I just woke up, and first thing in the morning I almost always listen to jazz. One of my favorite albums to listen to in the morning is one we've spoken of before, and that's 'Kind of Blue' by Miles Davis. Coincidentally, this record is also a great one to study for you music theory geeks. Why? Because of the album's immense popularity, transcriptions of the songs are all over the internet. The song I want to showcase today is 'So What'. Like the rest of 'Kind of Blue', 'So What' is based on a modal scale or mode, in this case the mode is D dorian. The actual progression of the piece is the old 32 bar standard american pop song: 16 bars of D dorian, 8 bars of E flat dorian, and then back to 8 bars of D dorian.
Below is a video from 1958 of Miles Davis playing 'So What' along with members of the Gil Evans Orchestra and the mighty John Coltrane (whose own song 'Impressions' is a reworking of 'So What'.)
Quincy Jones once wrote to one of his many friends, "That [Kind of Blue] will always be my music, man. I play Kind of Blue every day—it's my orange juice. It still sounds like it was made yesterday." I couldn't agree more and that's why a lot of times I'm eating eggs and drinking coffee while listening to it. What's your wake up music?
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