Is there such a thing as the ‘blue note’?

Abstract

Among the most frequently repeated formulae in the description of the traditions most often called Afro-American music, in particular the styles of jazz, blues, soul and rock, is the concept of the `blue note’. It may also seem that this is a most widely accepted idea. The ‘blue note’ is usually thought of as a kind of basic element in those styles, as constituting the `ethnic’ or ‘African’ aspect of those musics as opposed to the ‘Western’ contributions of harmony.My main attempt here is to step into the somewhat muddy waters of musicological and sociological/anthropoligical/ cultural studies discourses of ‘the blue’ and ask what the ‘blue idea’ really is about. In rethinking the concept of the ‘blue note’, I find it necessary to differentiate between two concerns that often seem to be somewhat unconsciously or muddily mixed together:(1) the idea of the ‘blue note’ as referring to pitch, thinking of the note as an ‘item’, commonly thought of as the slight altering of the minor third and the flattened seventh; and(2) the general concept of `blue feeling’ linked to the idea of playing ‘blue notes’: in short, the performance of music with a ‘blue feel’.