St Louis Blues? It’s a mini opera

Classical music writer

Monday 13 June 2011

Let's take a little musical diversion this week, lean to the left, elide a few notes and crush a few others to give the column a bluesy hue; then cautiously – for we may tread on knowledgeable toes – take one step over the boundary line that says: "Beyond here you are out of your comfort zone."

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Michael Tumelty

What am I prattling about? Well; I’ve recently had a thrilling musical experience and wanted to try to share it. “Try?” Yes; it entails writing about a style and a type of music that I usually leave to others more expert than myself. The chances are that those who are involved will know intimately the experience I am about to relate, and will think me downright ignorant not to have known about it in the first place.

Recently I have been listening to WC Handy’s St Louis Blues. Yes of course I knew the tune and the song. Doesn’t everybody? Is it not one of the most famous, universally known tunes ever penned? I suspect it is. I don’t remember the first time I heard it, but I seem to have known it all my life. In the days when I could still find my way around a keyboard, I could play it. And is it not a song that didn’t so much break as establish a mould, if not a genre, ploughing a furrow for a million and more songs in a similar vein?Grove’s Dictionary Of American Music would seem to agree: “St Louis Blues represented a break with the ragtime style currently in vogue and paved the way for public acceptance of negro folk blues as distinct from spirituals and work songs.”In relation to what I’ve recently been listening to, that last statement is not entirely accurate; more of that in a moment. I’ve always associated the song with Bessie Smith’s voice, but the version to which I’ve been introduced, featuring the great lady herself, is not one with which I was familiar.It’s set in a short film, St Louis Blues, made in June 1929, with an all-black cast and Smith in the title role, as it were, in what I understand was her only film appearance. It’s been described as a “dramatic interpretation” of the song. It’s more than that. It’s like a mini opera, replete with recitatives, choruses, storming instrumental sections and ballet: the dancing is out of this world. It’s a complete artwork, with a great crowd scene in a bar staffed with near-acrobatic barmen, boogieing on the spot, tray-twirling, and never a drop spilled.The opera analogy is extravagant; but this has got the lot, all of it expressed and enshrined in jazz and blues idioms. WC Handy himself was music director and wrote the choral score, which is an absolute blinder: a masterpiece of sophisticated choral writing, designed to sound natural and spontaneous.And this is where Grove’s is wrong. The choral writing, which is sensational in performance, is derived entirely from black American song traditions: of gospel singing, close-harmony singing and the work song. You can hear the call-and-response style; you can hear the sonorous harmonies of the spirituals tradition, while the blues choral “shout” is electrifying. The band, James P Johnson’s, staffed with players from Fletcher Henderson’s outfit, is out of this world; and their playing during bad-guy Jimmy’s explosive, virtuosic, bendy-legged tap dance is roof-raising.All of this is packed into 16 minutes. And there is a coup de grace of inspirational genius (Handy’s?) as sharp-suited Jimmy abandons dejected Bessie once again, the choir sings a final choral lament and the band, in a stunning coda, blazes in with a direct quotation of the orchestral climax from Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue. Rhapsody In Blue was written in 1924, so was still quite young. Clearly, within five years, it had already become the quotable America musical icon that it remains to this day.There will be a single showing of St Louis Blues in the Club Room of the City Hall during the Glasgow Jazz Festival on July 1 at 7.30pm. Admission is free but ticketed; visit www.jazzglasgow.com.

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St Louis Blues? It’s a mini opera

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