Kind Of Blue

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Miles Davis - Kind Of Blue, 1959
    Referring back to the sad death of Keith Tippett last week at the age of 72, I was reading his obituary in The Guardian today. Apparently, the recording that got him into modern jazz was the album above. Miles Davis' Kind Of Blue.
    The first track on the album - 'So What' - is both quintessentially of it's time and to my mind the sound of cool jazz of the period, but also a great soundtrack for life in lockdown. In musical terms, the call & response of the opening section is defined by Bill Evans' use of an E Minor Eleventh chord - the eponymous 'So What Chord' - a five-note chord consisting of three perfect fourth intervals followed by a major third: the bottom five strings of the guitar in standard Spanish Modal tuning: EADGB. The structure of the piece is modal and built around the familiar A-A-B-A song structure - in this case sixteen bars of  D-Dorian, eight bars of E-Flat-Dorian and eight bars again of D-Dorian. The modes have been with music for millenia; at the heart of ancient Greek culture, religious music through the ages and of course underpinning just about all the music we grew up loving, from The Grateful Dead to Rory Gallagher to Yes to Mahavishnu Orchestra to Peter Green.
    At it's heart, though - like all jazz -lies the blues. The foundation. The Root.

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