thomasquinn 32989
I always found that song very intriguing - Queen often tried something new, but this is the only time they ever came close to playing actual jazz.
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cmsdrums
[QUOTE] [b]thomasquinn 32989 wrote:[/b]
I always found that song very intriguing - Queen often tried something new, but this is the only time they ever came close to playing actual jazz.[/QUOTE]
I've always referred to as more blues-based rather than jazz, but those two genres are often intertwined, and have so many variations, that either helps to describe it.
I always found that song very intriguing - Queen often tried something new, but this is the only time they ever came close to playing actual jazz.[/QUOTE]
I've always referred to as more blues-based rather than jazz, but those two genres are often intertwined, and have so many variations, that either helps to describe it.
Sebastian
I personally think the bluesiest aspect of it is the title.
The Real Wizard
[QUOTE] [b]Sebastian wrote:[/b]
I personally think the bluesiest aspect of it is the title.[/QUOTE]
I'd say "blues" refers more to the idea of "having the blues", as opposed to the genre of music.
I personally think the bluesiest aspect of it is the title.[/QUOTE]
I'd say "blues" refers more to the idea of "having the blues", as opposed to the genre of music.
Sebastian
Exactly.
tomchristie22
Anecdote in the comments from a man named Anthony:
"I caught [Queen] at Stafford Bingley Hall in May ’78. Freddie introduced it thus: ‘This is a song I wrote for Ella Fitzgerald when she popped ’round for tea the other day’."
"I caught [Queen] at Stafford Bingley Hall in May ’78. Freddie introduced it thus: ‘This is a song I wrote for Ella Fitzgerald when she popped ’round for tea the other day’."
The Real Wizard
^ love that.
thomasquinn 32989
Re: jazz/blues and My Melancholy Blues.
Warning: this is going to get technical!
My Melancholy Blues is, from a formal standpoint, a so-called "minor blues". Which is also called a "melancholy blues" - hey, what a coincidence! But - minor blueses are almost exclusively used in jazz music.
Yes, jazz has a lot of blues-influences, but there are clear differences. In western music (since the 17th century), clasical, folk, popular and the likes, accompaniment is based on functional harmony, i.e. every note in the scale has a function (tonic, dominant, subdominant, mediant, etc.) and the leading tone (the half-note between the 7th and the 1st note of the scale) takes a starring part in the dominant-tonic resolution. To put that into something that doesn't look like musician's techno-babble: if it sounds like a satisfying end to a song, it's a dominant-tonic resolution.
The blues tends to mask the use of a leading tone. How? By making every primary chord (I, IV and V) into a dominant, thus subverting the "functional" part in "functional harmony". That makes improvisation dramatically easier AND more diverse. Blues is necessarily harmonically simple (i.e. doesn't use too many different / too complicated chords), because more complex chord changes make improvisation more difficult, and use of the blues scale without alterations for improvisation practically impossible.
Jazz is different. Ever since the '20s, jazz employed AND subverted functional harmony. Approaches differ, but the key is that the full scale is used for soloing, including the notes that blues-players would regard as avoid-notes (like the fourth). But, if they left it at that, improvisation would be as difficult as it is in classical music. So, they needed to break free from the constraints of functional harmony. Blues did that by turning every primary chord into a dominant, which means adding a minor 7th to a major chord. As a first step, jazz goes a step further and employs chord extensions beyond the 7th, uses the major 7th where the minor 7th is expected and other alterations to chords: adding notes that would not usually occur in the scale (much like blue notes, but in irregular places). This is exactly what classical music at the end of the 19th century did to break free from the constraints of functional harmony. But, that music didn't feature improvisation as a major aspect. The second part was to abandon the idea of a chord as a function of a scale and to turn it around: every chord gets one or more associated scales. That sounds a little abstract and weird, but what it means in practice is that you can move from a chord to another chord that isn't in the same scale without modulating.
If we look at the harmonies of My Melancholy Blues, we see a number of things that point clearly towards jazz: the use of non-scale chords (like using an Edim7 in a C minor song, moving from Ab major to Ab minor), modest chord-extension/alteration (Fm6 without the 5th, Gbdim7) and tonal ambiguity (Cm to Gm, but then to D major). The melody and style of singing are also very far divorced from blues - emphasizing tension notes, imitating the phrasing of a trumpet or saxophone and the likes. If you're still reading, congratulations on your patience and tolerance. To summarize, the use of rather sophisticated tricks and a very rich set of harmonies makes My Melancholy Blues far removed from the *relative* simplicity of blues and its subtle, smooth melodic movement is far from the direct and jagged sound of blues melody.
Warning: this is going to get technical!
My Melancholy Blues is, from a formal standpoint, a so-called "minor blues". Which is also called a "melancholy blues" - hey, what a coincidence! But - minor blueses are almost exclusively used in jazz music.
Yes, jazz has a lot of blues-influences, but there are clear differences. In western music (since the 17th century), clasical, folk, popular and the likes, accompaniment is based on functional harmony, i.e. every note in the scale has a function (tonic, dominant, subdominant, mediant, etc.) and the leading tone (the half-note between the 7th and the 1st note of the scale) takes a starring part in the dominant-tonic resolution. To put that into something that doesn't look like musician's techno-babble: if it sounds like a satisfying end to a song, it's a dominant-tonic resolution.
The blues tends to mask the use of a leading tone. How? By making every primary chord (I, IV and V) into a dominant, thus subverting the "functional" part in "functional harmony". That makes improvisation dramatically easier AND more diverse. Blues is necessarily harmonically simple (i.e. doesn't use too many different / too complicated chords), because more complex chord changes make improvisation more difficult, and use of the blues scale without alterations for improvisation practically impossible.
Jazz is different. Ever since the '20s, jazz employed AND subverted functional harmony. Approaches differ, but the key is that the full scale is used for soloing, including the notes that blues-players would regard as avoid-notes (like the fourth). But, if they left it at that, improvisation would be as difficult as it is in classical music. So, they needed to break free from the constraints of functional harmony. Blues did that by turning every primary chord into a dominant, which means adding a minor 7th to a major chord. As a first step, jazz goes a step further and employs chord extensions beyond the 7th, uses the major 7th where the minor 7th is expected and other alterations to chords: adding notes that would not usually occur in the scale (much like blue notes, but in irregular places). This is exactly what classical music at the end of the 19th century did to break free from the constraints of functional harmony. But, that music didn't feature improvisation as a major aspect. The second part was to abandon the idea of a chord as a function of a scale and to turn it around: every chord gets one or more associated scales. That sounds a little abstract and weird, but what it means in practice is that you can move from a chord to another chord that isn't in the same scale without modulating.
If we look at the harmonies of My Melancholy Blues, we see a number of things that point clearly towards jazz: the use of non-scale chords (like using an Edim7 in a C minor song, moving from Ab major to Ab minor), modest chord-extension/alteration (Fm6 without the 5th, Gbdim7) and tonal ambiguity (Cm to Gm, but then to D major). The melody and style of singing are also very far divorced from blues - emphasizing tension notes, imitating the phrasing of a trumpet or saxophone and the likes. If you're still reading, congratulations on your patience and tolerance. To summarize, the use of rather sophisticated tricks and a very rich set of harmonies makes My Melancholy Blues far removed from the *relative* simplicity of blues and its subtle, smooth melodic movement is far from the direct and jagged sound of blues melody.
Sebastian
Excellent post. This is the sort of stuff that makes me glad to still visit QZ.
Oscar J
Agree, very insightful post. Why would blues players avoid the fourth though? I'm not sure I understood that one.
Am off to listen to some Debussy.
Am off to listen to some Debussy.
Chopin1995
This is the most interesting post on Queenzone I've seen in last months!
Thank you for that. I've just learnt something new today!
Now I'm gonna try those ideas at my piano.
And I love Debussy and play him a lot :)
Thank you for that. I've just learnt something new today!
Now I'm gonna try those ideas at my piano.
And I love Debussy and play him a lot :)
thomasquinn 32989
First off, glad to hear people are interested in reading this. I love getting deep into more or less abstract music theory, but it's not everyone's cup of tea.
[QUOTE] [b]Oscar J wrote:[/b]
Agree, very insightful post. Why would blues players avoid the fourth though? I'm not sure I understood that one.
Am off to listen to some Debussy.[/QUOTE]
Avoid it melodically, not harmonically. It's the half-tone interval to the third that makes it somewhat troublesome. An 'avoid note' doesn't mean that you don't play that note, but that you don't emphasize it (i.e. don't play it on a strong beat or for a long duration of time and definitely don't resolve to it).
But why, that's a tough question. The perfect fourth is generally considered a consonant, it is the interval between the third and fourth naturally occurring harmonics, it has a neat mathematical ratio of 4:3, it occurs in two of the three voicings for three-voiced chords. And yet, it is a note that gives you trouble when improvising and has historically been considered a dissonant in all two-voiced parts.
Now, I'm going to speculate a bit. The above is probably our main point right there: in two-voiced parts, the perfect fourth, having little affinity with the tonic (it doesn't feature in either of the two chords forming an authentic cadence (V to I)), is perceived as being a suspension of the third, from which it is only a semitone away. It resolves very neatly downwards, but not so upwards.
Double-stops play a large part in solo blues-playing, and single melodic lines over single bass lines are, or at least were originally, the most common in combo-playing. If the perfect fourth occurs there in two-part playing it causes trouble when used on a strong beat (on a weak beat it naturally resolves to the third but would sound a little too 'classical' for most blues).
Another problem is the use of blue notes - b3, b5 and b7 - and the fact that the fourth interferes with the effectiveness of both the b3 and b5. First of all, in both these cases the perfect fourth would create a sequence of more than two consecutive semitones, which is problematic because it creates tonal ambiguity: it is not immediately evident which of the three is/are diatonic and which chromatic. Second of all, blue notes are often not exactly in tune, and the extra semitone interval would emphasize their 'off-note' quality a bit too much.
[QUOTE] [b]Oscar J wrote:[/b]
Agree, very insightful post. Why would blues players avoid the fourth though? I'm not sure I understood that one.
Am off to listen to some Debussy.[/QUOTE]
Avoid it melodically, not harmonically. It's the half-tone interval to the third that makes it somewhat troublesome. An 'avoid note' doesn't mean that you don't play that note, but that you don't emphasize it (i.e. don't play it on a strong beat or for a long duration of time and definitely don't resolve to it).
But why, that's a tough question. The perfect fourth is generally considered a consonant, it is the interval between the third and fourth naturally occurring harmonics, it has a neat mathematical ratio of 4:3, it occurs in two of the three voicings for three-voiced chords. And yet, it is a note that gives you trouble when improvising and has historically been considered a dissonant in all two-voiced parts.
Now, I'm going to speculate a bit. The above is probably our main point right there: in two-voiced parts, the perfect fourth, having little affinity with the tonic (it doesn't feature in either of the two chords forming an authentic cadence (V to I)), is perceived as being a suspension of the third, from which it is only a semitone away. It resolves very neatly downwards, but not so upwards.
Double-stops play a large part in solo blues-playing, and single melodic lines over single bass lines are, or at least were originally, the most common in combo-playing. If the perfect fourth occurs there in two-part playing it causes trouble when used on a strong beat (on a weak beat it naturally resolves to the third but would sound a little too 'classical' for most blues).
Another problem is the use of blue notes - b3, b5 and b7 - and the fact that the fourth interferes with the effectiveness of both the b3 and b5. First of all, in both these cases the perfect fourth would create a sequence of more than two consecutive semitones, which is problematic because it creates tonal ambiguity: it is not immediately evident which of the three is/are diatonic and which chromatic. Second of all, blue notes are often not exactly in tune, and the extra semitone interval would emphasize their 'off-note' quality a bit too much.
Oscar J
Haha, sorry. I did mean for you to clarify what you meant by "avoid note" as I'm not familiar with some of these musical terms in English. Indeed it sounds out of place by itself at strong beats, but sounds fine when bent from the b3 or in a reversed bend from b5. I think it needs to be put in context to fit in - as you rightly point out it's problematic to just place it by itself on top of the tonic.
thomasquinn 32989
Well, it was a really good question in the abstract too. Music theory has struggled with the perfect fourth for a long time. It gets even better when it comes to the #4 / b5 conundrum: on most instruments, the exact same note. Yet, the b5 has a legitimate place in classical harmony, and the #4 doesn't. The worst part is that, if you bother to get to reading up on it, they actually make a good point for that.