Pojawienie się bluesa w Polsce. Przypadek inwersji w ewolucji gatunku muzycznego

Abstract

The emergence of blues from the aesthetics of the so-called “big-beat” in Polish popular music is a process that largely coincides with a parallel phenomenon observed in other European countries. With the expansion of rock and roll in the UK during the 1960s, many beat performers (e.g. The Rolling Stones, The Animals) turned towards blues aesthetics, attempting to imitate black American performers. It should be emphasised that this was done in isolation from the cultural context and “root” performance tradition and was a kind of experiment that, despite some cases of apparent stylistic deviation from the blues genre, brought many positive results, such as the emergence of the blues-rock subgenre or the penetration of blues elements into hard rock and progressive rock. The article’s title uses the term “inversion”, reflecting the reversed order of genre evolution. In Europe, blues did not imply the development of jazz or rock and roll, but through these genres, musicians and listeners became interested in the blues form and used its elements to transform the beat style into rock, eventually developing traditional blues performance. This article attempts to reconstruct the process of adapting blues in Poland and transforming the beat into a blues-rock style. The analysed phenomena’ chronological framework reaches back to jazz’s beginnings in the interwar period, while the clear boundary marking the emergence of blues-rock and its emancipation is the release of Breakout’s Blues album in February 1971.