So What

Recorded on 2 March 1959, it is a 32-bar AABA form: sixteen bars of D Dorian, eight of E-flat Dorian and eight more of D Dorian. The bass plays the central theme, and Gil Evans wrote the piano-and-bass introduction. Bill Evans's chord voicing, stacked fourths topped by a major third, is known as the So What chord. Coltrane used it in Impressions, and both trace it to Ahmad Jamal's 1955 version of Pavanne.

Ethan Hein notes that the tune proper only starts at 0:34, and that the introduction was supposedly inspired by Debussy's Voiles. He also traces the riff into James Brown's Cold Sweat: Pee Wee Ellis put it into the horn chart and said it was unconscious, and Davis later asked Tony Williams to play the Cold Sweat beat on Frelon Brun. Rolling Stone ranked it number 492 on its 2024 list of the 500 greatest songs.

Live

Davis's quintets played it faster than the record. Versions by the first quintet appear on The Final Tour: Bootleg Series Vol. 6, and by the second quintet on Four & More. It was also played with an orchestrated introduction on a television broadcast with the Gil Evans Orchestra and on Miles Davis at Carnegie Hall.