Blackblue
a sketchy chapter that never made it to the presses
1959 saw the release of Abbey Lincoln’s fourth album, Abbey is Blue, featuring a cover image of the singer mid-note shaded in the titular hue. In my mind, she is captured singing Track One, Mongo Santamaria’s composition “Afro Blue.” On the very first vocal version of what was originally an instrumental song, Lincoln’s voice is dynamic: as multi-shaded as the “delights” the lyrics speak of, gliding above the horns as delicately as the song’s lovers in flight. Most often, when blue and Black are associated in music, the connotation is the blues. “Afro Blue” gives its listeners a different kind of blue. “Afro Blue” is not a lament, but a tribute to young Black love in sweltering night air, both from the heat of summer and from the heat of two bodies pressed close.
John Coltrane’s later rendition of “Afro-Blue,”1 recorded live at Birdland on October 8, 1963, is fast-paced, drum-forward, rhythmically inverted from Santamaria’s original polyrhythmic percussion. While Santamaria’s version held three beats in the space of two, (grounded in the traditions of West African music) Coltrane’s lives in the context of a new time signature.
For Robert Glasper’s 2012 album Black Radio, Erykah Badu, too, recorded a cover of Mongo Santamaria’s “Afro Blue.” Badu’s cover is similarly drum-forward to Coltrane’s but decidedly less frenetic. At 97 beats per minute, it falls into line with the heart rate of lovers locking eyes and time slowing as they magnet to each other across a club. It evades “straight time” and falls into the relaxed bounce of hip hop. Badu sings behind the beat, though not too far behind. She changes the tone of a song which has carried, throughout its history, many vibrations: from upbeat yet bluesy, and frenetic, to a casual, soulful bounce.
Sometimes blue is Abbey’s desire-driven sway with a lover, sometimes blue is Trane’s whiplash interpretation, sometimes blue spills out of its container.
For me, the wail of Coltrane’s trumpet at the 5:00 minute mark lives in the same aural universe as Etta James. More specifically: James’ gritty “Iiiiiii” in songs like “Why I Sing the Blues” performed live at Montreux in 1993. Even the throwing of a sweat-soaked towel over her sequined shoulder has its own grit, calls up the image of the preacher perspiring from the forehead as he transmits the word of some God.
Unlike any other version, Etta James’ “Stormy Weather” is the dusky gray-blue of the sky just before a raucous storm. Indeed, halfway through, James’ “Stormy Weather” becomes the raucous storm. Her deep, lilting rasp, her elongated, lingering phrasing. Her own intermittent wail and dynamic build at the bridge. These sounds open a haunted portal in the gut, making way for blackblue. It isn’t that blackblue can’t be a lament, just that it is both a lament and a tribute. There is something bright about the production of James’ rendition—the bouncy piano, plucky bass, and the swaying strings carry an irony that gets to the heart of blackblue. At times pushing her voice to its edges, James is lyrically melancholic about the loss of her man, but putting it to music opens up something in the sound that makes way for a formation of self. The studio becomes a confessional, and the listener merely eavesdrops outside the door.
Etta James’ blackblue tells a secret that I am unsure she even knows she is telling. It is haunted by the multiplicity and ambiguity of double entendre that her enslaved ancestors employed to communicate beneath recognizable figurations— language in and beneath the wail. James says, “Most of the songs I sing have that blues feeling in it. They have that sorry feeling. And I don’t know what I’m sorry about. I don’t.” The language of blackblue is extrafigurative— it can only be transmitted through affect and color, and is often impossible to name.
Similarly, it is difficult to find language for the chord changes in Stevie Wonder’s “Girl Blue”, a song charting a woman’s azure malaise that seems to come from her haunted past. The song begins with the greeting “Hello morning,” which might also be heard as “mourning” depending on the day, and given the subject matter. Somewhat suddenly, the stormy verse quickens and becomes sweeter. Beginning in B-flat minor, it progresses up and down through minor chords until it ultimately resolves into B major, giving the ending a brighter feel. Wonder’s lyrical warning, “Little girl, be smart/Don’t break your own heart.” belies the fact that blackblue is an unruly thing.
Live in New York in 1965, Nina Simone’s “Little Girl Blue” begins exactly like a lullaby. The piano enters alone as the song begins, reminding me of the music from a jewelry box my great-aunt gifted to me in childhood—a celeste-like tone accompanying the delicately painted porcelain ballerina revolving en pointe. The lyrics are deeply melancholy. Indeed, what can one do when seized by such a melancholy but count (fingers, raindrops), what can one do but keep the mind awake to keep the body alive. And in this case, the girl’s blueness is not an adjective to describe her affective state, but it becomes the primary descriptor of her personhood. In fact, we are not given her name, but she is named after her blueness itself.
In the first chapter of her book The Sound of Soul, music critic Phyl Garland writes: “Sometimes it is the gusty cry of a blues singer standing in a smoke-dimmed room where sweaty scents are compressed before a faceless but responsive audience of the “never-hads and never-wases,” shedding his own private tears of conjugal misalliance through a song-story half-talked and half-sung in down-home phrases punctuated by slurred notes sustained on an amplified guitar. And the shouts of, “Do your thing, baby!” come back from all corners of the room, a musical performance is transformed into a ritual of release.” In blackblue music, the private becomes public, and not only that, but the private becomes a communal experience shared between the performer and listener, whether live and in person in those “smoke-dimmed rooms” or across time and space on a record. There is something gutsy, gusty, guttural, from the gut, about blackblue.
Save for the lyrics, the lament of Prince’s “So Blue” might be obscured by the pop-like melody. The tone of the melody in contrast to the lyrical elegy of a lost love, the muchness of “so” blue—this nuanced contrast is blackblue. Prince’s precarious falsetto conveys blackblue just as much as Etta James’s wail. “So Blue” is delivered to its subject in second person. Though this adds an epistolary element to the song and presumes a direct address to the lost love-object, there is an undeniable sense of internal, private melancholia that undergirds the song. Its pace, the discordance between the shining sun mentioned in the lyrics and the speaker’s titular blue. This song employs blue as a color and affective state, citing the hue of the sky to illustrate the speaker’s sadness. The wafer-like, attenuated timbre of Prince’s voice edges toward a break, occupies the in-between— particularly as his falsetto cracks at “cryyying over you”. It reminded me of my father’s comment to me as I stood centimeters away from the microphone’s pop filter: “Take a big breath; you just broke.” Even as the song takes on a different sonic shape than traditional blues, it contains the love and lament, the ambivalent affect of a lilting pop sound that with a few tweaks would have an air of brightness, against the pervasive depression of the speaker.
Blue as in jazz’s “blue note”—an unexpected deviation, a shift away from standard—however slight or imperceptible, which may be interpreted as darkness. Blue as in one’s aura, meaning: intuitive listener, as in calm and calming. As in, the “blue hour” — that rapidly-closing window photographers rush to capture, when the sun has just finished its setting and it is pushed below and beyond the horizon. Even if blue is not necessarily the blues, it’s always an affective tone, a textured feel. There is darkness in it—lovesickness is an unruly illness that cannot be pathologized, hard as we try. But there is also brightness, there is always the B major chord to come back around to.
Abbey Lincoln’s articulation on Max Roach’s 1960 track “Triptych: Prayer, Protest, Peace” is deeply divergent from her rendition of “Afro-Blue” one year earlier. Particularly in the middle section, “Protest”, Lincoln’s yowls transcend words and enter into a realm much like Fred Moten’s “break”. In a live television performance in Belgium from the year 1964, Afro half pulled back and adorned in a chunky necklace over a floor length wrap dress, Lincoln’s precise dynamics range from a sharp and quiet hum that barely catches the microphone, to an operatic “eeeeee” with the slightest vibrato and the translucent clarity of glass, all against the backdrop of Max Roach’s cymbal and Eddie Kahn’s dextrous bass.
In In the Break, Fred Moten says of Lincoln,
Where shriek turns speech turns song—remote from the impossible comfort of origin—lies the trace of our descent. That place—locus of an ongoingly other recording of event, object, music—is Abbey Lincoln’s narrative. This is a recording, an improvisation, of her words, troubled by the trace of the performance of which she tells and the performance of which that performance told.
And I think to myself—what happened in the space of that twelve months, that opened Abbey up such that she lived fully in the break and could shriek like that? Such that she shrieked at all? Or, what happened that forced it into clarity: perhaps the break was already inside her—pressing at the boundaries of her diaphragm, catalyzing her caterwaul? The camera zooms in on her face and the viewer is met with the beautiful vastness of her mouth—her molars visible as she sings from somewhere deep inside her gut. Her head descends, eyes closed between screams, a sort of quickening toward that extrafigurative screech. To call it prayer feels imprecise. Instead, it is the charging up of an electric current, it is attunement to blackblue.
Erykah Badu, too, wails much, but if I had to choose, “Penitentiary Philosophy” from 2000’s Mama’s Gun, which samples Stevie Wonder’s “Ordinary Pain” approaches the break most clearly. The lyrics repeatedly ask “Why in the world do you want me to be so mad?” and yet anger is already laced in the shouts at around the 4:50-5:00 minute mark, desperation maybe, certainly the shriek. In a 2001 live performance at North Sea Jazz, her dynamics are just as modular and mutable as Abbey’s. And just like Abbey, Badu bangs a tamborine against her palm as she wails the question “Why?”
What is blackblue but the constant shift between minor chords, even if there is always B major? What is blackblue but the mist hanging above the heads of two lovers on a summer evening, living in the same world as a guttural shriek from the singer who tells both tales? What is it but blues, lament, and exaltation at once. Melancholia, the smoke-filled room.
The added hyphen almost foretelling the also hyphenated term “African-American,” nodding to African heritage.