Why I Reacted To This Song
It’s one of the quietest, most restrained pieces on Kind of Blue and somehow that’s exactly what makes it hit so hard.
Original by Artist
About This Song
“Blue in Green” is the third track on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, recorded March 2, 1959 and released that August. It’s a modal jazz ballad built around Davis’s muted, languid trumpet and Bill Evans’s sophisticated piano voicings, played by Davis, Evans, John Coltrane on tenor sax, Paul Chambers on bass and Jimmy Cobb on drums; notably, it’s the only track on the album without alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley. Evans described the piece as a 10-measure circular form following a 4-measure introduction, an unusual length that creates real harmonic tension against a listener’s ear trained for the standard 8, 12 or 16-bar jazz phrase.
The song is also shadowed by a long-running composer dispute. It was originally credited to Davis alone, but the evidence points strongly toward Evans as the actual writer; he said as much himself in a 1979 radio interview, stating plainly, “The truth is I did write the music,” and drummer Jimmy Cobb has confirmed Evans contributed material to the album, while composer Earl Zindars claimed Evans wrote it at his own apartment. Critic Ted Gioia has described it as closer to a meditation than a traditional song, a fitting label for something this minimal and this quietly demanding to perform.
First Impressions
It barely announces itself, just a few notes in and the whole room seems to slow down with it.
My Reaction
What stays with me is how much space this song is willing to leave. Davis and Evans aren’t rushing to fill every bar, they’re trusting the silence between notes to do just as much work as the notes themselves. Knowing the credit behind it was likely misassigned for decades adds a strange undercurrent to listening now; it doesn’t change how the song sounds, but it does change how you think about who actually built this stillness. Either way, it’s one of the most quietly commanding pieces to come out of that whole session.
Rating
87/100