Integral

He also made this larger perspective clear when I recently interviewed him for a story published on April 7, 2011 in the New York Daily News

. Regarding the relation between jazz and blues, Marsalis (who recently performed with famous blues and rock guitarist Eric Clapton) said the blues is “central to the music. It’s central to American music. It should be known, and it should be in everybody’s sound by now.” I asked him, “So do you think that the avoidance of blues and swing is a conscious or unconscious rejection of that tradition?” “It started off consciously, now it’s unconscious,” Marsalis asserts. “It’s not just Afro-American; there’s an Anglo-American tradition of the blues too. Ultimately, there’s a tradition of blues in all of our cultures. Country music, Anglo-American folk singing; the blues is our American folk music. We have rejected that. So, who created it is not important at this point. We’re suffering from a profound identity crisis in our nation.” Can embracing the blues help solve what Marsalis calls our “identity crisis”? What can understanding the blues as a folk, pop, and fine art aesthetic line of development add to our understanding of Integral theory

? Why is the “break” in blues idiom music so important? And how does Ken Wilber’s Miracle-of-We concept of Joy2

equate with Albert Murray’s notion of the “velocity of celebration”? These are a few of the questions I’ll answer in Part Two of “An Integral Take on the Blues Idiom.” For now, I’ll leave you with several examples of blues within a jazz context. A classic 1957 clip of Billie Holiday’s “Fine and Mellow,” with solos by tenor saxophonists Ben Webster and Lester Young (one of the purest blues solos you’ll ever see or hear), trombonist Vic Dickenson, baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, and trumpeter Roy Eldridge. The OM, the Original Master, Louis Armstrong, with the song and recording that forever changed instrumental and improvised music. The explanations along the way make this video special too. “Parker’s Mood,” a classic blues by Charlie “Bird” Parker. I guess the person who uploaded this to You Tube thought that a view of Paris from the sky was a pictorial representation of Bird’s mood. That’s a vocalese version of Bird’s “Parker Mood” by one of the first vocalese masters, Eddie Jefferson. Vocalese in jazz is the art of composing lyrics to instrumental solos. Jefferson’s lyrics tell of the heartbreak and hope a man felt after his baby left him. His melodic flow is based on Bird’s improvisation, heard in the previous clip. Duke Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing,” written in 1931. It remains a jazz blues standard to this day. This is an example of what Billie Holiday, in the clip above, called “the happy blues.” One of the greatest trumpet players in jazz history, Clifford Brown, playing “Sandu” at the age of 24. He collaborated with a young Quincy Jones, toured with Lionel Hampton, recorded with Art Blakey, and played in a famous quintet (that included saxophonist Sonny Rollins) which he co-led with drummer Max Roach. Brownie, as he was affectionately called by his peers and jazz heads the world over, was a teetotaler, and a chess-playing math whiz, who died tragically at 25 in a car crash. The blues. This is “Twisted Blues,” performed by the legendary guitarist Wes Montgomery. Nice camera work and editing. Wes influenced all guitarists in his wake who aspired to the aesthetic objectives of jazz. John Coltrane, who, along with Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker, is one of the Mt. Rushmore figures of jazz improvisation, here plays the blues with his characteristic depth of feeling and the onrush of what one jazz critic called his “sheets of sound” style. From his 1957 album, Lush Life, the song is “Trane’s Slo Blues.” And last—for now—country great Willie Nelson along with Wynton Marsalis and his ensemble playing a folk blues song made famous by Hank Williams and Louis Armstrong, “The Bucket’s Got a Hole In It.”