Re: "SLAVE SCALE" ??

Date: 16 Jul 2003 11:48:43 -0700
Newsgroups: alt.music.gospel.southern
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Actually, I read the article that you're referring to, David, and I
didn't find it to be all that academic. I don't know if the guy was
writing down to people who don't know anything about music or if he
just didn't know now to talk about things in a musicological way. The
book I recommended earlier, The Story of Jazz, has a much better
discussion on the issue. Also, there is some low-key discussion in
parts of "Just Mahalia Baby," the monumental biography of Mahalia
Jackson.
Anyone interested in musical structure should try to obtain from your
local library, directly or by loan, the Norton Lectures on music by
Leonard Bernstein. Maestro Bernstein was able, despite his profound
musical knowledge, to show how music is constructed in a way that a
child can understand it. I recommended this series to an old gospel
singer in his 70's who started singing when he was 15. He said to me
later, "I wish I had seen this when I started, I'd have had a better
understanding as to what we were doing and why it worked."
The western musical scale is a tempered chromatic scale (more or
less), whereas African music is in a diatonic scale. What happens that
makes blues and the kind of black gospel done by Mahalia Jackson,
Ethel Waters, and Willie Mae Ford Smith work so well is that they've
been able to marry the two types of music.
Mahalia, for instance, is always better in her recordings live in a
black church rather than the studio Columbia recordings or even live
before a white audience. It's always interesting to see her get
carried away in front of a white audience and start that hollerin'
kind of singing that she was best at, when the Spirit would get hold
of her. It's really not the Mahalia that most people know.
Now, when you engage in harmony, 4- or 5-part harmony, like say, the
Fairfield Four, the diatonic aspects have to be more muted because of
the harmonics, but the Fairfields, well the old guys who are mostly
dead now, could really do some of that stuff better than you would
think possible. If you don't have the recording, "Wrecking the
Church," which is an old live recording, well, you should get it.
Anyway, we are talking here about two different approaches to the
structure of music, and the attempts to join them together in blues,
jazz, some popular, even some classical, and certainly, the older
black gospel. It's exciting to make this kind of music. Of course, the
African-American version of white music, adapted to their style, can
also be stunningly creative and interesting. I played for an
African-American lady who sang old-fashioned gospel and it was quite a
challenge, musically, to get into her groove, so to speak, and let it
carry me. We had a great time making music together.
Larry D
Atlanta, GA
> Or generate more questions and/or confusion. Read the "Conclusion" section.
> In typical educated-ese, Baker cites a reference that says the blues can't
> be defined or even agreed upon by musicologists. His article is called a
> "brief history," but is mostly an exercise in theorectical discussion.
> Actually, it looks like the guy read a few sources and parroted them back,
> pointing out discrepancies of opinion between the sources. It's a decent
> college report. I'd give it an A if I were the teacher, but I wouldn't quote
> him as an authority on the subject.
>
> Music theorists love to find differing ways for explaining the same music.
> The point of a theorist is not to define music in the one and only way it
> can be defined, but to explain it in a consistent, methodical manner. Any of
> those explanations COULD possibly work. None are definitive.
>
> It's clear from listening to traditional blues artists that they like to
> sing between the cracks in the piano. It's thus clear that, although blues
> music typically has a tonal center, the twelve note Western scale is at
> most, a suggestion to the performer . . . not a guide. Obviously, a modern
> blues artist who chooses the piano as his instrument is going to be limited
> to those twelve notes and make do with minor third tonalities and/or grace
> notes. Singers and instrumentalists who have the liberty of bending pitches
> still take advantage of that option, though.