Expert: Abdalla Mohamed Ali - 11/29/2007

Question
Hi, I'm working on aprject on the difference between jazz and blues in terms of style, harmonic progressions and timelines. I need to do this so that I can accuratel;y identify a piece of music as being in either of these genres. Please could you help me with information? Thank you very much.

Answer
Hi there,
First off , I'm sorry for my late reply I was really sick and have not checked my email in a while.

"Blues is a vocal and instrumental form of music based on the use of the blue notes and a repetitive pattern that most often follows a twelve-bar structure. It emerged in African-American communities of the United States from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed English and Scots-Irish narrative ballads. The use of blue notes and the prominence of call-and-response patterns in the music and lyrics are indicative of African influence. The blues influenced later American and Western popular music, as it became part of the genres of jazz, bluegrass, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, hip-hop, and pop songs." Wikipedia.
I suggest you check Blue, Jazz on wikipedia to get a clear idea of both.

Now Jazz music was very much a continuation of blues music, except that it took advantage of the instruments of the marching band. The jazz musician was basically "singing" just like the blues singers even though he was playing an instrument instead of using his vocals. The kind of dynamics and of improvisation was identical. The call-and-response structure was replicated in the dialogue between solo instrument and ensemble. Compared with European music, that for centuries had "trained" the voice to sound as perfect as the instruments, jazz music moved in the opposite direction when it trained the instruments to sound as emotional as as the human voice of the blues. After all, many jazz instrumentalists made their living accompanying blues singers in the vaudeville circuit. The main difference between jazz and blues, i.e. the heavy syncopation, was the original contribution of ragtime. Thus the marching bands contributed the instruments, blues singers contributed the improvisation, and ragtime contributed the syncopation (that ragtime had, in turn, taken from the "minstrel shows"). Jazz as a separate genre of music was born at the intersection of collective improvisation and heavy syncopation. Another defining feature was that it was mainly instrumental (blues music was mainly vocal). For some observers of the time jazz music may have sounded simply like the instrumental side of blues music, or the group version of ragtime, or a non-marching club-oriented evolution of the marching bands.

Now this can be a brief about this differnce between both genres but will it help you to identify Jazz from Blues? I guess not really, today both genres have grown more complicated, you need to listen to a few Jazz/Blues pieces to have a clear image of sound and style.