Jazz is jazz and blues is blues - are they related?

Bean sprouts on the page, or black magic on paper?

In this post, we learn that blue notes give blues music its unique texture and feeling, and the versatility afforded to playing these notes allows blues artists great freedom to improvise and develop their own styles of play.

Our handy New Grove Dictionary of Jazz tells us more about these wondrous little things…

Blue Notes:

A microtonally lowered third, seventh, or (less commonly) fifth degree of the diatonic scale, common in blues, jazz, and related musics. The pitch or intonation of blue notes is not fixed precisely but varies according to the performer’s instinct and expression. Together with other, non-inflected, pitches they make up the blues scale . . .

Blue notes were common in jazz from the earliest times, and have long been used as a criterion for separating authentic early jazz from jazz-related commercial music of the day. At first they were apparently associated with particular pitches (notably C# — D in the key of Bb) and were not transposable, which probably indicates their dependence on certain characteristic instrumental fingerings; later, as jazz musicians gained greater fluency in remote keys, blue notes could be heard on other pitches as well.

Eventually blues-like inflections were applied to other degrees of the scale, as may be heard in Saeta from Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain (1959-60, CS8271) and above all in the work of Ornette Coleman, who from the early 1960s applied blue-note inflections to all degrees of the chromatic scale (Blue note).

Work Cited
Blue note. “The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz.” New York; London: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

While reading up on this stuff, I became quite curious to find out how the parts of a musical note are labelled, so after digging around, I found this.

Isn’t it interesting to note (Ed: lame pun detected!) that the names of parts of a musical note have a certain organic feel to them? A head, a stem (which others might call a “tail”), the “anatomy” of a note sign.

If the parts of a note give it body, what then gives it soul?

– With contributions from Naemah