8. “So What (Live),” Miles Davis, from The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel, Disc 5 (1965)

In December of 1965, having just finished their first full-length studio album together, E.S.P., Miles Davis’s second great quintet—including Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter, and a young drumming firebrand named Tony Williams—prepped for a gig at Chicago’s Plugged Nickel. Oddly, the sets they played over the course of their two-night engagement contained none of the original music the group had just recorded, and instead consisted entirely of standards that had been in Davis’s live repertoire for many years.
 
The eccentric treatments the group committed to tape over those seven sets were apparently the results of a dare: Prior to the gig, according to Shorter’s biographer Michelle Mercer, Williams challenged his bandmates to “break free of their accustomed musical ideas and techniques” and try instead to play “anti-music.” Thus did the quintet arrive at a frenzied double-time version of “So What”—which first appeared as the lead-off track for Kind of Blue, Davis’s inescapable quintuple-platinum hit record.
 
“So What” as Davis’s sextet recorded it in 1959 is perhaps the most immediately recognizable jazz tune. From the melodic theme, delivered not by the horn players as one would expect but instead by bassist Paul Chambers, to pianist Bill Evans’s chord voicings—so distinctive that some critics have taken to calling them the “So What chords”—the song in its original form seduces the listener despite the bandleader's eccentric arranging choices.
 
The second great quintet’s version, by contrast, is hilariously irreverent: The band races headlong through the changes, slurring the melodic theme, crashing from solo to solo, and playing with a ferocity that likely pleased their leader given that within a year or two he would begin referring to his immortal ‘50s outing as “warmed-over turkey.”
 
Heading into the second half of the ‘60s, Miles was ready to discard all of his previous notions of jazz and occupy new sonic territory—and he’d clearly found the group of young musicians to take him there.