Bruce Arnold kicks it up a notch with “Art of the Blues” (MSK 157) Great musicians have been doing their own take on the blues since the form was created, and now Bruce Arnold joins their company with Art of the Blues. Arnold has exhibited astonishing versatility with his various projects, tackling pieces as disparate as Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” and Native American chants. He is best known however, for his explorations into the application of 12-tone theory in jazz improvisation. Arnold here applies a similar intellectual rigor to the 12 tracks that are by turns lyrical, spare, haunting and always intriguing. As Bruce explains it: “In Art of the Blues I have applied the structural rhythmic and harmonic ideas that I have been working with over the past several years to the blues form. These structures deal with small three note groups and the superimposition of time fields over a basic pulse. I’ve used the unit of a ...