All Blues

Miles Davis recorded this in 1959 and it has been in every jazz musician's repertoire since. The All Blues chords here are a blues written out long — twenty-four bars in 4/4 in C at 140, with each chord of the twelve-bar form given two bars — and two bars of C7 to close. The backing track follows that chart, so the tempo and the key can both be moved; the original is played in G and felt in six rather than four.

Who wrote "All Blues"

Miles Davis wrote it, and there is no lyric. He told the critic Ralph Gleason that the piece grew out of live playing over about six months and was worked over by Gil Evans along the way. It was recorded on 22 April 1959 with John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb, and came out on Kind of Blue that August. Bill Evans said afterwards that nothing was written down at the session and the piece did not yet have its title — the session notes call it "African". In his liner note Evans described it as a twelve-bar blues in 6/8 that makes its mood out of very few changes. It remains under copyright.

Recordings that made it a standard

• Miles Davis, Kind of Blue (1959) — the original and the one everybody knows. The vamp underneath never stops, the horns state the theme in unison over it, and the whole performance holds still for eleven minutes. It is the best-selling jazz record ever made.
• Miles Davis, My Funny Valentine (1965) — recorded live at Lincoln Center in February 1964 with George Coleman, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams. Five years on, the same piece is faster, looser and far less still than the studio version.
• Bill Evans — Evans played it on the record and kept it afterwards, and his trio readings show what the piece sounds like when the vamp is carried by a piano rather than by a whole band.

The changes

This is a twelve-bar blues written out at twice the length. Each chord of the form gets two bars here, so the chorus comes to twenty-four, and the chart is barred in four rather than in six. If you know the tune from the record, halve everything you see and put it in six-eight and the two will line up.

Almost nothing happens, and that is the piece. C7 is held for eight bars — four of the blues — then F7 for four, then C7 for four again. Every chord is a dominant seventh and none of them resolves like one: they are colours held in place, not functions. Nothing needs to be added to them. The commonest mistake with this tune is treating those long stretches as an invitation to reharmonise.

The whole harmonic event of the chorus is in four bars near the end. G7#9 is held for two, then Ab7#9 for one, then G7#9 again for one, and C7 returns for the last four. That rise and fall of a half step, with the sharpened ninth on both chords, is the only tension the piece contains, and it is what the ear waits twenty bars for. Voice the two chords identically and let only the root move.

What makes it hard is not the harmony but the discipline. Eight bars on one chord at 140 is a long time, and the piece asks a soloist to build a line rather than to negotiate changes. Practise it by playing only the notes of the chord for a full chorus before doing anything else.