here's a great passage from "Deep Blues" by Robert Palmer that I think can
be applied to Detroit techno & house
Here he is addressing "blue notes"
"This is the expressive core of the hollers, work songs, spirituals that
have not been substantially influenced by white church music, and later the
blues, especially Delta blues. You can hear it, or suggestions of it, in
African vocal music from Senegambia to the Congo, and it has special
significance among the Akan-speaking people of Ghana, who suffered the
depredations of English and American slavers through most of the period of
the slave trade. Akan is a pitch-tone language in which rising emotion is
expressed by falling pitch, and in Akan song rising emotion is often
expressed by flattening the third. There seems to be a direct continuity
between this tendency and blues singing, for blues singers habitually use
falling pitches to raise the emotional temperature of a performance.
Usually these falling pitches are thirds, but Muddy Waters and other
vocalists and guitarists from the Delta tradition also employ falling
fifths, often with shattering emotional effect."
It's not a great leap to follow the tradition -
MEK
