Blue's Blue (1978)
(A musico-ethnological reconstruction for four players)

The exact date of his birth will probably never be fully clarified. 1847? 1851? (One thing is certain: he was a contemporary of Wagner, Berlioz and Verdi).
John Blue himself claimed to a tax official in 1903, as he waited for customers in front of the portal of the Creole cemetery in New Orleans, that his skin had as many layers as that of a giant Sequoia tree. Unfortunately, he was almost completely blind and his epidermis was black. These unfavorable conditions did not allow him to give a reliable prognosis of his age.

Blue spent the last and probably happiest period of his life as a lamentation man at the “Excelsior” funeral parlor on Canal Street opposite the “Coal Merchants and Plasterers” ballroom. His services were procured by mortician Liberty Boss along with the other props for funeral ceremonies. Jazz research owes Liberty a number of important documentary sources. Among other things, he wrote what was probably the first printed price list for musical settings without a clear concert character in the USA, based on – admittedly dubious – reports from slaves in the Lower Mississippi area. The only surviving copy of this rate sheet can be viewed in the permanent exhibit at the Museum of Non-White Native and Late History in Jackson, Miss. (Much of it remains valid to this day for similar events, also in predominantly non-colored Central Europe). The price list, for example, refers to “juke music boys,” an unmistakable reference to the origins and guild of the hired musicians of the time. It is well known that the term “juke box” was coined for the first public, coin-operated record consoles in reference to “juke houses”, a colloquial word for brothels. (The Jukes = New York slang term, common in the 19th century; fictitious name for a family or group of people considered inferior by their surroundings).

I cannot deny that I have always been fascinated by the blurred boundaries of definitions for acoustic activities in brothels, cemeteries and churches – offered in Liberty's installation simply as a (music) service to customers. (But already in the 15th century music played a role in the strangest places in Europe. See R. Schaub “Das Badewesen im Mittelalter”, dissertation, Frankfurt/M. 1949, quoted by E. A. Bowles in “Musikleben im 15. Jahrhundert”, Leipzig 1977). My interest in this regard has never waned, but has been largely supported by ever new views that I have been able to gain in my activity in the predominantly higher regions of musical life. An imperceptible change of function or even a painless permutation of the names of the institutions involved was also sometimes on the tip of my tongue. Perhaps there would not even have been any serious consequences.

I bought my first John Blue records at the age of fifteen in Osorno, a strange find in that arch-conservative German-Chilean town where people always stayed to the right in order to be righteous. It made sense that these were “Puritan” recordings (“America's best record”: No. 732-D, 841-A and 1011-B). Unfortunately, these records were already copies of old matrices that were used for the production of records for “graphophones” (the earlier types of “talking machines” = record players). Later, some of them were reissued by the Brunswick company (= Braunschweig). Perhaps this explains the winding route from Washington, Wis., where the “Puritan” company was based, via Lower Saxony to southern Chile?

John Blue's vocal artistry and instrumental skills made such an impression on me that I soon started playing jazz with other students. Of course, back then it was imitations – in this case a kind of Old/New-New Orleans style – as is common in the jazz world. What is exciting in jazz is not so much the momentary innovations as the crystallization of styles as soon as they have acquired the patina of time. This results in a peculiar relationship to the jazz tradition on the one hand and to the tradition of jazz cultivation on the other. Everything that is handed down from the musical past of the genre – from the legendary beginnings to just before today – everything that reaches musicians and fans as self-contained, coherent styles is classified in a coordinate system of musical jargons in which the appearance of familiar features is slightly more important than the surprise of new moments of intuition.

An ethnomusicological reconstruction?
As if they were in the intimacy of a living room or a shabby hotel room, the four musicians at this event, sitting close together, listen to ancient recordings of John Blue (“Everything is Blue in Blue's Lips”). Scratching noises and poor playback quality do not prevent these listeners from accompanying and imitating this almost unknown father figure of jazz, at first tentatively, but then in ever greater detail. And so the four players also find themselves in a special kind of musical service. In the gradually increasing, but finally complete identification with this music and the art of its interpreter, the participants attempt the public reconstruction of a frozen poetic. The result is indeed hardly predictable. It is improvised imitatively and spun further with the given elements; at the same time, something like a preservation of traces and musical osmosis takes place: The pervasive aura of the blues still has an effect on the practice of jazz today, like a self-filling pantry at the open grave of acoustic archaeology.

M.K.
(Translation by Edition Peters)