Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at for further information. Troupe's poetry collection, The Architecture of Language, will be out this fall.Ĭopyright © 2006 NPR. He co-authored Davis' autobiography, Miles. GORDON: Writer and poet Quincy Troupe on the classic Miles Davis song, Blue in Green. It's a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful song. And those trees and that darkness and all of those memories that he had. Which evokes that loneliness, that loneliness on that back road, I think, in that dusty, dusky place in Arkansas when he was walking there with his cousin. TROUPE: And it is aching, and it is plaintive. ![]() It is classical, you know, in the sense - with the mute. TROUPE: And on this record, Miles' tone, his playing, is wonderful. TROUPE: Bill Evans, who starts this tune, this masterful tune, and ends it, and with Miles and Coltrane and the bass up under it, played this circular movement inside of the song. He missed it on those songs that he missed that feeling that he heard with that old black lady's voice coming through the woods. People were calling the song a masterpiece, and, but he says to me, and in the book, that he missed it. TROUPE: But he says, but when you write something and then guys play off it and take it someplace else, through their creativity and imagination, you just, you can miss it. Because that was the only way I could get in the sound of the African finger piano. TROUPE: So, he says he wrote about five bars of that and he recorded it, and added a kind of running sound into the mix on the whole album. I wrote these blues to try to get back to that feeling I had when I was six years old, walking with my cousin down that dark, Arkansas road. That feeling had got in my creative blood, my imagination, and I had forgotten it was there. He said that feeling was what I was trying to get close to in Kind of Blue. ![]() So he said that gospel, and that music, and also he had been listening to the music from the Guinean Ballet, the finger piano, so all of that fused and came back to him with this feeling that he heard playing when he was walking through the back roads of Arkansas.Īnd he started remembering what that music sounded like and felt like. And it was dark and he was about six years old, and he was walking with his cousin. He couldn't see the people but he heard these gospels coming in through the trees and over the trees. And the people in the backwoods were playing these really bad, really great gospels. TROUPE: Miles talked about being back in Arkansas, and he was walking home from church. So there were a lot of great songs recorded in that session, which included Julian, Cannonball, Adderley, Miles Davis, Jimmy Cobb, Bill Evans on piano, and Paul Chambers on bass. TROUPE: Also in that session, So What, which is also a classic tune, was recorded in the same session. ![]() QUINCY TROUPE (Writer and Poet): Blue in Green was recorded on March 2nd, 1959, in New York City. (Soundbite of Blue in Green, performed by the late Miles Davis) Here, Troupe remembers one of Davis' signature songs. Poet Quincy Troupe co-wrote Davis' autobiography, and spoke extensively with the trumpeter about Kind of Blue. One of his most widely acclaimed albums is Kind of Blue, which features saxophonist John Coltrane. The late jazz giant has a prolific career that spanned half a century.įrom be-bop to electric fusion, Miles made classic, innovative music that has set a standard for musicians of all stripes. I'm Ed Gordon, and this is NEWS AND NOTES.
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