Shades of Blue

The process of creating the 'Play the Blues' section of my website has been challenging, in part because it has required me to seek out a huge number of musical examples to demonstrate various facets of the blues. It would have been possible for me just teach theoretically, saying "these are the key features of the blues", but that style of teaching is probably what I'm reacting against as I go really hard looking for musical examples for everything. When I learnt the 12 bar blues in high school, neither I nor my classmates listened to a single piece of music of any kind, let along an actual blues. Sadly, this seems to be the experience of many people when it comes to learning the blues. So I've been determined to furnish all theoretical points with musical examples. Here's how I'm going so far.

(I definitely should point out that it's WAAAAAAAAY easier to find music now than it would have been 10 years ago when I started high school. I'm not letting my teachers off the hook, but I am saying that I have no excuse because YouTube + Spotify = most songs ever recorded.)

In Search of Bass Lines

The number one curiosity I had coming into this mass blues listening experience was: What do blues bass players play? Particularly since myself and many others learnt one specific bass line as "the walking bass" in high school, I wanted to know whether this bass line actually existed in real recorded music.

Oh and by the way, here's the bass line:

I started with boogie woogie, and there were a few different bass lines going around:

This style (and its variants) was quite common, and the notation looks like this:

There was also a more rapid-moving octave bass line like this:

This one looked a lot closer to the bass line I had learnt in school, but it still had some nice variations:

Ultimately, I found lots of other bass lines, but nothing that was exactly like what I learnt in school.

Chord Progressions

Something that I was already attuned to before coming into this project, but that was worth checking out, was the variation in blues chord progressions that exist. Some variant progressions like these were common:

Some were more challenging! Take Blues for Alice (Charlie Parker) for example:

I guess in seeing the huge amount of variation that existed between different chord progressions (and bass lines), it helped soften the language I used to talk about the resources I was using. So rather than saying "This is the walking bass", or "this is the blues progression", I would phrase it in terms of this being a common feature but not necessarily the case all the time. I just hope that students are okay with things being nuanced. Life is nuanced!

Here are some more drafts from my website:

(Note the gap: these are separate sections!)