"Now see here, son, if you're going to continue to live rent free in this house, you are going to live by my rules. So let's make one thing clear right now: the Blues is now and will continue to be an essential component of Jazz. If you aren't willing to accept that, you are welcome to move out and pay your own bills."

No one ever said that to me when I was growing up. And I don't say that to my students, but only because they don't live with me. It's what they call a "conceit," it's true because I say it's true, because in my world it's ridiculous to question it. The Blues. Why get so committed to it? What engenders such loyalty?

At it's essence, Blues is not a form, or a scale. It's a particular type of expression, an expression of a feeling. The dorian mode gives you a certain feeling when Miles plays it. The Harmonic Minor scale mode V gives you a certain feeling in Sephardic folk music. So does Melodic minor mode VII coming from the hands and heart of Thelonious Monk. That's what the Blues is. A good Blues phrase will mean different things to different people, but they will all feel something.

There are those who think Eric Clapton when they think Blues. Think Louis Armstrong and Cootie Williams for the rest of the story. The idea of a Pentatonic scale having some kind of primacy misses the point also. It's about intervals, sound, and timing. Clapton and pentatonics are guitar conceits, it's bigger than that. Blues is basically about tension and release. It's also useful to think of it as a vocal style, more like Opera rather than like instrumental music. Whether your instrument is a trumpet, a guitar or the human voice, the Blues cannot be played, it can only be sung.

Tension and release ala Blues can be accomplished to a surprisingly sophisticated degree using only roots, thirds, fourths and fifths of the major scale. The fourths provide the tension, the rest provide the release. And if you bend, slur, hammer or otherwise articulate the thirds, there's your vocal inflection. But the X factor is what you do rhythmically. The rhythms of speech are both infinite and highly personal. Rhythm is key to expression of both tension/release and vocal lyricism.

You want to think about these things, not only to identify them in the work of others, but moreover to find a path toward uncovering your own musical identity.

Then you work on your lines, individual phrases, and also series of phrases that relate in some way. You play for long periods of time with the intention of sounding good on a G7 chord, for example. What you do must satisfy two conditions: it should sound good and it should be easy to play. Whether or not it sounds good depends on if you have good taste. Having good taste depends on whether or not you've checked out enough music and poetry, studied enough art, architecture and sculpture, enough literature, enough dance, theatre and cinema, so that at the end of the day you know what's good. These are things you can do something about.

You might want to check out some Blues, too, obviously. How it's sung and how it's played. There are regional differences. They do it a certain way In Chicago, a little different in Kansas City. They have a certain thing in Memphis, something else in Austin. Then there's New Orleans. The distinctions were clearer in the past than they are now, but they're still there. Get the records and get to the clubs.

Jazz players think in terms of three different levels of harmonic sophistication within the 12 bar form. More or less chords is the difference. Traditional Blues is like Honky Tonk or the beginning of St. Louis Blues. Billie's Bounce is an example of Standard Blues changes. Then there is New Blues, aka Bird Blues. Chi Chi and Freight Train are New Blues. You certainly hear Blues expression in these forms, but you also hear bebop or swing language. And there are countless harmonic variations across all the tunes. Not so simple.

Blues are not generic, what you do is specific to the chords of the tune in question. If Bird wrote certain chords in bar 7 and 8 of Bloomdido, he solos on those chords, and you should too. Again, not so simple. When Monk plays Blues, his solos will usually borrow heavily from the melody as well as the chords. So musicians who say, "It's just a Blues" are to be regarded with skepticism until proven otherwise.

Educators don't help, either. They often represent it as a gateway style into jazz improvisation. Really? You have to have something to say. Most college music students haven't been in jail, or been divorced, or hitch hiked across the country, ok, maybe some of them had a dog that died, but you need to have lived joy and pain and survived if you are going to get over with people who have lived all of the above. This isn't pop music.

Charlie Parker famously practiced Blues changes (and Rhythm changes) in 12 keys. Take it seriously. Fifty thousand honkin' sax players walking the bar can't be wrong. Most of them will never be Charlie Parker level, but they mean what they're playin' up there.