Language of the Blues - Edmonton Blues Society

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drew together the descendants of once-disparate tribal people who had suffered sickening
humiliations in a foreign land.
This new African-American community invigorated American music with not only
its unique aesthetics for musical
improvisation. While describing Ewe master drumming in Studies in African Music,
repeated several times is simply not African music. The full flower of the music is in the
variations, of which the standard pattern is the nucleus. The musical technique is this: the
master announces a standard pattern and repeats it several times to establish it. Now each
standard pattern consists of several phrases or sentences. Any of these can serve as a
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Jones might as well be giving the aesthetic code for a blues jam
or American jazz.
Another African aesthetic that survived slavery and became fundamental to blues
improvisation is the definition of mastery of an instrument as the ability to choose the
perfect note to evoke an emotion, as opposed to dazzling technical displays. As Chernoff
prove the strength of the drummer more than the execution of a technically difficult
68 This is a guiding principle for blues musicians and is what distinguishes
mature masters from showoff-y youngsters.
eed directly through
many styles in order to display his skill and make the music interesting with accentuation.
Instead, those drummers considered to be the best do just the opposite. They take their
nce will be the timing of the
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choose the right note.
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listener to feel what
Somehow, as Africans became African Americans, they maintained their aesthetic codes
-- even as their languages and songs were stomped out. Their great achievement was that
they transferred these values to a new world and created a new music that today
transcends racial and cultural boundaries, such that American blues artists can fly to
Japan or Poland and be met by hordes of screaming fans who may not speak their
language, but understand their music.
As guitarist Robben Ford likes to
71 An astonishing
amount of music has been birthed under its roof, all of it based on what is proving to be
one of the strongest, most flexible, and inspiring musical frameworks ever created.
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