teaching—are on the wrong track. I can hear a music both expressive and progressive in which the idea of playing in tune is irrelevant. Examples are usually dangerous, but I will risk saying that I prefer the line of development I hear in Ornette Coleman, Roland Kirk, Arthur Blythe, and Archie Shepp, as extended by such younger musicians as, say, Dave Holland, to the line I hear in much of Miles Davis and the later John Coltrane. In this respect it is worth repeating the observation made already by Gerald Early, that in retrospect Thelonious Monk seems less a performing musician than a composer, a songwriter. I do not mean to be cryptic. Monk was a genius. Perhaps he is the best example we have in jazz of a piano player trying to escape the confines of his instrument, although that has been the attempt of nearly all jazz pianists since Ferdinand (Jelly Roll) Morton—the piano is the instrument par excellence for ragtime, as it is for the compositions of Mozart and Chopin, but it is inimical to the blues. One might argue that the best blues pianist was Basie, who reduced his style to a minimalist melodic phrasing with the primary emphasis on rhythm; yet even Basie (together with some of the musicians associated with him) was more at home in the four-stanza, 32-bar, essentially sonata form of the Tin Pan Alley tune than in the blues. Again and again, at any rate, Monk was driven away from improvisation and toward composition, granting that the two overlap considerably; he made songs that other musicians could perform better with other instruments than he could with the piano. The contrast to Duke Ellington, who had a whole band at his fingertips, so to speak, and a remarkably many-voiced band at that, is illuminating. Ellington's influence is still pervasive, while that of Basie has died away, and Monk's appears to be diminishing.
All this about the piano is intentionally argumentative, that is, exaggerated. But what I have said about the blues is not; I have said it—and before that thought it—in the spirit of our super-rebel, Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote: "Without music life would be a mistake."