Lowside Blues

Joanna MacGregor is one of Britain's leading concert pianists — a Bach specialist, a contemporary-music champion (Birtwistle, Reich, Adès), and head of piano at the Royal Academy of Music. Her own compositions sit in a jazz-tonal idiom shaped by her work as a curator of cross-genre festivals. Lowside Blues takes a slow blues form and expands it into a Grade 7 character piece with a richer harmonic vocabulary than a strict twelve-bar.

Technically the piece tests three things at concert standard. First, a swung quaver feel sustained at slow tempo — slow swing is harder than fast swing because every off-beat is exposed. Second, a left-hand walking-bass or stride pattern that must stay quiet under the right-hand line. Third, blue-note inflection in the melody: the player must lean into the blue notes the way a singer would, with a tiny weight, then release.

Two pitfalls. First, students play the swung quavers straight at slow tempo — the blues feel evaporates. Second, the left-hand bass becomes louder than the right — bring it back to mp and let the right hand sing.

Listening: PD jazz piano (Jelly Roll Morton, James P. Johnson, selected on Musopen) calibrates the blues-stride idiom MacGregor inherits. For slow-swing reference, the closest accessible PD blues recordings come from W.C. Handy and early-jazz piano.