IEB Matric Music

Among the most important foundations of jazz is a type of music known as blues. The term refers both to a form of vocal and instrumental music and to a style of performance. Blues grew out of African American folk music such as work songs, spirituals and the field hollers of slaves.

Vocal blues is intensely personal, often containing sexual references and dealing with the pain of betrayal, desertion and unrequited love. The lyrics consist of several 3-line stanzas. The first line is sung, then repeated to roughly the same melodic phrase. The third line has a different melodic phrase and lyrics. This gives each stanza the form: A A’ B.

The blues stanza is set to a harmonic framework that is usually 12 bars in length. This harmonic pattern, known as the 12 bar blues, involves only three primary chords: Tonic (I), Subdominant (IV) and Dominant (V). The music is almost always in quadruple meter (44), so each bar contains 4 beats. Twelve bar blues is divided into three phrases, each of which is 4 bars long. Here is how the three line stanza is set to the chord progression:

The soloist typically takes only about 2 bars to sing a line. This leaves the reminder of the four bar phrase to be filled by a supporting instrument in a ‘call and response’ type manner.

Blues singers have a special style of performance involving “bent” notes, vocal scoops and slides. Their melodies – both composed and improvised – contain many “blue notes”, which are produced by slightly flattening the third, fifth and seventh tones of a major scale. Blues rhythm is also very flexible. Performers often sing or play “around” the beat, accenting notes either just before or after it.

Jazz instrumentalists imitate the performing style of blues vocalists and use the harmonic pattern of the twelve bar blues as a basis for improvisation.

Bessie Smith (1894 – 1937), known as the “empress of the blues”, was the most famous blues singer of the 1920s.

Lost Your Head Blues is a well-known example of blues form and performance style. The lyrics express the feeling of a woman who plans to leave her man because she’s “been treated wrong”. Each of the poem’s five stanzas is set to the twelve bar blues pattern. Typically, a cornet response follows each line that is sung.