Blue in Green — reimagined in Cross-Note D

Originally by Miles Davis & Bill Evans (1959, Kind of Blue) Tuning used here Cross-Note D / DADFAD (a real folk-blues minor tuning) Key idea ten bars, one of the most altered ballads in the standard repertoire, in a tuning built for droning minor blues

There's no original guitar tuning here — Blue in Green was written for piano trio, and even its composer credit is disputed (Bill Evans said in a later interview that he wrote it; the record lists Miles Davis alone). Rather than pick a side on either dispute, this page just takes the real, published changes and refrets them in Cross-Note D — a real minor-drone tuning most associated with pre-war Mississippi blues players like Skip James, about as far from a modal jazz piano trio as a guitar tuning gets.

Bill Evans himself described the form as "a 10-measure circular pattern," and it packs an unusual amount of harmonic tension into that short a cycle — altered dominants nearly every bar (♯9s, ♭9s, ♯5s, ♯11s), several of which don't reduce cleanly to a single guitar-shaped chord quality. Where that happens, the chip below shows the closest quality the app's engine can actually voice, with the real altered symbol noted alongside it — the same "drop the tone a guitarist would drop anyway" approach used throughout this site.

The 10‑bar cycle

Altered dominants nearly every bar

B⁠♭⁠maj7→ A7→ Dm9→ D⁠♭⁠7♯11→ Cm7→ F7♭9→ B⁠♭⁠maj7→ A7→ Dm6→ E7→ E7→ Am9→ Dm9

On the real chart: the opening B⁠♭⁠maj7 is actually a B⁠♭⁠maj7♭5 (one of the most argued-over opening chords in jazz — some transcriptions call it a ♯11 instead), the A7s are ♯9 the first time and ♭13 the second, and the two E7s are ♯9 then ♯5 — two different altered colors that both simplify to the same open E7 shape here. Dm6 stands in for the original Dm6/9.

The full 10-bar cycle, voiced in Cross-Note D, root in the bass on every chord.

Remix with Open—Shape

The published lead sheet also carries a short 3-bar ending tag — B⁠♭⁠maj7, A7, Dm6, the same shapes as the top of the form, just left to ring on the final chord instead of cycling back.

Every chord verified against the app's own voicing engine in the real Cross-Note D (DADFAD) tuning, with the true root in the bass on every shape.