Good morning, and welcome to your Rip it Up (and Start Again) Sunday newsletter. Today’s long read explores my personal connection to ‘Blue in Green’, which you can hear on this week’s two classic albums, both recorded in 1959: Miles Davis’ ‘Kind of Blue’ and Bill Evans’ Portrait in Jazz.
“Thanks, Dad!”
It was my birthday, I was nine years old, and Dad had just handed me six C90 cassettes. I’d recently moved into my new bedroom (a place that was just for me, apart from my younger sister, hurrah) and the gift I’d asked for was a radio cassette player, so that I could listen to music alone, in my own space. To accompany the modest machine that I’d unwrapped, Dad had recorded twelve albums for me from his own vinyl collection. He’d not asked what music I particularly wanted to hear and nor did he tell me anything about these albums in advance (one of the great things about Dad was that he never told you what to think). He simply put the tapes in my excited hands and left me to it.
Dad was a saxophonist, and though bebop and hard bop were his thing, he enjoyed and listened to many different styles of jazz. He’d selected an eclectic range of music for me, and I happily dug right in. I was immediately drawn to one cassette, with which I could sing along with Mel Tormé and the Marty Paich dectet on one side, then turn it over to be bewitched by the mysterious French sounds of Dizzy Gillespie accompanied by Paris’s innovative “double six.” Another tape was all about the tenors (Dad’s heroes): Sonny Stitt, Sonny Rollins, Tubby Hayes. The two sides of a Miles-focussed cassette, meanwhile, brought together Porgy and Bess (1959) and Sketches of Spain (1960), while another tape featured two albums which were both recorded in 1959: on one side was Dave Brubeck’s Time Out and, on the other, Bill Evans’ Portrait in Jazz. I initially found Time Out much easier to get into (which nine-year-old would not be carried away by the infectious rhythms of Unsquare Dance?) but as time went on, it was Portrait in Jazz which increasingly intrigued me, and which I played on repeat. I recognised in the piano trio something similar to the chamber pieces to which my violin teacher had recently introduced me, a format in which attentive musicians really spoke to one another. And Portrait in Jazz just felt genuinely odd to me: unlike music that you could sing or move to, this sound was spare and spacious and demanded that you listen. And I did.
Nine years of living in a house surrounded by music meant that I recognised many of the standards that Bill Evans had selected for Portrait in Jazz, but I had not heard them played like this before. Autumn Leaves, which I knew as a melancholy ballad, had developed sharp corners that I never knew it had, while the piano on When I Fall in Love, filled the air with wide, dancing harmonies which intensified the song’s pained yearning. Someday my Prince will Come was a tune which I actively despised (nine-year-old me hating all Disney princesses), but this trio, who communicated so carefully with the listener and with each other, had transformed its simpering resignation into a tune that now seemed to be about finding oneself rather than waiting to be found. But it was the album’s final track, Blue in Green that was most gripping and confounding. This tune didn’t seem to go anywhere, yet it carried a strange, moody force that caught you up and carried you away. The song had continuous forward momentum, but no resolving destination. Blue in Green was a musical puzzle that I could make no sense of, but which I really wanted to investigate and solve. Listening to it gave me the same, weird vertiginous feeling that I occasionally had when I heard the Picture Box theme on ITV schools: of being swept off and drifting somewhere in an endless loop.
Bill Evans had first recorded Blue in Green just a few months before he’d made Portrait in Jazz, on the famous Miles Davis album, Kind of Blue. In 1958, Miles had been looking for a pianist to replace the increasingly unreliable Red Garland in his popular sextet. The group’s alto saxophonist, Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, recommended that Miles check out Bill Evans, who was playing with his brother Nat, “someplace in the village. So I went down to see them,” Miles recalled, “and I heard this cat and I said, wow, this is a beautiful piano player.” Bill joined Miles’ sextet that April, and spent an intense six months touring with John Coltrane, Cannonball, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones, eventually recording the marvellous material which was later included on Miles’ Jazz Track album (1959). Temperamentally, Miles and Evans were poles apart but musically, the two found themselves in immediate affinity. The classically-educated Evans brought a spacious, Eastern sound to contemporary jazz piano, which he had picked up via Debussy and his love of the pentatonic, while Miles’ recent encounters with African music were prompting him to explore soundscapes and structures beyond those of conventional (Western) diatonic harmony. “Bill had this quiet fire that I loved on piano,” Miles recalled in his memoir, “the way he approached it, the sound he got was like crystal notes or sparkling water cascading down from some clear waterfall.” According to saxophonist, David Liebman, Miles “used to call Bill up and tell him to take the phone of the hook and play the piano, because he loved the way he played.”
Miles had a habit of presenting his musical collaborators with conundrums. A few notes or chords might be sketched out on a bar napkin or matchbook, and he would demand his companion to make something of it. Late in 1958, he presented Bill Evans with such a puzzle, writing the symbols for G-minor and A-augmented on some manuscript paper, and asking “what would you do with that?” “I didn’t really know”, Evans recalled, “but I went home and wrote Blue in Green.” On December 30th, Evans had been booked for a recording session for Riverside, joining Pepper Adams, Paul Chambers and Connie Kay to lay down tracks for Chet Baker’s new album. Evans took the introductory bars of Alone, Together, and expanded the transitions between G-minor and A-augmented which Miles had sketched out for him a few weeks earlier into something which sounds eerily like the opening of Blue in Green.
In January, 1959, Evans recalled “I had been out of the group for a few months, but Miles called me to make a date [to record the album which became Kind of Blue]. He said he had some things sketched out, and I should call round . . . I took a tune of mine called Blue in Green.” The sextet had been working to develop a distinctive modal sound on the material they’d recorded for Jazz Track, and Miles felt completely confident in this new musical direction. Rather than selecting familiar tunes from the American songbook, Miles had decided that every piece on the new album would be an original, and each would be, in its own particular way, innovative. There would be little rehearsal and few takes, to keep things loose and fresh. Rather than a detailed score or set of chords, the group would simply be presented with a skeleton of the scales—or modes—through which the soundscape of each tune would move, together with a brief verbal account account (from Miles) of the piece’s intended structure. Soloists would be told the order in which they’d play, and their number of assigned choruses, and that was it. Bill Evans was excited by the project, and worked together with Miles to produce the modal sketches used by the group during the two recording sessions for Kind of Blue in January, 1959. Reproduced in Ashley Kahn’s superb book about the creation of this album is the chart which Bill Evans drafted for Cannonball’s alto sax part in Flamenco Sketches. Alongside the chart’s minimalist notation, a scribble in Bill Evans’ hand instructs his friend to “play in the sound of these scales.”
Kahn describes how Evans took on a clearly proprietorial role with Blue in Green during Kind of Blue‘s recording. In the session tapes, his voice can be heard taking charge, directing the structure, and counting in. The mood of the piece is quiet so Cannonball, with his big, muscular rolling sound, is instructed to lay out. Then, after a couple of false starts, Blue in Green is recorded in one single, mesmeric take: Evans draws a harmonic circle in which Miles dances with lyrical restraint; Coltrane’s solo is spare and haunting, carrying Evans’ piano with it to a deep, reflective place, and as the piece draws to a close, Paul Chambers re-emphasises the tune’s perpetual motion with some beautifully bowed bass.
Bill Evans’ Kind of Blue liner notes describe Blue in Green as “a ten measure circular form following a four measure introduction, and played by soloists in various augmentation and diminution of time values.” It was this choice of ten bars, rather than the more usual twelve or sixteen, which generated that feeling of suspended animation which the nine year old me initially found completely baffling. “The ear is deceived,” as Ted Gioia puts it, “expecting another two or four bars, but instead the composition slides back to the start.” “I love that suspense,” Miles said of Blue in Green. “It sounds good. It’s unpredictable.” Blue in Green “borders on absolute minimalism,” Ashley Kahn writes “yet it possesses a totality . . . listeners marvel at.”
Blue in Green played a central role in Bill Evans repertoire for the next twenty years, and my experience of listening to it aged nine began a love of this pianist-composer’s introspective yet expansive music which has been a constant throughout my life. Since Dad first recorded Portrait in Jazz for me in 1982, no year has gone by in which I’ve not listened to Bill Evans. I especially love the “hyperorganic” sound of his first great trio with Paul Motian and Scot LaFaro, captured so memorably on Sunday at the Village Vanguard (1961), his collaboration with his friend, Cannonball, Know What I Mean? (1963) and the shared, responsive creativity of the two albums he recorded with Jim Hall Undercurrent (1962) and Intermodulation (1966).
Bill Evans has spoken to me in many different ways at different moments of my life (somewhat unbelievably, he even composed a gorgeous, crafty tune called Knit for Mary F), yet I always feel there is something more to discover in his soundscapes. His is a music which is forever rising out of the shadows into light, forever seeking to find itself, and which possesses a rare combination (which I’ve found in few other musical places) of extraordinary restraint with heart-on-its-sleeve emotion. And through listening to Bill Evans, I have always felt profoundly connected to the gentle man who was my Dad, who decided to record this unusual music for a nine year old girl who was just beginning to explore her own creative path.
Dad died in 2026 – the same year as his hero Sonny Rollins – and during his final weeks I brought his music to him in the hospital bed in which he lay. I held his hand as he listened to a 1957 recording of Rollins playing Cutie while the tears rolled down his face. I kept vigil with Dad on his final night, and we sat quietly together, listening to several of the albums which he’d recorded for me back in 1982. As he drew close to death, I put on Portrait in Jazz, and the last music Dad heard while he was on this earth was Blue in Green, its trail of notes circling back to the start of that movement out of the shadows into lightness, the sequence rising, fading, falling, beginning to rise and flow again. As he once said to me, as we sat companionably, listening carefully together, “this music is timeless, eternal, transcendent.” I think of him now, as I have always done, when I hear it.
Futher reading
My account of the recording of ‘Kind of Blue’, relies heavily on the Kahn and Pettinger titles, both of which I heartily recommend.
Ted Gioia, The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repeertoire (2012; 2021)
Ashley Kahn, Kind of Blue: The Making of a Masterpiece (2018)
James Kaplan, 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the Lost Empire of Cool (2024)
Peter Pettinger, Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings (2002)
Keith Shadwick, Everything Happens to Me: Bill Evans, A Musical Biography (2002)
Quincy Troupe and Miles Davis, Miles: The Autobiography (1990)
Other recordings:
Blue is Green is a tune closely associated with Bill Evans, and was infrequently recorded by other artists while he lived, but the version by Gary Burton and Stephane Grapelli on Paris Encounter (1972) is wonderful. Since 1980, Blue in Green has been recorded many times, in many different ways. Try Rasmus H Thomsen Trio (2023) or potsu’s lofi version (2019).
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