HUM223: 'It's all music' -- blues and jazz

"It's all music." -- Duke Ellington

Duke Ellington, the jazz band leader, used to get impatient with critics who tried too hard to define things like jazz, or blues, or the difference between the two. He had a point there! But we're going to try anyway.

On the Humanities 223 blog, I'm starting to collect links to material that briefly explains blues and jazz ... and how the two types of music are related. A good place to start, as long as you go on and don't finish there(!), is the online, user-generated encyclopedia Wikipedia.

According to Wikipedia, blues is

... a vocal and instrumental form of music based on the use of the blue notes and a repetitive pattern that most often follows a twelve-bar structure. It emerged in African-American communities of the United States from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed English and Scots-Irish narrative ballads. The use of blue notes and the prominence of call-and-response patterns in the music and lyrics are indicative of African influence.

There's more, a lot more, on the page. Wikipedia defines jazz like this:

... an original American musical art form which originated around the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States out of a confluence of African and European music traditions. The use of blue notes, call-and-response, improvisation, polyrhythms, syncopation and the swung note of ragtime are characteristics traceable back to jazz's West African pedigree.

There's a lot in both articles worth studying, and we'll keep coming back to them.