SO WHAT

I don't know anyone who loves jazz who ever listened to Miles Davis's Kind of Blue just once. Kind of Blue is considered by many to be the greatest jazz album of all time. Recorded in two sessions on March 2, 1959 and April 22, 1959 at the 30th Street Columbia Studio in New York City, it featured an extraordinary sextet: pianist Bill Evans (also Wynton Kelly); drummer Jimmy Cobb; bassist Paul Chambers; John Coltrane on tenor sax; "Cannonball" Adderley on alto sax; and Miles on horn. The album, based entirely on modal jazz which uses scale improvisations, came out Aug. 17, 1959; it wasn't the first modal album ever, but it mesmerized a generation, and has become a musical treasure.

In 1959, I was barely an item in the universe, a bicultural kid, living in Talara, Peru, who probably had never heard the word, jazz. It awes me how it is I would wind up loving jazz the way I do, how it is the music can touch my mind and soul the way it does -- unless music travels through time and space and can reach us even if it doesn't come through our ears. I do have this pretty simple theory that the music our parents loved, particularly when we were in the womb and very young, somehow settles into our genes. This would explain why so many of us born in the 50s and 60s dig bebop, hard bop, modal jazz, the jazz of the 50s. Similarly, I've found that many of the kids born to parents who as youths loved disco in the 70s, grow up to love disco music and its styles too. Clearly, the love of certain kinds of music, just like musical talent, has mysterious sources.

That said, I didn't know anything about modal jazz or much about Miles when I first heard Kind of Blue in the early 90s. A kid working in a basement record store in Northampton suggested it when I asked him to recommend the best jazz ever recorded, and predicted it would "blow me away." As a poet, I was experimenting with typing to different kinds of music, mostly modern jazz, on an old Remington, a manual typewriter that allowed me to hear the music within, if you will. Jazz inspired me to break out of my own molds, preconceptions about music and rhythms, and reach into my own word songs and poetry.

The kid in the record store was right. I was really blown away by Kind of Blue, especially "So What," a modal composition based on two scales: 16 measures of the first, followed by eight of the second, then eight again of the first. There have been periods in my life, when I couldn't wait to hop in my car just so I could play that Miles' piece on my CD, over and over. It never inspired poetry, but a short story, named after the composition. Throughout the years, "So What," like its parent album, has never lost its hold on me. I derive a special excitement from knowing what the horns and other instruments are going to do when I listen to it. The soloists on it, in order, are: Miles, Coltrane, "Cannonball," Evans (and horns), and Chambers.

Listen to it sometime. It is just so damn cool.