13. THE SLAVE COAST

What do Flamenco and Blues have in common? Both styles feature structured improvisation. Both originated with song forms that were later accompanied and imitated on the guitar. They share features in the areas of tonality and harmony that are non-European, several of which are also common in Islamic music culture. They even share some terminology. A good example is the flamenco term zambra (celebration featuring music). Linguists indicate that this term is related to the African-American word jamboree, and that neither is descended from the other, but that both are derived from an earlier ‘parent’ word. Similarly, the word bandolon (Spanish oval-bodied guitar) and banjo both spring from some older source. To understand how this came to be, we must study the history of the slave trade. In the same time period, free African sailors (who constituted a large percentage of the maritime work force) functioned as a sort of musical link between Africa and the New World. Playing on fretless string instruments, these musicians could have played European and African music with equal facility. Africans in North America fashioned fretless banjos for generations before the fretted version of the instrument appeared. The need to play essentially African music on the guitar led to two important innovations. Choking is pulling a stopped (fingered) note slightly to one side to raise its pitch, traditionally about a quarter step. The other is the use of a glass or bone slide to stop a string at pitches unavailable using the frets. Apparently, in the early twentieth century, Gypsy musicians working on cruise ships introduced several Afro-Cuban forms to the Flamenco repertoire, among them the guajiras, rumba, milonga, and tango. It should be noted that the Flamenco tango and milonga bear little resemblance to the Argentine tango and milonga (it has been suggested that the term ‘tango’ comes from an African word meaning ‘night club’). At any rate, it is possible that both Flamenco and Blues were influenced by a now-vanished style. This could have been a cosmopolitan style of dance music featuring solo vocals, contrasting a pentatonic or hexatonic melody with a fuller tonal language in the guitar. Early Blues featured not only a neutral third, but a slightly flat minor seventh. It is interesting that a bouzouki fretting used in Morocco and parts of the Mediterranean rim gives the same pentatonic scale.