Inside Kind of Blue: Miles Davis and the Music of Modal Jazz

Kind of Blue is regularly described as a modal jazz album. The term sounds technical, but the central idea is simple: fewer chord changes can give improvisers more room to develop a melody.

What Davis changed

Much modern jazz in the 1940s and 1950s relied on improvisation through changing chord progressions. A soloist needed to negotiate those changes at speed. Davis became interested in forms where musicians could remain in one harmonic area for longer, drawing melodic material from a scale or mode instead of moving through a rapid succession of chords.

Modal playing was not invented in 1959, and Kind of Blue did not dispense with harmony. The album is notable for applying the approach clearly and consistently across a set of compositions, while retaining blues and familiar jazz structures.

“So What”: thirty-two bars, two modes

The opening track begins with a spare exchange between Bill Evans and Paul Chambers before the famous bass figure establishes the theme. Its 32-bar form consists of sixteen bars based on D Dorian, eight bars a semitone higher in E-flat Dorian, and eight bars back in D Dorian. This gives the musicians a striking amount of room compared with a tune that changes chords every bar or two.

The interest lies in what they do with the space. Davis chooses short, carefully placed trumpet phrases; Coltrane and Adderley take different approaches to the same harmonic setting. The rhythm section keeps the form moving without filling every gap.

A blues still has its place

“Freddie Freeloader” is built on a twelve-bar blues and features Wynton Kelly at the piano rather than Evans. It serves as a useful reminder that the album is not an exercise in one system. Kelly’s touch and the familiar blues form give the first side another character, while allowing the horn players to remain recognisably themselves.

“Blue in Green” and its ten-bar circle

“Blue in Green” has an unusual ten-bar repeating form. With Evans on piano and a particularly restrained ensemble sound, it demonstrates how repetition can generate variation even when the composition is brief. The piece has a complicated authorship history: it was originally credited to Davis, while Evans later described his own substantial role. It is more accurate to acknowledge that dispute than to state a single uncontested account.

“All Blues” and “Flamenco Sketches”

“All Blues” returns to a blues structure, now in 6/8, with a repeating bass figure and a memorable horn theme. The rhythm has a rolling feel quite different from “Freddie Freeloader”.

“Flamenco Sketches” takes the modal idea further. Evans’s original sleeve notes describe five scales through which the soloists move, without a fixed number of bars for each. The musicians decide when to proceed. Its form is therefore organised, but not bound to the same length on every pass.

Why it remains approachable

None of these choices prevents the music from sounding direct. The melodies are memorable, the solos are distinctive and the recording has enough space for each instrument to be heard. A listener doesn’t need to identify Dorian modes to enjoy “So What”, but understanding the relatively simple framework reveals how much the players contribute.

More on Kind of Blue

Sources: Miles Davis: Kind of Blue Legacy Edition; official album discography.

For the original discussion of the five pieces, see Bill Evans’s original sleeve notes.