Step up to the stage with library@esplanade as we feel the blues in the month of May… *Pssst* read on for something special :D

1. Prelude to the Blitz (in Blue)…
   blue is the new white
2. Why is the blues, the “blues”?
   blue is the new white
3. Jazz is jazz and blues is blues - are they related?
   blue is the new white
4. Every time we see The Blue Angel, we can’t help Falling in Love Again.
   blue is the new white
5. Feeling the Monday blues? Why not sing them away! 1/2
   blue is the new white
6. Feeling the Monday blues? Why not sing them away! 2/2
   blue is the new white
7. This Blue Kite flew away with awards aplenty, but also landed itself in a whole lot of hot water.
   blue is the new white
8. He felt Kind of Blue and made the record that’s by Miles, one of the greatest jazz albums of all time.
   blue is the new white
9. Seven directors, seven films, seven roads down the musical journey called The Blues.

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The Blues: A Musical Journey
By: Martin Scorsese, [et al]
Call No.: 781.64309 BLU
Location: Music Village, library@esplanade

Martin Scorsese (Goodfellas ), Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire ), Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep ), Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas ), Clint Eastwood (Unforgiven ), Richard Pearce (Homicide: Life on the Streets ), and Marc Levin (Slam ). Seven directors, seven films, seven roads down the musical journey called The Blues.

See how the music has influenced the lives and works of these seven pre-eminent directors as they pay tribute to the blues in the way they best know how.

Extracted below from Time Out Film Guide is Nick Bradshaw’s introduction to the project, as well as his thoughts on Richard Pearce’s contribution:

As the subtitle of this seven film series underlines (The Blues: A Musical Journey), the story of the blues is the story of transience, of exile. Even its documentation is a matter of hitting the road, as pioneered by John and Alan Lomax for their seminal Library of Congress recordings in the 1930s (Feel 119).

[ . . . ]

The Blues – A Musical Journey: The Road to Memphis

Lovely, subtle, low key film from Pearce, a director whose qualities are not much in demand in Hollywood. An oasis for African Americans in the cultural desert of the segregated South, Memphis — and in particular Beale Street — was central to the development of the blues.

Pearce tells the story by following Bobby Rush, still grinding out funky R&B after decades on the road, still dreaming of crossover success; BB King, moved as he recalls the first time his audience turned white; and Rosco Gordon, a ’50s star who disappeared when Elvis took the blues into rock’n'roll — there’s a brief but pointed exchange about this between Sam Phillips and Ike Turner.

You can argue about the impact white patronage had on the music, but ultimately this is Gordon’s film, a poignant figure dismayed by the face Beale Street puts on today (The Road to Memphis 120).

Works Cited

• Bradshaw, Nick. Feel Like going Home. Time Out Film Guide. Ed. John Pym. 16th ed. London, England; New York, N.Y., USA: Penguin Books, 2008.

• —. The Road to Memphis. Time Out Film Guide. Ed. John Pym. 16th ed. London, England; New York, N.Y., USA: Penguin Books, 2008.

The entire series is reviewed in the book, so make sure to come down to the library to check it out!

Don’t forget to also keep an eye out for the companion book to the films. It’s packed full of information, essays and just about everything else that’s needed to help you step on the journey with the blues. Particularly interesting, for me, were the individual reflections on the blues written by each of the directors himself.

Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: A Musical Journey
Editor: Peter Guralnick, [et al]
Publisher: New York: HarperCollins, 2005
Call No.: RART 781.64309 MAR
For Reference Only
Location: Arts Central, library@esplanade

“Even if you’re a blues hound with hundreds of discs in your collection, this book is a learning experience, and richly enjoyable.”

— Kansas City Star

Kind of Blue (Jazz Album)
By: Miles Davis
Publisher: New York: Columbia/Legacy, 1997
Call No.: RAV Other 781.65 DAV
For Reference Only
Location: Music Village, library@esplanade

Each and every one of us, we all believe we know which is the best, be it the best film, the best restaurant, the best book to read on a lazy Thursday afternoon. Like the immaculate ladies and gentlemen we are (Ed: We are? ), most every time, we politely agree to disagree. But sometimes, maybe just that one time, the choice is so clear that there is really only one bet where we all happily lay our chips on. Each and every one of us.

The Encyclopedia of Popular Music tells us as it is:

Advocates from the many corners of jazz will argue their points, some with bigoted passion and self righteousness — a trait that has been known to follow some jazz buffs. When you find jazzers, rock and popular music followers unanimously united over one record, then you know something must be right.

This album contains only five tracks, with musicians Julian Adderly (alto), John Coltrane (tenor), Bill Evans (piano), Paul Chambers (bass), James Cobb (drums) and Miles on trumpet. It is played with absolute cool perfection, not a drop of sweat or cigarette ash. There can be no debate, this is the greatest jazz album in the world ever; so what, just accept it (Kind of Blue ).

Work Cited

Kind of Blue. The Encyclopedia of Popular Music. Ed. Colin Larkin. London; New York: Grove’s Dictionaries, 1998.

Feeling in the mood for more?

Every masterpiece has a story to tell and here is a selected list of titles to help tell the story — the story of Miles Davis, the story of Kind of Blue.

* All blurbs taken from items’ back covers.

Miles Davis - Kind of Blue (Score)
By: Miles Davis
Publisher: Milwaukee, Wis.: Hal Leonard, 2001
Call No.: 788.92165 DAV
Location: Music Village, library@esplanade

Blurb:
“It’s about time we had study scores for small group jazz, and what better place to start than this beloved and influential album? Put on the recording, take out the score, and you’ll learn a lot and hear things you hadn’t noticed before.”

— Lewis Porter, Director of the MA in Jazz History and Research, Rutgers University at Newark

Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece
Author: Ashley Kahn
Publisher: London: Granta, 2001
Call No.: 782.42165 KAH
Location: Music Village, library@esplanade

Blurb:
“This fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the making of a masterpiece . . . only enhances the pleasure of the music itself.”

– People

The Making of Kind of Blue: Miles Davis and his Masterpiece
Author: Eric Nisenson
Publisher: New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000
Call No.: RART 781.650266 NIS
For Reference Only
Location: Arts Central, library@esplanade

Blurb:
“Eric Nisenson turns Kind of Blue into a story that tells us much about what great jazz is and can be. It’s worth reading just for the stories of how one of the greatest albums of all time came into being, but it offers so much more — a low-key but superb education in the way jazz is made and how it comes to mean the things it does.”

— Dave Marsh, Playboy pop critic and editor of Rock and Rap Confidential

Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography
Author: Ian Carr
Publisher: New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999
Call No.: RART 788.92165092 CAR
For Reference Only
Location: Arts Central, library@esplanade

Blurb:
“The most complete portrait of Davis that we have had — He knows his music and his Miles.”

— The New York Times book review

蓝风筝 / The Blue Kite (1993)
By: Tian Zhuangzhuang
Call No.: Chinese 791.4372 BLU
Location: Film Village, library@esplanade

From 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die (2005 ed.):

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So the first half of Monday is over, and New Order’s pop-tastic Blue Monday has gone some way to help fend off the Monday blues. But the second half’s looming, and you think, maybe it’s time to switch gears a little, you know, go for something smoother, cool, like you know, the real folk blues to ease you through the rest of bad ol’ blue Stormy Monday. So here’s another little somethin’ to pull you through…

Song Name: After Hours/Stormy Monday
By: Muddy Waters

Lyrics can be found here.

Muddy “Mississippi” Waters - ‘Live’
By: Muddy Waters
Format: CD [Sound Recording]
Call No.: RAV 782.421643 MUD
For Reference Only
Location: Music Village, library@esplanade

Bob Margolin, who played guitar alongside Muddy in this set, tells the story behind this song, on the night it was played. It is a moving tribute to the man and his genius, and on reflection, a heartfelt mourning at the loss of a voice that will always be heard, but never in the “live” again.

“After Hours/Stormy Monday.”

This may be the most important song on both CD’s because in his playful band introductions, his reminiscing about T-Bone Walker, and his sudden delivery of the deepest blues, Muddy revealed so much of who he was.

Muddy sang this when he took the bandstand for the second set of the night. Muddy had enjoyed playing a strong first set and had been relaxing in the dressing room with his friends and family. He had a ryder in his performance contracts for the venues to provide a bottle of vintage Piper-Heidseick champagne and he probably had imbibed a touch more than usual this night.

He takes the stage, begins to introduce the band and can’t hear himself, so he tests the mic impatiently, “Hello, Hello, who is you?” The soundman had not turned his mic on yet in the club’s sound system though it was still feeding the tape recorder. When he could hear the mic, Muddy slurs “Yeah, hey…” and you can hear the champagne, maybe a little reefer too.

He complains about how the club owner wants two sets, “will not let me leave after one like a gentleman.” He playfully introduces the band and it was one of the few times he pronounced my name close to right. As I begin to play some T-Bone Walker licks, Muddy muses over T-Bone’s recent death — “…never will be replaced-ed….” Lost in music and memories, he doesn’t actually call T-Bone’s name but the subject is obvious to any blues fan when begins to sing “Stormy Monday.” I think this song is the vocal high point of these albums as well as an intimate look at Muddy, the man.

The day after we mixed this song, in August, 2002, I drove to Chicago to pick up Willie Smith, the drummer on these albums, to do some gigs together. Willie lives next to Muddy’s old apartment on the South Side of Chicago. There’s a historic plaque in front of 4339 So. Lake Park.

As I pulled up to the curb, Muddy’s stepson, Charles Williams, came walking by. I hadn’t seen Charles since Muddy’s funeral. I told him we were mixing songs from Harry Hope’s and he told me he used to like the way I played guitar on “Stormy Monday.” Since I had the the CD-R of the new mixes in my van’s CD player, I opened the door and played “Stormy Monday” for Charles. We got goosbumps as Muddy’s unique voice suddenly rang out strong, clear, and alive in front of his old apartment building almost 20 years after his death.

Work Cited
Margolin, Bob. “After Hours/Stormy Monday.” CD liner notes. Muddy “Mississippi” Waters - ‘Live’. New York, NY: Epic/Legacy, 2003.

they call it stormy monday
but tuesday s just as bad
wednesday s worse and
thursday s all so sad

let s just chill and be cool
take it easy
take to the blues
find
it ain t so bad
yeah
find
it ain t so sad

Song Name: Blue Monday [88]
By: New Order

Sing along to the lyrics, here.

This song can be found in the following items:

(The best of) NewOrder
By: New Order
Format: CD [Sound Recording]
Call No.: RAV 782.42166 NEW
For Reference Only
Location: Music Village, library@esplanade

New Order 316
By: New Order
Format: DVD
Call No.: 782.42166 NEW
Parental Guidance is Advised.
Location: Music Village, library@esplanade

From (The best of) NewOrder’s liner notes, comes a flamboyant and quirky introduction to New Order by the “supremely stylish” Paul Morley. Here’s but a mind-tripping extract:

Who are NewOrder? We may never know.

[ . . . ]

Why are NewOrder? 1) I have worked in one or two capacities with NewOrder, and played with them now and then, and let me tell you they’re a bunch of difficult buggers but you can’t help but love them. 2) They’re kind of anti-stars. Perhaps if they’d showed willing and showed their faces more, and hadn’t hidden behind themselves and their cryptic records sleeves, if they’d disguised their distrust of the media and acted a little more friendly to each other and others and just generally sold themselves a bit and weren’t so perverse when it came to self-promotion, they might now be rock giants — post-punk Pink Floyds — instead of detached pop secrets — sub Pet Shop Boys, although it should be recorded that NewOrder came first, and how. But what the hell, they just thought, what the hell, and why not. They developed as true originals because of their independence, and they’ve stuck fast to an alternative spirit, firmly sceptical about the rock business, and they’ve come this far, to this best, which includes several top tens and a fancy number one, and which is the most accessible and spectacular example of the art of uncompromise you’ll ever hear. So what the hell. They blew it and they made it and it couldn’t have happened any other way.

Work Cited
Morley, Paul. (The best of) NewOrder. CD liner notes. London: London Records, 1994.

Psychedelic writing on the pinnacle of pop. Joy Division. Tell me how does it feel.

How does it feel?

How does it feel?

How does it feel?

Related read

Touching from a Distance: Ian Curtis & Joy Division
Author: Deborah Curtis
Publisher: London: Faber and Faber 2005
Call No.: 782.42166092 CUR
Location: Music Village, library@esplanade

Blurb (taken from back cover):
“An extraordinary book, a steely-eyed look at the pitfalls of fame and a fascinating insight into one man’s heart and soul, written by the only person qualified for the job. Most books about rock and roll cling greedily to the myths of the subject; this one tears them apart.”

– Ian Rankin

– With contributions from Naemah

The Blue Angel (1930)
By: Josef von Sternberg
Publisher: New York: Eureka Video, 2002
Call No.: Other 791.4372 BLA
Location: Film Village, library@esplanade

From Radio Times Guide to Films:

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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…

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Compiled from a few sources, here’s a quick look at the blues — its origins, its meaning and its form. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I don’t really know much about music myself, so I hope this bit (Ed: quite a “bit”, really), which I’ve put together with the help of Naemah, will be as interesting for you as it was for me.

The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz states that the “term ‘blues’ has a number of interrelated meanings. In the 16th century the ‘Blue Devils’ referred to a fit of melancholy, an interpretation that persisted and came into popular usage in the mid-19th century (Blues: Origins).

Musically, the blues, as Bob Porter observes, “is the music of black Americans” (64). Porter notes the development of the blues as such:

Originating in the South and first discovered in Mississippi, it is music that developed from field hollers, work songs, religious music, and folk melodies. Undergoing continuous change through the years, it has kept its characteristics throughout. The blues means different things to different people. Simultaneously a form and a feeling, it has provided inspiration for singers and musicians for over a century [and] blues influence can be heard in each form of American popular music (64).

Here, I find it very interesting how the quality of “interrelated meanings” in the term “blues” manifests itself in its musical form. Let’s see how Porter describes the blues again: It “means different things to different people”, but at the same time, it possesses certain inherent characteristics that have been kept through years of change.

This seems to me a key point about the blues, and I try to think of a way to describe its essence. “Flexible constant”? Kinda oxymoronic (Ed: and not a little lame, I might add) I know, but look at how Scott Yanow talks about the “irony” of the blues:

“The irony of the blues is that the word means both a sad feeling (having the blues); and a style of music that is meant to dispel the blues and make listeners happy, even when the subject matter deals with the singer’s bad luck” (xxvi).

So I’m guessing at any given time, the blues is always one thing, yet another; it is always two things, if not more, at once. And I think this is how the music enriches itself, through its own fluid movements across variegating meanings founded upon its own term(s), its name, the blues.

As Timothy Berg tells us, the blues “emerged in its mature form after the turn of the twentieth century”, but unfortunately, “no one knows who the first singers or musicians were that put this style together into its now familiar form, as the music evolved before the invention of recording technology”. Berg goes on to detail the blues as a musical style:

[The] blues is centered around a 12-bar form with three lines of four bars each. And, while it does use standard chords and instrumentation, it is an innovative music known for the off-pitch “blue notes” which give the music its deeper feeling.

These blue notes are produced by bending tones, and the need to produce these tones made certain instruments key to playing blues music: the guitar, the harmonica, and the human voice. It is a rather informal music, with plenty of room for singers and musicians to express themselves in unique ways. Thus, the music has given the world a wide variety of unique blues artists whose styles are not easily replicated (Blues).

As we learn here, while the blues can be, and I gather, is, notated to a more or less formal arrangement, there is a lot of room for both music and performer to “breathe”, so to say. This is thanks to the use of blue notes (Ed: You can read more about them, here) and the spontaneous nature of the music that almost demands improvisation.

Just how flexible is this music?

With a humourous touch, David Evans delivers the perfect riposte: “Blues is such a protean and flexible mode of expression that it almost defies any attempt to pin it down with a concise definition. One can’t, for example, even state with any finality whether the word “blues” is singular or plural (1)!”

And that’s the gist of it. (^_^)

List of Works Cited

* To see catalogue details of references, please click on the links in blue.

• Berg, Timothy. Blues. “St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture.” Ed. Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast. Vol. 1. Detroit: St. James Press, 2000. 290-293. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Gale. National Library Board Singapore. 14 Apr. 2008 <http://go.galegroup.com/ps/
  start.do?p=GVRL&u=sgnlb >.

* You can access Gale Virtual Reference Library by signing up for a FREE Digital Library Membership with NLB. For details, please go here.

• Blues: Origins. “The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz.” New York; London: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

• Evans, David. “NPR Curious Listener’s Guide to Blues.” New York: Perigee Books, 2005.

• Porter, Bob. The Blues in Jazz. “The Oxford Companion to Jazz.” Ed. Bill Kirchner. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 64-77.

• Yanow, Scott. “Jazz - A Regional Exploration.” Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005.

An interesting article I found about the stock markets while dipping around one of our edatabases, Pop Culture Periodical Collection. Time’s Daniel Eisenberg wrote this short article in 1998:

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