The blues - evolution of the blues in jazz dance - Brief Article

Dance Magazine, Jan, 1998 by Don McDonagh

When the merry twinkle of Christmas cheer gives way to the stem reality of New Year's resolutions, one begins to understand that special comer of the jazz idiom known as the blues. It's not just a feeling of sadness but a vantage point for a rueful, sardonic assessment of life's ebb and flow. A fertile source of inspiration for a variety of choreographers, the blues are the plaintive songs of survivors.

Blues Suite (1958) is a classic of the genre. It was one of the first pieces that Alvin Ailey ever created, and it remained a vital part of his company's repertory throughout his life. It is a full-blooded examination of enjoyment and enjoyment receding, its passage marked by the Sunday morning bell of a new day and the plaintive sound of a train whistle in the distance. A cycle, it has the inevitability of living to see another day.

The strictly musical roots of the blues include field hollers, ragtime, work songs, minstrel show music, and pop songs. The discussion among musicians and musicologists as to the exact birthplace of the blues is ongoing. All agree that it was well south of the Mason-Dixon Line and originated among itinerant black musicians who traveled between towns, honky tonks, farms, work camps, and roadhouses. Accompanying themselves on guitars, they sang songs that reflected the buffeted life of the wayfarer.

Jazz drummer Warren "Baby" Dodds, with whom Merce Cunningham created Fast Blues (1946), a dance dialogue between soloist and musician, recalled hearing the blues in New Orleans in die 1890s. Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton also heard it there at the turn of the century, however W. C. (for "William Christopher") Handy, composer of "St. Louis Blues," said he first became aware of the style in 1903 while waiting in a railroad station in Tutweiler, Mississippi. The number of early blues musicians who came from that region -- among them Charley Patton, Eddie James, Chris Burnett, and "Son" House -- would seem to give die Delta the stronger claim, but New Orleans and environs still have their champions.

Wherever its birthplace, the form has struck a chord with choreographers. It is not surprising that modern dancers such as Donald McKayle, Talley Beatty, Eleo Pomare, George Faison, Katherine Dunham, and Pearl Primus, among others, have drawn on the tradition. Starting from folk roots. the music has made its way into the street life of our largest cities. The genealogy runs from blues to rhythm & blues and on to soul and then to rock.

McKayle in Rainbow `Round My Shoulder (1959) movingly explored the feelings of a prisoner on a chain gang, laboring mightily while longing for his past life and dying in an escape attempt to return to it. Games (1951), his first piece, presents the street life of playful but wary city children, whose rhythmical chanting of doggerel is alarmingly interrupted by the shouted warning, "Chickee! The cop!" The edge of sadness is never far from the spirit of the blues.

Beatty, who grew up near die tracks of the Erie Lackawanna Railroad, ironically named his 1959 examination of love and violence, The Road of the Phoebe Snow, after the line's spotlessly clean special train that completely contrasted with the harsh, experience-spotted lives of the less privileged it passed among. His "Congo Tango Palace," a popular excerpt from his 1960 Come and Get the Beauty of It Hot, was about the transient, momentary happiness among wary and driven young people whose meetings leave them tom between mistrust and happiness.

Paul Taylor was inspired to create 3 (originally 4) Epitaphs after James Waring introduced him to the Laneville-Johnson Union Brass Band's recording of low-down New Orleans jazz. Robert Rauschenberg, who designed its costumes and lighting, described this 1956 work as either the funniest or saddest piece one ever saw. Covered head to toe in matte black, with glittery highlights that made them look like animated coal slag, the dancers lurched and bumped through their little anonymous lives. They neither questioned nor plotted the paths they followed; they just moved along accepting their lot and hoping for the best.

"Dallas Blues," the first published sheet music identified as "blues," appeared in 1912. Four years later Mamie Smith recorded "Crazy Blues," and the form became a staple of what were at the time called "race records" designed for black record buyers. It wasn't long before these disks made their way into the consciousness of white recording artists and the mainstream music business. It was but a hop, skip, and a jump to the attention of white choreographers.

John Butler's Portrait of Billie (1960) detailed the troubled life of the talented singer Billie Holliday. Fred Astaire stylishly played with musical implications in his portrait of a London slum in the "Limehouse Blues" number in MGM's Ziegfeld Follies (1943). May O'Donnell included "Blues on Parade" in The Pursuit of Happiness, her depiction of the popular music world of the 1940s. Patricia Burke's Floyd's Guitar Blues and Twyla Tharp's Red White and Blues extended the reach of the form farther into popular culture.