Re: 7-limit in blues

> [zHANg, TD 394.11]
>
> From: Rick Tagawa <ricktagawa@earthlink.net>
>>
>> Hm, That's interesting. It seems a lot of musics avoid 7:4.
>> Danielou has warnings about it. The sruti don't go near it.
>
>
> eh... I thought that the African-American Blues do GO there...
> I could be mistaken... HEY MONZO!!! you seem to know!!!
> {cue J. Monzo...}

Altho the blues are almost always performed on instruments
tuned in the 12-eq system, the vocal and instrumental styles
feature lots of bending and sliding of pitches, and to my
ears most definitely imply a lot of 7-limit ratios.

> [zHANg, TD 394.12]
>
>
> From: Patrick Pagano <ppagano@bellsouth.net>
>>
>> Danielou describes the 7 intervals as the demonic numbers
>> or deva numbers drawing in powers us humans may not be able
>> to understand
>
> That is maybe why my Uncle hates African-American Blues &
> Rock musics... He is very "Sino-centric" & says that these
> musics have evil in their roots, that almost anything
> African-American is tainted by the bad blood of slavery
> & that a people severed from their ancestors en masse have
> no hope of substantial recovery of their history... I say :
> opinions & nether regions...

I haven't done enough research into African musical intonation
to verify how closely it is reflected in African-American
musical styles, but the intonation of the blues from early
in this century, when its practitioners were largely ignorant
of musical notation and theory, is very definitely microtonal,
and it had to come from *somewhere*.

In _Deep Blues_, the late Robert Palmer describes what I
think are quite plausible connections between blues vocal
techniques and those of west-African music and speech.

As far as the intriguing idea that your uncle has of
African-Americans not being able to recover their history
because of their severance from Africa, I'm not so sure...

I think if their 'history' was maintained anywhere, it's
in their music - this was just about the only thing the
African slaves were allowed to practice in America without
interference from their masters. Altho even in music
there was certainly a desire among some slaves to become
assimilated to some extent into the dominant European-American
culture, this desire for assimilation varied widely. Some
early blues recordings sound quite similar to west-African
music I've heard.

I speculated a while back in a posting here, when we were
discussing Danielou's ideas, that it may be precisely the
preponderance of 7-limit rational implications in blues
that contributed to its being referred to as 'devil's music'.

-monz

Joseph L. Monzo Philadelphia monz@juno.com
http://www.ixpres.com/interval/monzo/homepage.html
|"...I had broken thru the lattice barrier..."|
| - Erv Wilson |
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