AUGUST: Mark Winborn - Deep Blues: Human Soundscapes for the Archetypal Journey - ARCHIVED-Book Club 2012-2013

I'd like to welcome Alliance members to the August book club discussion of Deep Blues. As a general structure I'll suggest we focus on Chapters 1 (Introduction) and 2 (The Genesis of the Blues) during this week, Chapters 3 and 4 during the 2nd week, Chapter 5 during the 3rd week, Chapter 6 during the 4th week, and Chapters 7 & 8 during the last week of the month. Naturally, this will be a loose guideline and everyone is free to ask questions and offer reflections that don't necessarily fit into the chapter structure outlined above.

The primary focus of the book is the interaction between psyche and the music of the blues. The music itself is about hearing and resonating with the pain, suffering, joy, or sadness in the voice of the blues singer. The understanding of the blues comes through the direct experience of the music rather than through the intellect.

The word “blues” is derived from the term “blue devils” which referred to contrary spirits that hung around and created sadness. I believe it is the capacity of the blues to speak at an archetypal level about universally felt experiences that give power to the blues for both the performer and the audience.

Understanding the blues is similar to a perspective about images offered by Carl Jung - "Image and meaning are identical . . . the pattern needs no interpretation: it portrays its own meaning." In light of this, my aim is to let the musicians speak for themselves as much as possible. To facilitate our experience and discussion I plan to include links to audiovisual excerpts of blues performances to highlight the material being discussed.

To kick off our discussion I'll offer a video, recorded in 1966, of Chicago blues great Howlin Wolf (aka Chester Burnett) who offers his definition of the blues followed by a performance of How Many More Years. Howlin Wolf was a large, intimidating character who stood 6'6" tall, weighed nearly 300 pounds, with a deep growling voice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ou-6A3MKow

After viewing the Howlin Wolf video, I'd suggest we begin with our reactions to the Wolf's comments and offer some of our own personal experiences with blues music.

I appreciate your participation in this discussion group and look forward to hearing your comments about blues music and the book Deep Blues during the coming month.

Warm Welcome,

Mark Winborn

Bonnie - the notion of "field" is very appropriate for the subject. Jung was very interested in field experience and talked about it in a number of ways depending on the type of field being constellated - for example participation mystique, coniunctio, or hierosgamos. In the book I chose a more overarching term - unitary reality as proposed by Erich Neumann - to convey the idea of shared experiential fields. Contemporary infant observation research now helps confirm the powerful influence "ordinary" field states between mother and child have on the internal shaping of the child's psychic experience (as well as the mother's). So it is clear that greater healing/transformative potential occurs when a field is constellated between two individuals - be it parent/child interaction, a therapeutic dyad, or at a blues performance.

My experience as a musician is very consistent with this. It's most palpable within the experience of playing in a band. When a band is working well together there is an organic third that rises up among the various band members that is rooted in the beat - the rhythm that holds us all together. I experience it as being like all of us are riding a wave of energy that we all simultaneously contribute to creating and yet the energy associated with it feels like something that is beyond the sum of our individual contributions. Similarly, this process can also be felt between the band/performer and the audience. From the stage the feeling that the audience is locked in with the band often results in a sense of bond that helps focus or deepen the music. When these experiences are happening playing and singing often feels effortless and freed from conscious intention. However, both of these experiences are something that we can be receptive to and attempt to cultivate but which can't be chased or held too tightly. I've certainly had experiences where the band couldn't establish a groove and the sense of disconnection was painful and other experiences where the audience wasn't receptive and the evening became something leaden or like slogging through molasses.

Replies

Barry Spector August 20, 2012 at 8:35pm

Hi -- Mark, would you like to trade copies of our books?
muriel sperotto August 16, 2012 at 4:58pm

Thanks Barry for sharing the essay by Ventura. It is full of history and connections relating to the blues and voodoo and Catholicism previously unknown to me. It brought back to my mind an event with a friend from the Congo. He was a new arrival to Canada and I invited him to a jazz festival. The concert we attended was in a church and the black American singers went into a musical frenzy, shouting and swaying and sweating.

I was enjoying the experience and fully expected him to do so also. But to my great surprise my Congolese friend became frightened and statue- like and wanted to leave immediately. He was quite reserved and I never quite understood his reaction. It was obviously a "dark" experience for him. What sparked his fear I still wonder?
Bonnie Bright August 16, 2012 at 4:06pm

Hi Mark, Barry, Beth, Muriel--and everyone! I'm so enjoying all the comments and especially the video links that are showing up here this month! Great stuff. After watching several of these, I wanted to dig back into the book a bit. Several people have been interested in the connection between ritual, shamanism and the blues--and I just read the section in the book starting on page 58--"The Bluesman and the Shaman."

Mark, I'm fascinated by the image you invoke when you say on p. 59 "the bluesman assumes the role of a religious 'elder' and the audience assumes the role of a ritual 'initiate.' The purpose of the 'musical convocation' is to invoke the 'spirit of the blues' and thereby unite the ritual participants." This, to me, suggests the idea of a "field" between the two--certainly what must occur between a shaman and a patient he or she is trying to heal, and perhaps also similar to what occurs between a therapist and client when they work together as well. That "third thing" as Jung described it can be the transcendent--bigger than either of the initial participants. Mark,have you experienced it that way when you play, and could that be one reason there can be healing through blues? What does everyone else think?
- Mark Winborn > Bonnie Bright August 16, 2012 at 6:17pm
  
  Bonnie - the notion of "field" is very appropriate for the subject. Jung was very interested in field experience and talked about it in a number of ways depending on the type of field being constellated - for example participation mystique, coniunctio, or hierosgamos. In the book I chose a more overarching term - unitary reality as proposed by Erich Neumann - to convey the idea of shared experiential fields. Contemporary infant observation research now helps confirm the powerful influence "ordinary" field states between mother and child have on the internal shaping of the child's psychic experience (as well as the mother's). So it is clear that greater healing/transformative potential occurs when a field is constellated between two individuals - be it parent/child interaction, a therapeutic dyad, or at a blues performance.
  
  My experience as a musician is very consistent with this. It's most palpable within the experience of playing in a band. When a band is working well together there is an organic third that rises up among the various band members that is rooted in the beat - the rhythm that holds us all together. I experience it as being like all of us are riding a wave of energy that we all simultaneously contribute to creating and yet the energy associated with it feels like something that is beyond the sum of our individual contributions. Similarly, this process can also be felt between the band/performer and the audience. From the stage the feeling that the audience is locked in with the band often results in a sense of bond that helps focus or deepen the music. When these experiences are happening playing and singing often feels effortless and freed from conscious intention. However, both of these experiences are something that we can be receptive to and attempt to cultivate but which can't be chased or held too tightly. I've certainly had experiences where the band couldn't establish a groove and the sense of disconnection was painful and other experiences where the audience wasn't receptive and the evening became something leaden or like slogging through molasses.
- Bob Cvetkovic > Mark Winborn August 18, 2012 at 5:50am
  
  Blues becomes the soundtrack of our lives
  
  It is the rhythmic cadence of affect
  
  it is an organizing principle
  
  it is a threshold phenomenon that engages, transforms and re-creates
  
  consciousness 'becomes' from the collective unconscious
  
  a threshold phenomenon a unitary moment pregnant
  
  a phase change experience
  
  matter is described as such with inorganic chemistry
  
  I am reminded of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his use of 'flow'
  
  the field is the context and the flow occurs and all are transformed
  
  I'm still waiting for the book to arrive!
- Mark Winborn > Bob Cvetkovic August 19, 2012 at 6:07pm
  
  Bob - what a great stream of ideas about the blues experience. The one that stirs me the most is the reference to Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow experience. Flow experience has the possibilty of adding a more dynamic notion to field experience between two or more individuals. Flow suggests movement - either physical or psychological - as well as being "inside" the flow. While Csikszentmihalyi's focus is more about the individual's relationship to the activity they are pursuing, rather than the sense of relational connectedness, it might be useful to include flow as a subset of field experience. Bringing it back into the blues - I'm sure we could say that being "in the groove," either as performer or listener, is a type of flow experience. This rendition of Rollin & Tumblin by Baby Face Leroy, Little Walter, and Muddy Waters certainly has a groove and flow that is difficult to resist:
  
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6N-AkuOzRw
  
  - YouTube
  
  Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.
Mark Winborn August 15, 2012 at 7:11pm

Hi Barry - wonderful to read some of your observations on your blog - particularly "A Dark Salvation" - and to be directed to Ventura's essay - which I hadn't been familiar with before. I'll look forward to looking at that in more depth and to hearing more about your writing in November.

Hopefully you'll have time after you get settled in from your move to have a look at "Deep Blues." I think you'll find we are touching on many of the same themes, perhaps with a somewhat different language, especially the distinction between ritual and entertainment. There is also a long passage in "Deep Blues" about the blues performance as an experience which becomes a mutually inductive ritual that allows connection through an experience of unitary reality (an experience which is just as valid and transformative whether one is conscious of it or not and regardless of whether one has a name for it or not). I think you'll also find the idea expressed in "Deep Blues" of the blues as an expression of shadow for American culture, an aspect of shadow which needs to be continuously claimed and incorporated, serves as a nice complement to your notion of the culture's engagement with African ritual as a means of enhancing a new American mythology.
Mark Winborn August 13, 2012 at 8:17pm

Thanks Beth for sharing the links to Stik's Blues and the Trower video. Stik's Blues underscores the improvisational nature (like jazz) underlying the blues in which the forms, lyrics, or instrumental solos can vary significantly often depending upon the performer's state of mind, location, and audience.

The notion of trance takes us directly into contact with shamanic experience since ritually induced trance is a primary means by which many shamans "journey" to other realms for knowledge of the current situation. Similarly, blues musician Little Whitt Wells said, "You know, the blues is a trance music. If it can't take you there, it ain't worth the effort, and if folks can't get there, well I guess it’s not meant for them." In shamanic healing rituals there is a mutual interaction between shaman and the "patient" where the patient willingly gives themselves over to the ritual.

Muriel's observation that the participation with the music forms a bridge that unites mind with body - resulting in observable alterations in consciousness (i.e. reduction in pain) - seems to closely parallel shamanic experience.

One of my favorite video clips that evokes the shamanic element of the blues is a very informal juke joint performance by R.L. Burnside, in which Burnside - using an amalgam of his voice tone and words, the sway of his body, and the expressions of his face -creates an inductive connection with the audience but one which constellates a variety of reactions among those gathered. Similarly, shamans often rely on eight primary attributes of gesture, use of mask, sound, silence, rhythm, repetition, respiration, and movement in performing their shamanic role.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3e-BNLYrMU
- Barry Spector > Mark Winborn August 15, 2012 at 5:31pm
  
  Hello Mark and Bonnie -- I'm glad to get some time to join the discussion (just in the middle of moving my house). I've been a fan of Blues and of the African-American aesthetic in general my whole life, and -- for the past 25 years -- of the possibility that authentic ritual may transform our personal and collective American experience. I'll speak more about these themes when my book "Madness At the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence" will be featured in the November Book Club.
  
  Very briefly, I want to propose one of the book's major ideas: The transition to a new, sustainable, life-affirming American mythology has been and will continue to be influenced by the culture’s engagement with African ritual, specifically in blues-based music. Not just so-called “entertainment,” but also through rituals of grief.
  
  I'm not the first person to suggest this. I urge everyone to read Michael Ventura's absolutely great essay, "Hear That Long Snake Moan" (http://www.michaelventura.org/writings/EB2.pdf).
  
  I blog extensively on these themes, and I’d like to point out four of them that are relevant to this discussion:
  
  “ A Dark Salvation” -- http://madnessatthegates.posterous.com/tag/barrysblog6adarksalvation
  
  “The Dancing Ground at the End of the World” -- http://madnessatthegates.posterous.com/tag/barrysblog30thedancinggr...
  
  “Didn’t He Ramble?” -- http://madnessatthegates.posterous.com/tag/barrysblog36didntheramble
  
  “Don’t You Know?” -- http://madnessatthegates.posterous.com/tag/barrysblog37dontyouknow
  
  I’m looking forward to your comments.
cheryl bach August 12, 2012 at 1:54pm

Thanks for this discussion Mark and Bonnie.

I agree with what has been said about the blues here, and see it as my Shadow self. When listen to blues, it is inside of me, a sometimes scary place that is almost undefinable. Dancing seems to sooth my soul, but even then when I get too much the grief is overwhelming.

Sharing my local blues band, an almost every Monday evening experience:

https://www.youtube.com/user/BryanDeanTrio/videos

And my fav tune:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFcZtKOgdvY

BDTAz.

Bryan Dean Trio You Tube Channel

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