Re: [Harp-L] Should the blues scale be revised?



At 07:29 PM 3/5/2008, Zvi wrote:
What about the natural 3rd? Why isn't it part of the scale? It seems
that there are good reasons to include it in the scale.

This very question was posed by Bill Monroe and his fiddle player Kenny Baker. They felt that the flatted third had burned its way so completely into the ear of their audience that the natural third, coming where you'd expect a flatted third, was actually more compelling as a blue note. I am not sure when they started substituting the natural third in for the flatted, but it would probably be in the late 50's or early 60's.


This was told to me in the early 70's by a guy named Bob Fowler, who had just been Monroe's guitarist for a few years, while Baker was still in the band.

As with other highly formal Japanese arts, sumi-e ink painting places various kinds of balance requirements on the painter. If you paint an object on one part of the field you are required to place one in a geometrically opposite location, to balance it. My favorite solution to this problem was done on a three-screen work: A bird is darting just off the 'ground', all the way at the right edge of the right screen, flying to the right. As we often see when a bird is darting low to the ground this bird appears to be moving very quickly. In the blink of an eye the bird will be gone, except of course that this is a painting, so it's there forever.

But the sense of the bird's high speed is so convincingly executed that your eye actually seems to see the ghost of a black line all the way across the bottom of the painting - the blur of the bird's flight path. There is no black line, but the feeling that there is one is enough to satisfy the formal requirement for balance.

Monroe and Baker's blue-note innovation is parallel to this, for me anyway. When they play the natural third as the blue note it sounds even bluer than the flatted, because the brain somehow hears the echo of the flatted third, too. Very, very powerful.

Musical theory is essentially the recipes of how composers and players achieved their effects IN THE PAST. Every musician eventually adds to the Theory when they achieve effects outside the existing theory. Zvi's question is the kind of question one asks when one wants to make music that is one's own.

Ken





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