Nick wrote:Yep, I wondered about that as well. in fact
"Do you mean Blues is the roots of modern western late 20th/early 21st century popular music."
Much as I love the blues.
Well my comment was meant to be take in light not an attack on music generally but let's say from 1909 is was believed was the first documented blues to be written
http://academic.scranton.edu/student/pe ... page2.html
But that saying blues is the roots of all music is true in today's modern music you will almost certainly find blues notes cords across all the various types of music
Yes indeed we have our Western style which is entirely different to other cultures. My Soudi lodger likes to listen to some Urd (don't know the spelling) which is a bit like a 12 string guitar and they don't use anything familiar ot our musicians.and clapping togFlamenco people h
My tutor studied flamenco and as he was a drummer he spent many years researching the tympanic sounds coming from the Morish originated Spanish culture. The tympanic methods even down to the hand clapping techniques and the Flamenco guitar are entirely different to out styles.
But in our small over inflated Western history we can hark back to the Blues for quite a lot of modern stuff true.
You should hear two people who can make all the wide variation of hand clap sounds in unison. It is AWTHUMB.
Yep, its a subject of great interest to me, the blues can trace its roots back to Africa, and the disconnect between that history and the European twelve tone system can be seen by the problems that fixed tuning instruments (like the piano) have playing blues. But those African traditions are just one of many non European ones, and as Paul mentions instruments like the Oud have no frets so is not chromatic. A lot of world music requires at least a quarter tone system to contain it (24 notes in a octave unlike our standard 12 tones). So the "blue note" as such is not only from the blues, in fact it can be found in traditional folk tunes and Celtic music. And of course the far eastern musical systems also don't use the European one either.
Whenever an honest man discovers that he's mistaken, he will either cease to be mistaken or he will cease to be honest.