Miles Davis made the best-selling jazz album of all time, Kind of Blue, under the influence of George Russell's 'Lydian chromatic concept' of harmony. But what's that?

Miles, a man of few but well-chosen words, summarized it by saying “F should be where C is on the piano”.

Huh? You have to unpack that.

If you play the white notes on the piano, going up, you get 7 different scales depending on where you start. If you start at C you get the familiar major scale - also called the Ionian mode. But if you start at F you get the Lydian mode. And there's an objective sense in which Lydian is unique among all the 7 modes. Check out the chart!

What's going on here?

We can get all 7 modes, now all starting at the same note, by taking Lydian and lowering more and more notes by a half-tone following the pattern in this chart. The notes become 'flat'.

Each time we lower another half-tone, the scale becomes 'darker' - not exactly more sad, but something sort of like that. So Lydian is the 'brightest' scale, and Ionian - our friend the major scale - is just the second brightest.

There's a lot more to say about this! I started here:

https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2023/08/08/modes-part-6/

In this article I point out *two* objectively special features of the Lydian mode! But I leave as a puzzle for you to figure out how they're connected. I'll give the answer in my next article.

When @mdreid told me about this connection, and I saw the consequences, my mind was blown. All of a sudden harmony theory seemed a lot less arbitrary - more mathematically beautiful! WHY HAD NOBODY TOLD ME THIS STUFF SOONER?