# Ravel Writes the Blues



## timothyjuddviolin (Nov 1, 2011)

Ravel's G Major Piano Concerto and Violin Sonata No. 2 and their jazz influence:

Ravel Writes the Blues


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

Ravel composed some fine music; he had insufficient feel for jazz, hence the PC in G is a challenge to listen to. Some days the bad overpowers the good.


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## DrKilroy (Sep 29, 2012)

Some of my favourite compositions by Ravel! Thank you. :tiphat:

Best regards, Dr


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

Ravel's G Major Concerto is VERY jazzy! Love it!!!


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

Ukko said:


> Ravel composed some fine music; he had insufficient feel for jazz, hence the PC in G is a challenge to listen to. Some days the bad overpowers the good.


Well obviously I disagree about the G major concerto! But that said I'd also add that in jazz the "feel" is supposed to come from the musicians. Many different players perform the standards, some "swing" more than others, the "feel" is about the musicians more so than the composers as you can't really precisely notate "feel" or "swinging" jazzy rhythms. The musicians have it or they don't.

Not that I necessarily think interpreters should try to make Ravel sound jazzier rhythmically though, as I think Ravel's goal was to incorporate jazzy elements into classical music, not the other way around.


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

hpowders said:


> Ravel's G Major Concerto is VERY jazzy! Love it!!!


not really in my opinion, there's a bit of blues in the beginning (it reminds me a bit of that little but beautiful "blue lullaby" of Gershwin) but I really like it.


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## spradlig (Jul 25, 2012)

He wrote more than one violin sonata?



timothyjuddviolin said:


> Ravel's G Major Piano Concerto and Violin Sonata No. 2 and their jazz influence:
> 
> Ravel Writes the Blues


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## ahammel (Oct 10, 2012)

spradlig said:


> He wrote more than one violin sonata?


Three, acutally. M1, which is lost, M12, an early work published posthumously, and M77, which is the good one.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

My favorite blues by a "classical" composer is in the third movement of Prokofiev's Violin Sonata no. 2. (From 1:08) Have no idea if he was actually thinking of blues, but if he was, it was thoroughly assimilated. This performance is maybe a bit over-precious:






Re Ravel's comment about American composers and blues: William Grant Still wrote a blues symphony that, to my ears, demonstrates little understanding of the blues.


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

EdwardBast said:


> [...]
> Re Ravel's comment about American composers and blues: William Grant Still wrote a blues symphony that, to my ears, demonstrates little understanding of the blues.


I wonder if the Greek Stoics would have understood the blues. Maybe they were one valley away. Damn near all white folks are at least one valley away - and sound doesn't carry well between valleys. Maybe WGS understood the blues very well, but couldn't make them into a symphony. Seems like that would be way harder than writing a jazz mass.

Jazz isn't blues anyway. It's relationship varies from nephew to cousin several times removed. Ravel makes references to a cousin.


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

Ravel was not trying to write "classical jazz/blues". Ravel wrote classical music with some influences from the jazz/blues of the time. 
To judge that music by looking for explicit jazz emulation is the wrong way to listen.
The way Ravel uses jazz/blues is similar to the way in which he uses asian music in pieces like Ma mère l'oye.
Ravel uses those influences in his own personal way.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

timothyjuddviolin said:


> Ravel's G Major Piano Concerto and Violin Sonata No. 2 and their jazz influence:
> 
> Ravel Writes the Blues


Thanks Timothy, I enjoyed read that. I think that whole interwar period was a fascinating time for music. One of the places where composers like Stravinsky, Ravel and members of Les Six mixed it with jazz musicians and literary figures like Jean Cocteau was the _Le Boeuf sur le Toit _nightclub. Pianist Jean Wiener, a protégé of Satie who went into jazz and later did film scores, organized variety type shows there which included all manner of things, performances of classical (sometimes by the composer himself at piano) as well as jazz and cabaret. Initially _Le Boeuf_ was a cabaret, after WWII it became a jazz club.

American jazz musos flooded the city after WWII, but there was no shortage of them in between the wars either (I know Louis Armstrong paid a visit there, and returned after the war). Post WWII you had the likes of Art Blakey, Sarah Vaughan, Bud Powell and dozens of other big names play Paris, making recordings there and appearing in venues such as the Olympia.

You also had locals such as Michel Legrand, who also crossed into film, and in cabaret and chanson the likes of Edith Piaf. There where quite a few long term residents from Belgium as well, the legendary Django Reinhardt amongst them.

Paris and jazz go together, just like Paris and classical. Then there's chanson and electronic music - Piaf started putting taped sounds of glass shattering, trains and ship horns to illustrate her songs, just as Varese was doing it in his pieces like _Deserts_, premiered in Paris.

And what of Ravel's famous line about his concerto, saying that an aim to entertain was not incompatible with classical music being good (like Mozart or Haydn), "it is my opinion that the music of a concerto can be happy and brilliant and that it is not necessary to strive for depth or dramatic effects."

Indeed, often its not easy - and maybe unnecessary - to tell the difference who is doing what. As Vienna moved in one direction, Paris became the epicenter of another, so too Berlin and New York in "the New World," there was this symbiotic relationship between all of them.

As I said, fascinating area, for Ravel and all that other stuff!


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Ukko said:


> I wonder if the Greek Stoics would have understood the blues. Maybe they were one valley away. Damn near all white folks are at least one valley away - and sound doesn't carry well between valleys.


Where I come from we all grew up in the same valley. Couldn't have escaped one another if we wanted to.



Ukko said:


> Maybe WGS understood the blues very well, but couldn't make them into a symphony. Seems like that would be way harder than writing a jazz mass.


Yes, this sounds like an equally reasonable interpretation of the evidence. I was perhaps being ungenerous. On reflection I would say a blues symphony might just be an idea whose time never was.



Ukko said:


> Jazz isn't blues anyway. It's relationship varies from nephew to cousin several times removed. Ravel makes references to a cousin.


Oh, I don't know, sometimes they look like brothers. But not in Ravel's case.


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

EdwardBast said:


> Where I come from we all grew up in the same valley. Couldn't have escaped one another if we wanted to.
> 
> Yes, this sounds like an equally reasonable interpretation of the evidence. I was perhaps being ungenerous. On reflection I would say a blues symphony might just be an idea whose time never was.
> 
> Oh, I don't know, sometimes they look like brothers. But not in Ravel's case.


There are critics who say that altough blues is not always jazz, jazz is always blues. Probably it's not true, but the blues was and is an essential part of jazz. The harmonic language of the great jazz composers was very influenced by the blues, and this is true also for many standards of the great american songbook, the songs of Gerswhin, Harold Arlen, Hoagy Carmichael.


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

EdwardBast said:


> Re Ravel's comment about American composers and blues: William Grant Still wrote a blues symphony that, to my ears, demonstrates little understanding of the blues.


Why? I don't remember it perfectly but when I listened to it I liked it. And it must be added that Still was very involved in the jazz world, he was also an arranger of jazz music. By the way If I remember well Gunther Schuller considers him one of the greatest american orchestrators.


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## poptart (Jul 15, 2013)

I love the Piano Concerto in G Major. When I first heard it I genuinely thought the first movement was Gershwin. And the second movement is intensely moving.


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

poptart said:


> I love the Piano Concerto in G Major. When I first heard it I genuinely thought the first movement was Gershwin. And the second movement is intensely moving.


The second movement is absolutely gorgeous. One of my favorite moments in all music.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

LOL. Ravel never wrote a blues in his entire life.

He did write a more generic tourist's post card version in that piano and Violin sonata movement.

I hear not a trace of anything at all attempting to sound like or directly allude to blues or jazz in the Piano concerto in G: the most I think one could say is that he wrote something with a similar energy in the first and last movements of the G major. This is a European composer with his own already quite established style who picked up and used perhaps a few notions about the MO of jazz, or blues, and who used them ever so slightly in a work which is still wholly in his own voice.

Stravinsky never wrote 'jazz' or 'ragtime' either. These composers were fascinated with a few operating devices about the modality, the overall configurations of the music, and its rhythms.


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