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This
month’s podcast montage concludes our November homage to artists we have lost –
and anniversaries thereof – with a focus on three of them and a common thematic
link.
The three
honorees this week are guitarist B.B. King, singer-songwriter-artist Gerry
Boulet and composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein (who was already
featured earlier in the month). And the “glue” that binds them together is the
Blues.
What is the
Blues? Some would say it’s a form of musical expression, others a musical
genre, and I think both are right in their own way. It’s about worry, broken
hearts, despair and it’s also a musical genre with its own “code” and
“patterns”. A key ingredient is the Blue Note – or the worried
note - sung or played at a slightly different pitch (typically between a
quartertone and a semitone). Like the blues in general, the blue notes can mean
many things. One quality that they all have in common, however, is that they
are lower than one would expect, classically speaking. A great example is
the Elvis Presley hit Heartbreak Hotel
Ever
Since my baby left me…
“my” here is sung as a blue note.
We
associate the Blues with North America and Afro-American music, but English
composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's "A Negro Love Song", from
his The African Suite for Piano composed in 1898, contains blue third and
seventh notes.
African
American composer W. C. Handy wrote in his autobiography of the
experience of sleeping on a train traveling through Tutwiler, Mississippi
around 1903, and being awakened by:
... a
lean, loose-jointed Negro who had commenced plucking a guitar beside me while I
slept. His clothes were rags; his feet peeped out of his shoes. His face had on
it some of the sadness of the ages. As he played, he pressed a knife on the
strings in a manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars. ...
The effect was unforgettable. His song, too, struck me instantly... The singer
repeated the line ("Going' where the Southern cross' the Dog") three
times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever
heard.
This
account, if you ask me, is the first recorded instance of a tradition we call
the Mississippi Delta Blues, epitomized – and recorded for posterity –
in an odd recording session held on November 23, 1936, in room 414 of the
Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, Texas. The artist, Delta Blues guitar artist
extraordinaire Robert Johnson, set 16 tracks to vinyl that day,
including "Come On In My Kitchen", "Kind Hearted Woman
Blues", "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom", "Cross Road
Blues" and the classic blues anthem "Sweet Home Chicago".
The melody
of "Sweet Home Chicago" is found in several blues songs, including
"Honey Dripper Blues", "Red Cross Blues", and the immediate
model for the song, "Kokomo Blues". In his rendition, Johnson succeeded
in evoking an exotic modern place, far from the South, which is an amalgam of
famous migration goals for African Americans leaving the South:
But I'm
cryin' hey baby, Honey don't you want to go / Back to the land of California,
to my sweet home Chicago
Last time I
checked, Chicago is nowhere near California… To later singers this
contradictory location held more appeal than obscure Kokomo, which is probably
why this stuck. And it is also fitting that Chicago is, to many, the home of
the Blues, and of the Blues Brothers. It also is where conductor Seiji Ozawa
was introduced to the Blues, while music director of the Chicago Symphony’s
summer festival in Ravinia.
In 1966,
after hearing a local group - the Siegel–Schwall Band - perform live at Big
John's in Chicago, Ozawa conceived the idea of combining blues and classical
music. The following year, Ozawa conducted a performance of William Russo's
Symphony No. 2, Titans, at the Ravinia Festival. Shortly after that, Russo was
commissioned to write and orchestrate the composition that became Three
Pieces for Blues Band and Symphony Orchestra.
Each “part”
(or movement) of the work introduces one of the handful of easily recognizable
“riffs” (or patterns) we all associate with Blues performance. While the orchestral
parts are fully delineated, the blues band parts are more broadly outlined,
leaving significant room for musical improvisation.
Ozawa
famously apprenticed under Leonard Bernstein in the early 1960’s, and so it is
a fitting segue to continue our exploration of Symphonic Blues under Lenny’s
able penmanship. We all remember the film On The Town which starred Gene
Kelly and Frank Sinatra as sailors enjoying leave in the Big Apple. The film,
and musical, was set to music by Bernstein and was based on Jerome Robbins'
idea for his 1944 ballet Fancy Free, which was also composed by
Bernstein.
The scene
is a bar and the outside sidewalk in New York City, in wartime. Three sailors
on leave boisterously arrive, have a drink and head outside looking for female
companionship. A beautiful girl passes by and the three sailors vie for her
attention. She demurs and escapes, pursued by two of the sailors. The Third,
having been left in the dust, encounters another beautiful passer-by, and
invites her to have a drink with him. He impresses her with a pantomime of his
military exploits, and they dance a passionate pas de deux. This musical
number – and indeed many of the numbers – uses the theme of a blues song that
Bernstein composed especially for the ballet, “Big Stuff”.
So you
cry, “What’s it about, Baby?”
You ask
why the blues had to go and pick you.
“Big Stuff”
was conceived with the African American jazz singer Billie Holiday in mind,
even though it ended up being recorded for the production by Bernstein’s sister
Shirley. At that early point in Bernstein’s career, he lacked the cultural and
fiscal capital to hire anyone as famous as Holiday. A few years later, she did
record the song, and it is that rendition that I included in the montage,
followed by significant highlights from the ballet.
In May
2015, American blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist B. B. King passed away.
An undisputed icon of the Blues -the King of the Blues to many - Rolling
Stone magazine ranked King No. 6 on its 2011 list of the 100 greatest guitarists
of all time. Where Robert Johnson is recognized as a master of the “acoustic
Delta blues guitar”, King on his “Lucille” Gibson guitar eintroduced a
sophisticated style of soloing based on fluid string bending and shimmering
vibrato that influenced many later electric blues guitarists. King was known
for performing tirelessly throughout his musical career, appearing at more than
200 concerts per year on average into his 70s. Today’s montage includes a few
tracks recorded by King, including his great standard “The Thrill is Gone”.
Gerry
Boulet, who died 25 years ago this year, is the iconic voice of French Canadian
Rock and Blues. Most famous as vocalist for the Quebec rock band Offenbach,
he is considered one of the innovators of rock music in joual, the plain
talk French Quebec dialect. His musical style and raspy voice are both unique
and unforgettable.
Offenbach’s
original members had long debated what language they should sing in. Boulet
held strongly to the custom of singing in English, but Pierre Harel felt that
French would be more natural. While the band members sat around waiting on
Harel’s arrival, they started playing around a good “walking boogie” lead by
bassist Michel Lamothe. When Harel arrived, Gerry was singing “That’s why,
that’s why I’m singing the blues”. Harel then composed French lyrics on a paper
place-mat that became the chorus
L’aut’soir,
l’aut’soir, j’ai chanté du blues / L’aut’soir, l’aut’soir ça l’a rendu jalouse
Thus was
born Câline de blues, a song now revered as a classic in the Quebec
blues-rock repertoire.
Set to
vinyl several times by the band, Offenbach’s first gold album, “Offenbach en
fusion” (a jazz-rock hit), contains another edition of the song, and it is that
version that concludes our montage.
I think you will love this music too.
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