Miles of Blues

Miles of Blues – Cd – Franco Morone – front cover

Starting from a few lines of blog is true, a musical genre is similar to a spoken language that has its own vocabulary, terminology, grammatical rules, punctuation and so on. In the same way, a musical tradition preserves elements that distinguish one’s own language: scales with certain intervals, accents, dynamics, rhythms, progressions and typical harmonies according to certain rules. So far so simple that the blues by its nature does not love too much fixed rules, is born and developped in a context not preordained in detail, there is just a little of formal.
Everything is born in a natural and spontaneous way, take it or leave, almost uncultivated and yet in its own way productive. More than written language is spoken language made of dialects and slangs acquired with the listener’s passion combined with the musician’s mileage.The direct experience made of practices transmitted orally, acquired by ear, makes the blues the traditional genre par excellence … it was then the white to codify writing trying to fix the notes on the paper, passages that however by their nature are changeable and subject to changes in the mood of the musician.
This practice led to forms of improvisation developed later with jazz. What would jazz be like without the blues? Probably a language without a backbone …. I listened to musicians who bypassed the blues jumping in jazz right away, result?: complex sentences and brain executions, the result of pure academic exercise. Notes that as a flooded river spread everywhere randomly, simple sentences and meaning are considered obvious, too easy to play. When a language becomes deficient in its essential features it detaches itself from its roots and becomes something else.
As Miles Davis teaches, it is necessary not only to play the right notes, the black ones to be clear, but also to avoid playing too many. So knowing how to use silence that translates into a clever use of pauses.
Imagine the listener who is hit by fourteen sixteen breathless shots, it is easy to get tired immediately. The musician who plays them without listening to the contrary seems not to get tired. It may seem like a paradox, but sometimes the desire to amaze, to demonstrate at all costs their ability in a self-celebrative way are temptations that, if not regulated, can take over.
Precisely for this reason the musician, during his artistic career, is better he keeps the sound passion of a listener, above all of the music he produces. In the case of the blues, the listener-musician captures the mood, the accents, the howling blue notes, the vibrati, all those feelings implied or openly declared that jump out of the lines of the pentagram. In case nothing happens, before the doubt cought that you are not in a position to get excited, get back on the road, looking for other miles away. Sometimes it’s just a matter of looking elsewhere. Yes, because often the notes that we find occasionally without effort are not enough. We need to look far and wider towards the borders.

Franco Morone tour in France

So one day we find a musical phrase that moves something inside as it has content. Successions of notes and harmonic progressions set on a rhythm that takes us away and away… now we know where and how to look, it also works with people, places and everything we love to have around. When we become aware of what we really like we have taken a step forward as persons and as musicians. Through a rigid selection of what we are passionate about, we can also transmit something coherent, a personality, our style … it is not a choice: at this point it is a natural consequence. And it is also right that we do not like everything about the blues, it is normal that in a musical genre we find things that leave us indifferent. In blues we find everything and its opposite: passion and indifference, transgression and tradition, black and white, sexual charge and forced abstinence, religious gospels and profane voodoo practices, prison blues and songs of freedom, and then still walking, talking blues.
Who has a blues, as we once said, is someone who has something to say, who has a history lived in the first person, not necessarily sad, that of the sadness of the blues is a common place; here it is someone who communicates and who wants to involve others.
This is perhaps why we immediately loved the blues, it was a love at first sight, certainly not a simple itchy juvenile as it still lasts.
The success of the blues throughout the world has always symbolically represented the revenge of an oppressed people, it is the story of many years ago, but it is always nice to remember it, because in this case music has never contributed to the integration of different cultures.
And then in the strictly instrumental sense how to resist the transport of rhythm, energy that ramifies further styles and genres such as ragtime, boogie, swing, jazz, rock, country, enters songs and ballads to multi-ethnic mixes. A journey of endless contaminations because however in the blues the road becomes more important than the same destination, as in the stories of Kerouac.
It does not matter if it is the main road, a mule track or maybe the crossroads of the film crossroads. Rather, even in real life it is better to avoid pacts with the devil, you risk having to be grateful for a lifetime. At some point in our existence a crossroads more seriously obliges us to take a direction … otherwise as in the song by Jimmy Cliff we find ourselves sitting in limbo, waiting for someone to take us along a road that we have not chosen … wow yes it’s late now, about this song, I should have told you about my new CD Miles of Blues but it’s never easy to talk about your own music, then the notes you play sometimes say a lot more than those written, for those who listen, for whom still believe it …