Friday, December 30, 2022

Composed Blues


Composed Blues


Exactly 10 years ago I wrote this blog about sets of preludes in major and minor keys. One of these sets is written by Kapustin, which I had recently "discovered" at that time.

I remember that I, back then, googled for music similar to Gershwin and found Kapustin. He was a great composer, having produced not only two sets of these preludes, but also 20 jazzy piano sonatas! In the meantime, unfortunately, he passed away in 2020.

Apart from Gershwin and Kapustin, there are many more composers who compose(d) blues or jazz for piano. Composed blues. Often jazz and blues are improvised. I remember having read an article in which Kapustin said that he preferred composing over improvizing, because it becomes "better". He could improvise very well, but still he preferred composing the pieces, that way getting perfect structure and balance.

After having found Kapustin I also found Erwin Schulhoff and Alexandre Tansman. They did not write exclusively jazz or blues, but there are quite some pieces inspired by jazz, or really jazzy or bluesy. Also we have Copland and Barber writing pieces in that style. Even Ravel wrote a cute blues for piano and violin in his violin sonata.

Recently I created a playlist where I collected 100 composed blues or jazzy piano pieces. Just jazz would have been easy (Kapustin alone wrote already hundreds of them), but I aimed to hear the more bluesy pieces, or else quite smooth and slow jazzy pieces. It is often a gray area of course. I tried to avoid foxtrot, ragtime, golliwog, cakewalk (several great composers created rag, such as Debussy, Stravinsky, Satie).

The resulting playlist contains awesome blueses and georgeous slow jazz pieces from:



The playlist on Spotify, enjoy!



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