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From album
Kind of Blue
Miles Davis · 1959 · Track 1
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The story behind
The first time you listen to So What by Miles Davis, what hits you most is that bass that enters like a whisper and never leaves its place. It's not a riff that repeats the same way each time: Paul Chambers's bass draws a line in D dorian that stretches for sixteen bars, as if time itself had stopped. Only when Bill Evans' piano enters with that chord in Eb dorian —one step higher— does the piece briefly light up before returning to the same point. It's music that doesn't progress through chord changes, but through nuances, as if each note were a question that never receives a definitive answer.
They recorded it in two sessions in 1959 at Columbia 30th Street Studios in New York, just as Miles was moving away from hard bop to explore modal jazz. The album, Kind of Blue, was released in August of that year and became the best-selling jazz album in history. On this track, the soloists —Miles, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, and Evans himself— improvise over that minimal structure, yet they do so with a freedom that sounds like a conversation among friends. Miles' trumpet floats above the foundation, Coltrane's saxophone weaves long lines, and the bass closes the piece with a solo that seems to summarize the entire album.