miles davis blue in green meaning

And, but Miles really knew, somehow, the depth and the potential development that Coltrane had coming, and just gave him all the room, just gave him all the room, man. And at the end of it, it had an identity and that’s why he’s a stylist. But I rang the bell and it was alright because Miles was up and was glad to hear from me, and Gil was there that day, and he just looked great and seemed in great spirits. And that’s the genius of his leadership in that he doesn’t say very much, and he gets things done like that, he allows, puts certain talents together and allows them to work on each other and work on the music, and somehow Miles will occasionally just give you one little clue. They don’t have the ability to discard and add, and what they really do is reflect the scene and it’s a marvelous talent that they have, and I love to hear them play, but as real contributors and so forth they don’t add up that much. The album Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, which features the iconic composition “All Blues,” is the best-selling jazz album of all time. So, in some ways he’s gotten a bad rap many times. And that may account for some of the success of this album, that all of those takes are the first takes. Ashley Kahn, the author of an authoritative and enjoyable book on Kind of Blue, quotes from the interview and, I believe, draws conclusions from it in his book (at least partly). I just don’t understand any of that at all. The provenance of this recording is an interesting jazz history footnote in itself. Davis’ dismissive take on Kind of Blue allowed him to concentrate fully on the next gig, the next studio session, and the next career turn. He showed me one change on that which gave that whole structure a different thing. I was comparing jazz in general, or the jazz discipline, to that kind of thing because you can’t go back. 1. There’s a certain kind of people that are more or less late arrivers, you can – even though he was certainly on the scene and known and respected – you can hear him building his abilities from the beginning very consciously and very aware of every note he played, theoretically and motivically and everything. I think there was a point, in my own opinion, where he made a turn, reaching for a large audience, I don’t know, or what, with the bands, and I have often wanted to speak to Miles about that period and find out how he felt about it, what he thought he possibly had developed or learned or whether that was a direction he’d like to go farther in or what. Bill King is a jazz columnist and co-host of Soul Nation on JAZZ.FM91. After catching a recent screening of the Miles Davis documentary Birth of the Cool, I found it fascinating watching the interplay between musicians, especially the collaborative and compatible moments between Davis and Evans. If you were a musician brought in to record with Davis, you wouldn’t be given sheet music ahead of time, or a rough demo recording to familiarize yourself with. … Previous Post Evans would join Miles Davis’s band in April, 1958, replacing pianist Red Garland. "Blue in Green" is the third tune on Miles Davis' 1959 album, Kind of Blue. Yeah, well, I had been talking to Philly Joe and the rumors go around. And it’s a remarkable discipline. Important, I mean. Until the arrival of the LP, I’d been locked to the piano with pianist Oscar Peterson, Phineas Newborn, George Shearing and Dave Brubeck. Anytime I see a jazz musician come up with a brilliant improvised solo, I’m blown away by the skill, courage, and adaptability that it takes. Did he tell you any times about what he was looking for in his music, especially maybe in the late ’60s when he was…. And the rest of it is being professional and, certainly as professionals, you do reach a high degree of performance in the area that you’re trying to work, but those special times, you don’t know when they’re gonna happen, and, unfortunately, we don’t get too many of them on record. It certainly has been a strong album, and an album I was very proud to be part of. Tracks WordPress Theme by Compete Themes. I sometimes wonder whether they really did. And he loved Blossom Dearie, who I love also. It is the third track, as well as one of two ballads, on Davis’ Kind of Blue, released by Columbia Records on August 17, 1959. On April 2, 1959, four months before Kind of Blue released, Miles Davis and his quintet performed “So What” at Studio 61 in New York as part of the CBS program, The Robert Herridge Theater. And I don’t think we would have had Coltrane or known Coltrane’s potential or the great contributions that he’s made, except for Miles and Miles’s belief in his potential. It wasn’t one of those things where he’s always saying, “Play this, play that, do it this way, do it that way.” But, that to me is a lot, a great deal of his genius. The way he approached it, the sound he got was like crystal notes or sparkling water cascading down from some clear waterfall. Does anyone else find improvisation amazing? I mean, this may be just a long break, for what reason, I don’t know. I think one thing that, in listening to the music of Miles through the years, that comes through, is that like technically or just as a trumpeter he does so much, it’s not; I mean like some people relate primarily to his muted style, and certain things that he was doing then. With that issue came a subscription offer that included a copy of the Bill Evans Trio’s Everybody Digs Bill Evans on the Riverside label. The topsy turvy emotion of the album, “Kind of Blue” is like a roller coaster. And I know that I don’t like anybody to come knocking on my door without calling, so I hadn’t seen him in a long time for that reason. Now, whether or not it will happen, I don’t know. Like, Freddie the Freeloader, So What, and All Blues, there was nothing written out on. Miles and Cannonball and Coltrane and Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb, and Wynton Kelly was on one track, which is a beautiful track, too. Eddie Karp: It’s really seeing him perform, I saw him perform at the Bottom Line I guess was about three years ago. You understand what I’m talking about. It could easily have been longer – it’s the shortest song on the album by several minutes – but it wraps up modestly, with a final little cadence by Evans. Yes, true. The second interviewer was Eddie Karp (according to Ashley Kahn), and the only known broadcast was July 4, 1979, on WKCR-FM in New York City, as part of the 126-hour Miles Davis Festival. Legendary jazz trumpeter Miles Davis recorded the second and final session of his seminal album Kind of Blue on April 22nd, 1959. Well, I often have said this, but I’ll say it again, that the most beneficial thing that happened to me in that association was that it confirmed my own identity to myself at a time when it would have been easy for me to go in certain directions that attracted a lot of critical and public attention, like sort of avant-garde, and I was, at that time, more or less, in the avant-garde, and could function in Third Stream and avant-garde, and the kind of attention you got sometimes could almost turn your head and you start perhaps thinking, well, maybe this is the direction, but being with the band and the real honest personalities involved really helped confirm my own identity, and made me realize that being myself was the only place to be. Yeah, he was describing him as that, rather than a technician. That’s going to affect other things that happen. He can play just one note, a line which maybe, talking about [sings a simple rhythm: quarter notes on the beat with a repeated pitch]. Since 1996, while continuing to teach and play, Chase has also been NEC’s chair of jazz studies and improvisation (1996 to 2001); dean of faculty, supervising classroom curriculum including jazz and contemporary improvisation (2000 to 2006); co-chair and then chair of contemporary improvisation (2005 to 2008); acting chair of liberal arts (2007 to 2008); and Berklee’s chair of ear training (2008 to present). I was still listening, though by now I had it memorized.’ His fascination with the recording led to his decision to put Evans on the cover of Downbeat’s December 1960 edition.”. The one solo piece — Peace, Piece — forever altered the landscape. The JAZZ.FM91 Studios are powered by Lawo broadcast technology, JAZZ.FM91 live performances are on pianos available at Remenyi House of Music, 4 Pardee Avenue, Suite 100, Toronto, ON M6K 3H5. Now imagine being good enough to improvise a whole album that would go on to become a multi-platinum seller. That “stylist” almost seems to have a rather limiting kind of quality to it. To read our privacy and cookies policy, please click here. He was called back to play on the now legendary "Kind of Blue" album in the spring of 1959. I could hear it in Marvin Gaye’s music years down the road; Little Anthony and the Imperials, jazz, soul, pop, they all owed Evans a firm handshake. At home he might have a Rachmaninoff concerto on his stereo or a score of Tosca on his piano, as bandmates and intimates have reported. And he would lay out a thing like on All Blues, say like “Play the chart and then before each soloist, the figure will serve as the little vamp, to enter into the next soloist.” And that’s all, everybody hears and absorbs it, and once we had the chart straight, the rest was up for grabs, and then we would play it and the first time we’d played each thing through, that was the take that’s on the record, so there are no complete outtakes. It’s like, on All Blues it seems like there’s certain simple ideas that Miles uses, particularly in his chorus at the end of the piece [unintelligible?] But I understand that Gil and he are involved in some kind of a project now to record, or to record and tour, or something. “Blue in Green” is almost achingly slow and delicate, with some of Davis’ best muted trumpet. Ashley Kahn told me the interviewer was Bill Goldberg and that he was an MD in the Boston area. But I can’t imagine him not playing ‘cause I think that his soul is fed by playing and it may be that he was feeling a little unsatisfied in his soul with what was happening at some point or whatever; I don’t know what his reasons are, but I’m sure he’ll be back. You go down, and then you have to start working your way up. Oh, I first heard Miles on the very first records he made. It was sometime in the late ’90s when I interviewed jazz journalist Gene Lees, who was central in elevating the mystique and publicizing the artistry of the brilliant pianist. The form of Blue in Green is very unusual. But Miles had that ability to create a kind of simple figure, like on So What or All Blues, that still generates a complete and positive reference off of which you can play and still relate to something which is unique, see? And I wrote those levels out for the guys, you know, that was all just little sketches, and, but other than that, it was a very simple thing that he came in with conceptually and sketch, you know, the little sketches I made, so that a lot — all, all of it was more or less created out of the musicians themselves, and all the things that were added, now, like on All Blues you know the little fluttering figure I played at the beginning is just something I throw in, just like, anybody will add as jazz players to it, to a thing. Miles was very much an independent person, like, I know that when I was hanging out with him, he liked people as different as, well he was very influenced by Ahmad Jamal for a while. He’s always gonna surprise you and then prove himself right in the long run. And I put a CD-R of it on reserve at the NEC library for my own Jazz Styles classes to listen to in a few semesters between 1997 and 2008. "Blue in Green," Miles Davis 10-bar "circular" form (with tempo changes) Chase had been playing jazz and improvised music with professional musicians since 1975, and teaching it in colleges since 1981 at Berklee, Tufts and New England Conservatory. Or, there are a couple of places on Freddie the Freeloader where just one note contains so much meaning that you just can hardly believe it. This from Joe Maita in the blog, JerryJazzMusician: “In Lees’ essay The Poet: Bill Evans, he writes of his discovery of the great pianist in 1959, as editor of Downbeat, when he noticed, ‘among a stack of records awaiting assignment for review, a gold-covered Riverside album titled Everybody Digs Bill Evans… I took the album home and, sometime after dinner, probably about nine o’clock, put it on the phonograph. This was Miles Davis’ approach to recording on most of his albums, including the legendary “Kind Of Blue”. And my first reaction was that this music could not be captured on record. I came across a blog curated by music college administrator and blogger Allan Chase with a detailed interview with pianist Bill Evans. Evans tucked himself away in the corner of the brain in such a way that it was as if life was one eternal cycle of springtime — renewal and rebirth. Yeah, that may have had something to do with it: just the fact that there were new kind of challenges to play off, and there was a simplicity about the charts that was remarkable, too. This is the only song on which Cannonball Adderley sits out. He’s not just a stylist or a great jazz player, he’s a great leader, and he’s served a marvelous capacity to bring many outstanding talents out and gave them the confidence and brought them out, and they probably didn’t even know that Miles was doing it. I’m sure that Miles never really strived to be a stylist. “Bill had this quiet fire that I loved on piano. So, I love the idea of it. One of two ballads on the LP (the other being "Flamenco Sketches"), the melody of "Blue in Green" is very modal, incorporating the presence of the Dorian, Mixolydian, and Lydian modes. You have to be able to roll with your mistakes, play off the other musicians, and anticipate what the audience wants to hear before they’ve heard it. And I don’t know who all he listened to, but that’s the way he would sort of pick up things, and I don’t think; I think he certainly did listen. There’s no question in my mind. It was through a cover story in a 1960 Downbeat magazine that I discovered pianist Bill Evans. And though Evans wasn’t given a proper songwriting credit until 2002, I think the real credit goes to all the musicians in the room, who turned scribbled key changes into a beautifully serene five and a half minutes. But of course, the people involved were pretty gigantic when you stop and think of it. The ensemble playing reaches new levels of subtlety and transcendence, and the work benefits greatly from the introduction of pianist Bill Evans, one of Miles Davis’ greatest collaborators. He’s a very paradoxical and many-sided person, and if you were to take any number of things of his — acts or things he said out of context — you could be completely on the wrong track, because he could say one thing today and the opposite tomorrow, for reasons that have to do with momentary response, or defense mechanisms, or who knows what. Now those are two of perhaps four or five things that he ever said to me about music; you know what I mean. In the summer of 1979, my good friend from Phoenix, the great drummer Lewis Nash (then 20 years old) was staying with the family of a friend of his in Bronxville, N.Y., and studying with Freddie Waits, Billy Hart, and Andrew Cyrille, and hearing as much music as possible. It’s something he leaned over and said, “I want this here.” Now, of course, that gives the total thing another character. Sometimes during a take, we wouldn’t even know that. The album is worth checking out if you haven’t already. “Blue in Green” is arguably the most beautiful piece of music on Kind of Blue. You probably wouldn’t even go in for a rehearsal. At 4 a.m. A lot has been said about the use of modes [and less?] Miles Davis was a genius. For instance, on Green Dolphin Street, the vamp changes — on the original changes, of course, aren’t that way — the vamp changes would be like a major 7th up a minor third, down a half tone, down a half tone. For years, I wasn’t sure about whose recordings these were and how to respond to many requests to share them. He would get things from people like that he could throw into his own work, and you would hardly know where it was coming from. He may have heard it in the WKCR archives. 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