Earliest jazzers how blues-interested?

Subject: RE: Earliest jazzers how blues-interested?
From: Stringsinger
Date: 25 Jul 16 - 12:06 PM

Using documented recorded sources to identify the form known as the "blues" is one way to do it. Another way is to show the musical influence from early blues forms and how they were used by New Orleans jazz musicians and chanteuses such as Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and others. These morphed into the early jazz and would be absent in this style were it not for an acknowledgement of earlier forms of the blues. I would argue that branding in a style of music is often rigid and that music flows in variation and form through earlier influences of its practitioners. For example, one of the finest blues musicians who ever lived was Charlie "Yardbird" Parker who took the blues to a advanced musical art form. Blues scales morphed into be bop scales. Much of what we know of this music emanated from modal scales of West Africa and were transported over here during slavery. Here we see a dichotomy of approach, academic versus artistic, the former formalizing in a rigid pattern, the latter a growing, developing musical cell resulting in new forms and constantly changing.

Subject: RE: Earliest jazzers how blues-interested?
From: GUEST,Joseph Scott
Date: 25 Jul 16 - 04:24 PM

"Another way is to show the musical influence from early blues forms and how they were used by New Orleans jazz musicians and chanteuses such as Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and others. These morphed into the early jazz and would be absent in this style were it not for an acknowledgement of earlier forms of the blues." I don't understand what you mean. Bessie Smith was an unknown when Buddy Bolden stopped playing, so she didn't influence his music.

Subject: RE: Earliest jazzers how blues-interested?
From: GUEST,Joseph Scott
Date: 16 Aug 18 - 05:50 PM

"Ayer and Brown" I've learned more about Nat Ayer in his context in the last few years, and I think he likely was interested in and deliberately used 12-bar-blues music as such when he put together "Oh, You Beautiful Doll." The same applies to e.g. Lewis Muir's "When Ragtime Rosie Ragged The Rosary," 1911, in New York, and similarly with Chris Smith's "Monkey Rag," 1911, in Chicago. It seems that blues music hit New York, at all, before Handy published anything, and it seems that Les Copeland (a friend of Ayer's) and Muir would have been two of the earlier musicians to bring blues music to New York. Likely Baby Seals too. Muir was born in New York, played in St. Louis for years, and moved back to New York in 1910. He may have also been friendly with Ayer.

(Nat's younger brother Silas was known as a bandleader for Cornell dancers, and by 2/1917 had used "Homesickness Blues," "Bullfrog Blues," "Hawaiian Blues," "Rice Hotel Blues," and "Hesitation Blues.")