Blue Note Spirituality

I teach a student who has absolutely no business knowing what he knows about the blues. In perfect detail, he can describe the different types of blues scales and how they differ from the standard diatonic, or major, scale. After I had simply asked why a blues clip I played sounded different from a popular rock song my students listened to, he shouted, “They use different scales!” I simply expected someone to say, “It sounds different” or, “It sounds sad.” Instead, I was witness to a primer on music theory.

We had been reading Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie. The novel looks to synthesize the cultural legacies of African Americans with the Spokane nation in Washington and uses the blues as the common language to bring the two together. It opens with Robert Johnson at a desolate intersection on the Spokane reservation.