So What

If you have never listened to jazz before, Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue is a great place to start. If you’re an obsessive jazz fan like me, it never gets old. The heart of the album is its first track, “So What.” Even before you press play, there’s a world of meaning in that title. Its cool hostility reminds me more of hip-hop than jazz. It’s no accident that Miles was eager to embrace rap at the end of his life.

Gil Evans wrote the abstract intro section, supposedly inspired by “Voiles” by Debussy, but people don’t usually perform it. The tune proper begins at 0:34.

Here’s a live television performance.

Here’s a chart.

“So What” is famous for being one of the first modal jazz tunes. This just means that it doesn’t have a lot of chord changes compared to the fast harmonic rhythms of bebop. The A sections use the D Dorian mode. This scale is especially easy to play on the piano; just play the white keys. The B section is up a half step, on E-flat Dorian. If you play the black keys on the piano, you get five of the seven notes in this scale. Last semester in my New School music theory class, I had a complete beginner pianist improvise a solo over “So What” in class. I called out when she needed to switch between the white and black keys. It worked!

“So What” occupies a similar place in jazz pedagogy to the blues: it’s simple enough for beginners to play, but you can devote a lifetime to practicing and never get to the bottom of it. If you want to learn how to improvise jazz, you should definitely learn Miles’ solo on the studio recording. A guy named Steve Khan posted this nice transcription of it, but you should learn and transcribe it by ear. The solo isn’t too challenging technically, and it can teach you a lot about swing, phrasing, and build.

The melody of “So What” is a call in the bass followed by a response from the piano and horns. The response part is a pair of minor seventh chords a whole step apart. Miles Davis didn’t invent this riff; it’s a jazz accompaniment cliche, widely used by pianists, guitarists and horn section arrangers. Miles just had the wisdom to pluck it from the memepool and place it front and center in a tune. The riff is built on the So What chord: a stack of fourths with a third on top. It’s an especially useful voicing for guitarists, since it’s easy to play and sounds good in so many different situations.

Let’s dive deeper into the call and response structure of the tune. The structure is more visible when viewed as color-coded MIDI clips.

And it’s even more visible when you put those color-coded MIDI clips in polar coordinates.

Black American music uses lots of call and response as a structuring element. “So What” has many call-and-response pairs at different scales. Here are all the layers I can detect, ranging from micro to macro:

• The first four notes of the first bass riff are a call; the second four notes are a response.
• The first chord in the piano/horn riff is a call; the second chord is a response.
• Each bass riff is a call; each piano/horn riff is a response.
• Each bass/piano call-and-response pair is itself a call; each following bass/piano call-and-response pair is itself a response.
• The first pair of bass/piano call-and-responses comprises another call; the second pair of bass/piano call-and-responses is a response.
• The first half of each A section is a call; the second half of each A section is a response.
• The first two A sections are a call; the B section and second A section are a response.

I would bet that this fractal-like self-similarity across different levels is a major reason for the tune’s appeal.

Any tune this immediately catchy yet also structurally deep is going to attract a lot of imitation. Casual music fans use the term “sampling” to mean any kind of musical quotation, interpolation or reference, not just the digital manipulation of audio recordings. Maybe it’s technically incorrect to call every quote a sample, but both practices stem from the same desire to repurpose existing ideas in new contexts. In this broader sense of the word, “So What” has been sampled extensively. Most famously, John Coltrane, the tenor sax player on Kind of Blue, used “So What” as a template for his own ubiquitous standard tune, “Impressions.”

“Impressions” is more of a mashup, really, since its A section melody is taken from Morton Gould’s composition “Pavane.” Listen at 1:28.

Coltrane probably learned this composition from Ahmad Jamal, who recorded an arrangement of it in 1955. (Miles Davis was a big Ahmad Jamal fan too, and almost certainly drew on “Pavane” for “So What.”) Lewis Porter says that Coltrane got the B section for “Impressions” from Ravel’s “Pavane pour une Infante Défunte.” Maybe Coltrane’s title refers to Impressionism.

Coltrane later used the “So What” riff in “Song of the Underground Railroad.”

The “So What” riff became a cornerstone of funk when Pee Wee Ellis, the trombonist and arranger for James Brown, incorporated it into the horn chart for “Cold Sweat.” (Ellis said that the copying was unconscious.)

“Cold Sweat” has itself been sampled many times, and the inspiration flows in both directions. Miles loved James Brown and drew on him during his electric funk period. For example, Miles specifically instructed Tony Williams to play the “Cold Sweat” beat on “Frelon Brun.”

One of the many rap songs sampling “Cold Sweat” is “Welcome To The Terrordome” by Public Enemy. The track also includes a sample of James Brown’s “Give It Up Or Turnit A-Loose.” Miles sampled that same James Brown break on his late-period track “Blow.”

The “So What” riff also shows up in the horn line from “Let a Woman Be a Woman And A Man Be A Man” by Dyke and the Blazers. This is another tune that’s been sampled extensively, most prominently in “How You Like Me Now” by The Heavy, as heard in countless movies and TV commercials.

The Heavy’s usage of the Dyke and the Blazers sample has been the subject of intense litigation, which is pretty funny, since Dyke and the Blazers copied their tune almost note-for-note from James Brown.

More recently, Erykah Badu repurposed “So What” for her live version of “Rimshot.”

Teena Marie makes similar use of “So What” in her tune “Harlem Blues.”

Anybody who’s been to music school can write complex and abstruse jazz tunes, and blow complicated solos over them. Not many musicians can write memorable hooks. And only the most profound artists can write a hook that conceals as much depth and possibility as “So What.” I wonder if that level of creativity is teachable, or learnable?