I've been looking for a description like this one for a long time. Leave it to Whitney Balliett to be the source. Sadly, The Blues seems to be a rare component of the music these days which appears to me to be more about showing off technique than anything else.
“The blues are the simplest of all jazz materials, yet they are the most difficult to play well — slow blues in particular. Their freight is emotion, and sustaining the mood and atmosphere that must be established in the first four or five bars demands great steadiness and invention. A blues solo can be destroyed by a whisper or a cough. It can be destroyed by the slightest flagging of intensity, by a poor chord change, by an uncertain rhythmic turn. Great blues solos are seizures: they possess both the player and the listener.”
“The blues are the simplest of all jazz materials, yet they are the most difficult to play well — slow blues in particular. Their freight is emotion, and sustaining the mood and atmosphere that must be established in the first four or five bars demands great steadiness and invention. A blues solo can be destroyed by a whisper or a cough. It can be destroyed by the slightest flagging of intensity, by a poor chord change, by an uncertain rhythmic turn. Great blues solos are seizures: they possess both the player and the listener.”
