So What (written by Miles Davis) Cover

A quick rendition of Miles Davis’ So What from his classic album Kind of Blue, I simply wanted to highlight the nice tone of the Ibanez guitar.

About So What and Kind Of Blue from Wikipedia.


MilesDavisKindofBlue“Kind of Blue
 was released on August 17, 1959, by Columbia Records. Recording sessions for the album took place at Columbia’s 30th Street Studio in New York City on March 2 and April 22, 1959. The sessions featured Davis’s ensemble sextet, with pianist Bill Evans, drummer Jimmy Cobb, bassist Paul Chambers, and saxophonists John Coltrane and Julian “Cannonball” Adderley. After the entry of Evans into his sextet, Davis followed up on the modal experimentations of Milestones (1958) by basing Kind of Blue entirely on modality, in contrast to his earlier work with the hard bop style of jazz”

So What is one of the best known examples of modal jazz, set in the Dorian mode and consisting of 16 bars of D Dorian, followed by eight bars of E Dorian and another eight of D Dorian. This AABA structure puts it in the thirty-two-bar format of American popular song.

The piano-and-bass introduction for the piece was written by Gil Evans for Bill Evans (no relation) and Paul Chambers on Kind of Blue. An orchestrated version by Gil Evans of this introduction is later to be found on a television broadcast given by Miles’ Quintet (minus Cannonball Adderley who was ill that day) and the Gil Evans Orchestra; the orchestra gave the introduction, after which the quintet played the rest of So What. The use of the double bass to play the main theme makes the piece unusual.

The distinctive voicing employed by Bill Evans for the chords that interject the head, from the bottom up three perfect fourths followed by a major third, has been given the name “So What chord” by such theorists as Mark Levine.

While the track is taken at a very moderate tempo on Kind Of Blue, it is played at an extremely fast tempo on later live recordings by the Quintet, such as Four & More.

The same chord structure was later used by John Coltrane for his standard “Impressions“. Both songs originate in Ahmad Jamal’s 1955 cover of Morton Gould‘s “Pavanne”

The actor Dennis Hopper, in an interview in 2008 with Men’s Journal, claims that Davis named the song after intellectual conversations with Hopper, in which Hopper would reply, “So what?”

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