Jazz is not Blues and Blues is not Jazz.......

In typical fashion, threads lose focus and go off in directions that are irrelevant. There is a tendency to dig one’s heels in and miss the forest for the trees.

I don’t recall anyone here claiming that there are no important differences between Blues and Jazz; or that they should be called the same thing. To claim so would be absurd. The over simplified title of the thread is only one part of the OP’s premise and complaint. The complaint was: “why do the two get lumped together?” I think that plenty of factual data has been presented and a pretty good case made for why they do get lumped together; and rightfully so. They are musical cousins having related genetic blue prints.

I think that this tune has been beaten to death and I will leave the discussion with this thought: there is a reason that I can find my Pepper Jack cheese in the same aisle as the milk 😋 (love those food analogies!).

I do find it interesting Orpheus10, knowing how many times you have come across the phrase “No Blues, no Jazz”, that this is the first time that I have noticed your objection to the premise 🤔

Frogman, you live in a musical universe of your own creation, and you never run out of "rose colored glasses".


"Feeling blue” is expressed in songs whose verses lament injustice or express longing for a better life and lost loves, jobs, and money. That's one definition.

"True Blues" has lyrics, while Blues in jazz is purely instrumental. Jazz was developed in our cities while Blues was developed in the cotton fields of the South, and the lyrics expressed deep dark misery and the desire to escape that misery.

I know if I was born in an unpainted shotgun shack in the middle of nowhere, I would most certainly have the Blues.

More often than not, the only things jazz and Blues musicians have in common is "ethnicity"; Miles Davis's father was a Dentist, and he went to Juilliard School of music in New York. What school of music did B. B. King go to?

Jazz, Blues, and Gospel were lumped together for the same reason everything else was lumped together some time ago, "ethnicity".

Even Duke Ellington had his mood indigos, but then again, he didn't pick no cotton, he just played at the Cotton Club.

Blues in jazz is purely instrumental

Oh contraire, of Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit - I think about the 2nd time I 'really' heard it, I wanted to cry... 

And also I would like to say something about  the Blues that I've always considered fascinatingly contradictory of the art form itself?

Back in the days, in the country (south) when the shotgun house was on Saturday nights, turned into a little juke joint, that house was a jumping!

With one hell of a house party! The corn liquor was flowing and the catfish was frying! Imagine that, the blues making you happy! Just to be alive! Jumpin, bumpin and grinding!