ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 discusses the origins of the blues as the musical embodiment of the Black American experience in America. The chapter continues to explore the use of blue notes, the lowered 3rd, 5th, and 7th notes of the diatonic major scale, with a transcription and analysis of Bessie Smith’s blues “Mama’s Got the Blues.” A continuum of “chord of the moment” vs. “key of the piece” is presented to help explain how great improvisers balance the use of blue notes with highly chromatic melodic chord tones. The chapter includes a discussion of over-simplification and over-use of the blues scale in jazz education. Improvisation exercises later in the chapter include adding blue notes to the “Distilled Saints Melody” and “Mike’s Original Saints Melody” introduced in Chapter 2, as well as the reader’s own melody composed in Chapter 4. Finally, the chapter ends with a jazz etude called “Blue Dolphin Street.”
