Footprints

Wayne Shorter wrote it and first recorded it for his own album Adam's Apple in 1966. The Miles Smiles version was recorded later that year but released earlier, so it was the first commercial release of the song. It became a jazz standard.

The feel alternates between simple and compound meter. Harmonically it is a 12-bar C minor blues, masked by the triple time and a turnaround that doubles the harmonic rhythm. On the Miles Smiles recording the bass switches to 4/4 at 2:20. This may have been the first overt use of systemic African-based cross-rhythm by a straight-ahead jazz group.

Davis kept it in his live book. It appears on Live in Europe 1967 and Live in Europe 1969 in the Bootleg Series. Q called it, with Dolores, an all-time great jazz composition.