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Ellington and Cole-man Hawkins, had to acquire the idiom consciously. The ease with which blues traveled and the very possibility that musicians from widely different backgrounds could master it suggests that blues was just part of a more widespread African American musical inheritance, and also that it was a transportable, itinerant music built for travel, whether on a train, or through the media of radio and recording. It was a kind of music that was everywhere, if you knew where to listen. As Ellington wrote, “I went on studying, of course, but I could also hear people whistling, and I got all the Negro music that way. You can't learn that in any school.” 13
    The blues, stylized verse in song, is both a poetic idiom and a distinctive musical sound. Blues singing, as ethnomusicologist Jeff Todd Titon observed, employed a particular kind of vocal production: “The tone quality of early downhome blues singing largely resulted from the way the singer enunciated his words. Singing with an open throat, he relaxed his lips and mouth and kept his tongue loose, low, and toward the back of his mouth. This position favored certain kinds of vowels and consonants and made it somewhat difficult to produce others.” 14 Titon noted that blues singers employ nasal, rasping sounds not used in their ordinary speaking voices, effects that can be traced to the “heterogeneous sound ideal” or “timbral mosaic” of African music. 15 In the blues, speech and song mix; in instrumental blues, the instrument always has a vocal quality: “the nasal, foggy, hoarse texture that delivered the elisions, hums, growls, blue notes and falsetto, and the percussive oral effects of their ancestors.” 16 In his classic study Stomping the Blues Albert Murray uses the terms blues and jazz interchangeably, but the blues encompasses many musical idioms beyond the usual boundaries of jazz. Buddy Bolden, often cited as the musician who brought the streams of ragtime and blues together, as well as the secular and the sacred, and the spoken and sung elements in African American music, played “with a moan in his cornet that went all through you, just like you were in church or something…made a spiritual feeling go through you. He had a cup, a special cup, that made that cornet moan like a Baptist preacher.” 17 Bolden's playing also took its timbre from the streets, from the sounds of itinerant ragmen playing long tin horns, party instruments that produced blues sounds later imitated on the trumpet. 18 The translation of blues from voice to instrument therefore was not an artistic elevation of a folk form into an art genre, but rather a complex process of interweaving many oral and aural traditions to pass on a body of experience and wisdom—folk songs without words.
    Within the realm of jazz the blues retains its poetic and timbral character, but it also serves as the basis of instrumental improvisation. When jazz musicians play the blues, they conceptualize the form in terms of a twelve-bar phrase structure, or “chorus,” divided into three four-bar phrases, following the stanza form. They create melodic lines using the pitches of a “blues scale,” which is usually understood to include major and minor versions of the third, seventh, and sometimes fifth degrees of the scale, and they follow a standard harmonic pattern, such as (one chord per measure):
    I-IV7-I-I7
    IV-iv-I-VI
    ii-V-I-I
    Because all blues restate the same harmonic and poetic patterns over and over again, they are all genetically related, though perhaps at different removes. These degrees of separation might be termed stylizations; we might, accordingly, listen to “Blue Light” the way we hear Chopin's mazurkas. But that would extract them from the intertextual continuum of their own culture, in which, as we have seen, different genres mingled easily. To see how “Blue Light” dialogues with other kinds of