I’m not exactly sure when Miles Davis came into my seemingly separate orbit.
I don’t know when I first heard his music. Maybe it was playing in my experience as a young person but I wasn’t fully aware of it, or who it was that was playing?
The likely thing is that I had heard Miles’ sound somewhere in my youth but just didn’t know how to pay attention to it yet.
I do remember the first time I ever came in contact with this tune, though.
On a summer night in 1990, my roommate Keith Parker and I went to a jazz club in Oklahoma City to hear this band that was beginning to gain some attention beyond the local scene.
I don’t remember the name of the band, but I remember like it was yesterday being completely enraptured by this tune and the way they played it.
When they finished, the band leader (whose name was the name of the band; I do remember that but nothing else) said,
“That was ‘So What’ by Miles Davis”
and I was like,
“If this song is on this band’s album (cassette tape), I’m buying it!”
It was, and I did, and I wore that tape OUT!
As good as I remember that group’s terrific version of this tune being, imagine my delight when I found the original some days later.
From the 1959 album “Kind of Blue,” this is a really terrific live version of “So What” by the great Miles Davis.
Enjoy!
THE SCOTT LANGDON PROJECT 