Cross-pollination is a wondrous thing. Over the last few months I've been reading about two topics that might seem quite far apart: ancient Greek tragedy and American jazz. In the first category, I'm working my way through all the extant tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and also reading literary and philosophical analysis of tragic drama, such as Walter Kaufmann's Tragedy and Philosophy. In the second category, I've been reading biographies of great jazz musicians and composers (Armstrong, Ellington, Monk, Mingus, Coltrane, etc.) as well as historical and philosophical analysis of the meaning of jazz and blues in American culture, especially some amazing books by Albert Murray and some essays by Ralph Ellison.
Both Murray and Ellison (who happen to have been close friends) touch on similarities and differences between tragedy and the blues. Here's Ellison from his 1945 essay "Richard Wright's Blues"...
Let us close with one final word about the blues: their attraction lies in this, that they at once express both the agony of life and the possibility of conquering it through sheer toughness of spirit. They fall short of tragedy only in that they provide no solution, offer no scapegoat but the self.
In his books Stomping the Blues, The Hero and the Blues, and The Blue Devils of Nada, Murray goes even farther: he argues that the purpose of blues music is to stomp on blues feelings in such an earthy yet elegant way that our fears and sorrows are transformed (even if only temporarily) into an aesthetic celebration of resilience and spontaneity. The essence of blues and jazz is, he says, "improvisation in situations of disruption" and "affirmation in the face of adversity" (conditions that any honest reader of American history knows were faced in abundance by the descendents of captive Africans who invented these musics in the first place).
As I reflect more deeply on these topics, I might even write a longer essay for publication. Stay tuned!
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)