Blue in Green

author of Mumbo Jumbo

Ishmael Reed

Miles Davis was a cruel, narcissistic bully who hated his skin color and cultivated an image as that of a pug. He practiced by beating up his wife, Frances Taylor, and Paul Chambers, but when it came to his business he was a pussycat. He played at Birdland, owned by the mobsters and where musicians were regularly called niggers and short-changed. He knew better than to raise his fists at these guys. He squandered money on the mob’s products. The cop who beat him up was probably owned by the mob too. New York cops at the time, authoritarian, catholic, hated race mixing unless it was them doing it.
Wesley Brown is a writer’s writer. His dialog in Blue in Green is remarkable. He knows the varieties of the American language in and out. We get fascinating portraits of Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, Clark Terry, Lena Horne, Katherine Dunham, Eartha Kitt, and others. An insider named Freeloader provides comic relief. Before the salespersons dictated trends in Black literature, a major publisher would have published this book. Thanks to Blank Forms and other midsize presses, the Black literary tradition, whose fictional standards were set by Brooks, Wright, Himes, Polite, Bambara, and others, is alive.

author of Four Lives in the Bebop Business

A. B. Spellman

Wesley Brown attempts a difficult thing with this book: He attempts to walk inside the consciousness of Miles Davis at a very complex point in his very complex life. Beaten by police for smoking a cigarette outside Birdland, married to a brilliant and accomplished dancer, leading a sextet that has genius at every station, and fending off demons that are co-authors of his being, Brown’s Miles is a man who is troubled and proud. This novella is lyrical, insightful, and beautiful.

author of Negroland: A Memoir

Margo Jefferson

Blue in Green is a gorgeous jazz composition. In love and in torment, Miles Davis and Frances Taylor are co-creators and lead soloists. Brown surrounds them with an ensemble of brilliant friends, rivals, and mentors: Monk, Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Katherine Dunham, Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt. All have their say—shrewd, ebullient, dissonant. When I closed the book, I wanted to begin it all overagain: see, hear, and re-experience every note of Wesley Brown’s wonderful prose music.

author of Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature

Farah Jasmine Griffin

As he writes about Miles and Lady Day in Blue in Green, Wesley Brown does more 'with less.' In this concise novella he renders the music and the musicians with intelligence, depth, clarity, and beautiful wisdom. An extra bonus: though it is a story of Miles, Frances, fully imagined, finally gets her due. Blue in Green is a true gift from a great writer.

author of Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-seventh Street, Manhattan

Darryl Pinckney

Wesley Brown approaches African American history with such originality. In his novella, he inhabits the mind of a creative legend, Miles Davis. Brown writes beautifully about musicians. He conveys so memorably the artistry of jazz and the passion of black life at a critical moment in our social history.