Track 42: "So What" by Miles Davis

I was a senior in college when I first got into jazz. It was sort of a backwards discovery for me--a lot of bands I was getting into then (Derek Trucks Band and Medeski Martin & Wood just to name a couple) are both heavily jazz influenced. And the more stuff I accumulated from those bands, the more I began to notice a Miles Davis cover here, a John Coltrane or Thelonius Monk cover there. Around the same time I read a biography of the Allman Brothers Band ("Midnight Riders", a really interesting read) and the book talked about how Dickey Betts and Duane Allman (two of my favorite guitarists ever) both could not get enough of Miles Davis' album "Kind of Blue."

I started tuning into NPR's jazz hour and just really started digging the music. The more I listened to the one true American art form, the more I began to see its influence in other bands I was getting into at the time (the Grateful Dead, Phish, the whole jam band scene pretty much). There's just something amazing instrumental music can do that songs with vocals can't--groove meets melody meets exploration and it all comes back together, almost magically.

Needless to say, "Kind of Blue" was the first real "jazz" album I ever purchased. And it's a fucking masterpiece. Released in 1959, "Kind of Blue" has been certified quadruple platinum and is the best selling jazz album of all time. And it's just a perfect Sunday morning/drink some coffee/watch CBS Sunday Morning kind of record.

I feel sort of pretentious even putting this track on the Playlist, because it's a whole musical universe I have only discovered a portion of. Though I was enthralled watching the entire Ken Burn's "Jazz" series on PBS and have amassed a good bit of jazz stuff, I'm more enthusiast than aficionado, and writing about jazz requires a vocabulary that I don't even possess.

But the more Miles Davis stuff I got into the more apparent it became that he was a visionary. After digesting "Kind of Blue" I got into some of his fusion stuff--and it still amazes me the same guy that made such a really cool, chill (dare I say sexy) sounding record like "Kind of Blue" could put out something as insanely amazing and amazingly insane as "Bitches Brew."

After reading his autobiography ,simply called "Miles," I came up with a simple explanation: Miles Davis was just one of the baddest motherfuckers that ever lived (sorry Mom, I know I dropped the F-bomb twice in this post, but it was necessary).

"So What" is just such a cool song, and how cool to have found actual video of the quintet (Miles Davis (trumpet), John Coltrane (tenor sax), Cannonball Adderly (alto sax), Bill Evans (piano), Paul Chambers (bass) and Jimmy Cobb (drums) performing it!