All Blues

"All Blues" is a jazz composition by Miles Davis first appearing on the influential 1959 album Kind of Blue. It is a twelve-bar blues in 6/4; the chord sequence is that of a basic blues and made up entirely of 7th chords, with a ♭VI in the turnaround instead of just the usual V chord. In the song's original key of G this chord is an E♭7. "All Blues" is a modal blues, meaning that the scale is a modal scale. In this case the 7th of the G major scale is flattened, so it is a mixolydian mode.^[2]

A particularly distinctive feature of the piece is the bass line that repeats through the whole piece, except when a V or ♭VI chord is reached (the 9th and 10th bars of a chorus). Further, there is a harmonically similar vamp that is played by the horns (the two saxophones in the case of Kind of Blue) at the beginning and then (usually) continued by the piano under any solos that take place. Each chorus is usually separated by a four-bar vamp which acts as an introduction to the next solo/chorus.

While originally an instrumental piece and usually performed as such, lyrics were later written for it by Oscar Brown Jr.

A cover was made by Ron Carter on his album All Blues which came out in 1973.

The song "Strange Feelin'" sung by the folksinger Tim Buckley in 1968 on his album "Happy sad" is basically a vocal version of All Blues.

References