The jazz classic that inspired Pink Floyd song ‘Breathe’
Some of the greatest rock albums of all time tend to fall out of the sky. It’s impossible for some fans to even imagine that there was a time before albums like Sgt. Peppers or A Night at the Opera, but each took months of labour to bring to fruition. Though Dark Side of the Moon tends to come from the internal psyche of every member of Pink Floyd, the opening sounds of the first proper song didn’t have a lineage in rock music at all.
In the first few sessions for Dark Side, Floyd was still finishing up a handful of the gigs they had scheduled for their tour behind Meddle, including their phenomenal performance at Pompeii, where they played a version of their epic ‘Echoes’. Having lost Syd Barrett to his own mind some years before, Roger Waters began imagining a concept for an album centred around what makes ordinary people go mad.
Before the listener gets into the big questions at the heart of songs like ‘Time’ and ‘Money’, the album invites them to take a breath on the song ‘Breathe’, inviting the listener to immerse themselves in the world that the music is creating. Right before the disembodied vocals come in, though, there’s a distinct chord change that wasn’t customary for rock songs.
When combing through different ways to write the song, Richard Wright relied on his jazz background, recalling during an interview with Classic Albums: “I came from jazz, basically, that’s my inspiration. There’s a certain chord [in ‘Breathe’]. That’s totally down to a chord that I heard on a Miles Davis album. I remembered this chord and working it out at home for the record”.
The Miles Davis album in question was Kind of Blue, as the same chord cropped up in the album’s opening ‘So What’. Though the chord had been around for centuries, it was just starting to find its sea legs in classic rock. Before Pink Floyd had used it, Hendrix had become infamous for stringing together the same cluster of notes for the main riff to ‘Purple Haze’, with some rock fans dubbing it “The Hendrix Chord”.
Though the replacement chord still works in the context of ‘Breathe’, it invites a level of intrigue that no other chord progression could have hoped for. Throughout the record, Waters is talking about the meaning behind life and what most humans are looking to get out of life, and this gentle pivot of notes is the mystery surrounding all of those questions.
The same chord also crops up elsewhere on the record during the end of ‘Time’, where David Gilmour sings a reprise of the opening track. Although the listener is almost halfway through with the album, the lyrical themes about returning home and warming his feet beside the fire seem to leave more questions in the air before going into ‘The Great Gig in The Sky’.
While ‘Time’ may have taught fans what to do with their existence, time isn’t over after death, and ‘Gig’ gives even more questions about what happens when the afterlife consumes everyone, with Clare Torry’s exceptional vocal performance. Whereas most veteran songwriters might claim to have all of the answers, Dark Side of the Moon was bold enough to ask questions and took to using strange jazz chords to create that musical question mark.
