[Monday Notes No. 171] Blue In Green is a track from Miles Davis’ famous album Kind Of Blue, released in 1959 and considered the most successful jazz album ever. Miles Davis wanted to explore modal jazz with this work, and helped to spread it among musicians and audiences alike. I tried to analyse the melody, harmony and form of Blue In Green. Here is what I discovered.
Let’s start with the title: Blue In Green. Any association between music and colours is obviously arbitrary, the sounds are heard while the colours are watched. Yet this title helps to illustrate the aesthetics of Miles Davis and modal music. This mixing of colours, blue and green, recalls the technique of the Impressionist painters, who towards the end of the 19th century abandoned realist painting in favour of greater freedom and creativity.
Likewise, modal jazz abandons the complicated subtleties of tonal music, with all its prescriptions such as tonality, cadences and modulation, in favour of a freer system. In modal jazz, the musician can play with fewer harmonic constraints and greater expressiveness, exploring new avenues in his or her improvisations.
Blue in Green actually is not a true modal piece, as it does not abandon the rules of tonal harmony at all. In fact, the piece is in the key of D minor, then modulates to the key of B flat major at measures 4-5 and to the key of A minor at measures 8-9.
Nevertheless, Blue In Green is an innovative piece for at least three elements: melody, form and metrics. Let us begin with the melody; while remaining within a tonal framework, with cadences and modulations, the melody almost always uses notes outside the chord, or rather notes of tension.
For example, on the first chord Gm7, the melody is on the thirteenth E. In the second measure, the chord is A7 and the melody sings C, the augmented ninth. A complete analysis of the melody follows, along with the relationship of the various notes to the underlying chords. We observe that the melody is very unusual, the theme almost seems to contradict the underlying chords, it almost always stops on tense notes.
The piece is also unusual in terms of form, as it has a duration of ten measures. Jazz standards are normally built on eight-measure phrases; there are numerous 32-measure pieces, for example, with the form AABA or ABAC. There are also 16-measure pieces, such as Summertime or Lady Bird, and of course the classic 12-measure blues.
Blue in Green, with its ten measures, therefore has an unusual form. Moreover, the beginning on the IV degree and the very sophisticated melody tend to make the beginning and end of the harmonic progression unclear, giving the feeling of a circular form.
A third element of originality in Blue In Green is the change of meter during the improvisations. The song is in fact structured in this way:
| Intro, piano and bass | 8 bars | double time |
| Theme, trumpet | 1 chorus | normal time |
| Improvisation, trumpet | 1 chorus | normal time |
| Improvisation, piano | 2 choruses | double time |
| Improvisation, sax | 2 choruses | double time |
| Improvisation, piano | 2 choruses | quadruple time |
| Improvisation, trumpet | 2 choruses | normal time |
| Theme, piano | 2 choruses | quadruple time |
The slippery and variable metre thus adds to the ten-measure form and the melody that lies on tense notes. The result is an unpredictable flow, where the sense of the chorus is almost completely lost and the discourse remains tense and liquid, depriving the listener of any point of reference. In this way, Miles Davis and his band break the classical patterns of jazz, which was strongly anchored to well-established and repetitive harmonic forms and concepts.
A quirk about Blue In Green: the song was written by pianist Bill Evans, but it was Miles Davis who signed it, crediting himself as composer. On other occasions too, Miles took credit for other people’s compositions, for example with Donna Lee composed by Charlie Parker, but registered under his own name.
Miles Davis was a musician with a strong personality. He evidently felt that his bandmates were debtors to him for the many musical ideas he shared with them, and he repaid himself by taking over their compositions! Certainly we jazz fans are indebted to him for the wonderful records he left us, including Kind Of Blue.
Until next Monday!
Mark Rothko and Blue in Green
Thanks for these interesting insights on Blue in Green. It is clear in the liner notes Bill Evans wrote for the Kind of Blue album that he believed the act of improvising and the act of painting held a lot in common. He compares a Japanese style of painting with spontaneous improvisation. Of note, his wife was Japanese, and perhaps he had extra interest or insights into that culture. But intense emotional creativity engendered in the act of painting was also an aspect of abstract expressionist painting that was a leading movement in art in New York City in the 1950s.
I cannot help but wonder and suspect that the title Blue in Green is actually a reference to Mark Rothko’s paintings of the 1950’s. These were the tremendously emotive, color-dominated “abstract expressionist” paintings. Rothko’s work was reaching it pinnacle in the late 1950’s right when Kind of Blue was recorded and released in 1959. Rothko was famous in the art world by then, and while his palette had switched to from brighter to darker colors in the late 50s, many of his pieces were titled by color, or titled by number, or simply untitled. None were titled Green in Blue although some came close. The switch form “color on color” to color in color” occurs once, and might, and for the music might have been Davis and Evans’ preference. (see below and at Mark Rothko – 180 artworks – painting )
Some of Rothko’s most intense paintings were part of a large project, The Seagram Murals of the late 1950s. At the time his studio was at 222 Bowery Street NYC, ie in lower Manhattan. This would be about 1.3 miles from the Village Vanguard to the west, and also 1.3 miles form Columbia’s 30th Street Studio where Kind of Blue was recorded. Miles Davis was born and grew up on West 77th street which is about 2.5 miles from where Rothko lived in the early to mid 1950s at 102 West 54th, just a couple blocks from the Museum of Modern Art. I lived in NYC, in Manhattan, 6 years and most things a mile away are like they are in a different city. But still, it is impossible to think these three high profile artists who were leaders in their fields did not know about each other’s work. Rothko especially intensely listened to Mozart, but also was a very widely cultured individual, and Evans clearly thought a lot about similarities between painting and musical creativity, with all aiming for very intensely emotion-filled art.
One very peculiar aspect of the Seagram Murals as explained by Rothko is that they were unconsciously heavily influenced by the Laurentian Library designed by Michaelangelo in Florence. The design, considered a great example of late Renaissance architectural style called Mannerism, has some very unusual features in the way the staircase and walls create an especially full space with ambiguous features creating a tension that is very visible, yet beautiful. I do wonder as well whether the 10 bar structure of Blue in Green may intentionally be a specially designed musical form aimed at providing an analogous sense musically. ( Laurentian Library – Wikipedia )
I first heard Blue in Green in the early 1970s, by John McLaughlin. It was extremely intense guitaristry. Only later did I hear Miles Davis Kind of Blue, which is just as compelling, and numerous other versions since. As an amateur guitarist for 60 + years I now have a few young students at the WO Smith Music School in Nashville. Last Spring I gave one more advanced student an improvisation assignment using five famous paintings starting with a still life by Zurbaran Still life with Lemon, Oranges and Rose (1635), then Monet’s Water Lillies (1899), van Gogh’s Starry Night (1889), Jackson Pollock’s Reflection of the Big Dipper (1947), and Mark Rothko’s Ochre and Red on Red (1957). I am still trying to do it myself. I also am just about to finish reading the exceptional biography of Mark Rothko by James EB Breslin, which details not just his life, but his conceptual approach to his painting. It is fascinating, and very thought provoking for an artist (and those of us who would aspire to be artists) working in any medium.
Paul Moots
Nashville, Tennessee
8/26/25
Green on Blue (1968)
Untitled (1959)
Black in Deep Red (1975)
Blue, Green and Brown (1952)