O Pato

The summer is almost over... but the ducks are still quacking! This week's jazz piano cover is a samba called "O Pato" (aka The Duck), composed by Jayme Silva and Neuza Teixeira. These kinds of songs make us think about how the boundaries of musical styles change over the years.

When you think of jazz, swinging songs from the '40s and '50s like I've Got Rhythm might be the first ones to come to mind. (Okay, I.G.R was written in 1931.) However, the genre has become further and further spread out over time.

For example, a song might be written that doesn't exactly fit within the jazz genre, but wouldn't be perfectly classified as a rag, either. To try and fix this problem, a new "subgenre" is created. But then, there's the stuff on the edge of the subgenre, and different types of music are subdivided more and more, until the sub-sub-subgenres are splitting up the music of individual bands. So, making subgenres doesn't really work - the only way to describe the song is half jazz and half ragtime. Therefore, it becomes included in both umbrellas, making them grow.

 
The same thing can happen with colors, an example I've been using for my last couple of posts. For example, take a look at these different shades of blue.

You see that big box just above the bottom left, the greenest of these colors? Is it green, or blue? This is the same kind of thing we were talking about on my Scrapple from the Apple post.  Perhaps you could ask the computer used to generate the image, but it would probably respond with "00ffff",

Yeah. That was really helpful...

"Helpful" in the sense that a duck answering this question with "Quack!" is helpful. Image by Thomas B. from Pixabay

*00ffff represents an equal mixture of green and blue. According to the computer, three specific shades of red, green, and blue are the only "true" colors, and everything else is a mixture of these. So, whether you say the cyan box is green or blue, you're technically wrong. Okay, I'm done talking about computers.

So, we invent a new subgenre called "cyan." But then take a second to think: where did other divisions like turquoise and teal come from? Those are made by all those little subgenres.

But, unlike the computer's color system, there isn't one song that defines what jazz is. Therefore the definition of a certain genre of music can change as new songs are written and people's interests change.

Those umbrellas from earlier can move around, get bigger, and start overlapping each other. Maybe instead of trying to define everything, we should accept those cyan boxes and try to work with them, even if it's hard to move with these definitions as they change.

If the edge of an umbrella is directly over your head, are you inside or outside?  Image by Pexels from Pixabay

And, it might be hard to keep filling up your teacup with music, but it's an important thing to do. If you;d like to come back here every Wednesday but you just can't remember, I encourage you to subscribe to my email list. I won't send you anything except the latest posts from Tea with Liya!

~Liya