Miles Ahead

God bless the YouTube revolution.

Not too long ago, my professor, Mike Formanek, a great jazz musician and all-around nice guy, spoke eloquently about the impact of YouTube with music history. Many clips have already been posted of rare footage (albeit sometimes grainy and noisy) of music performances, interviews, etc. ; material that over the years has been passed hand-to-hand or shared with one another through whatever means possible.

But as most issues with copyrighted material often turn out, these commodities can only last so long before they must be removed for "legal purposes." I've already seen this happen as one of the most notorious clips in jazz history has been posted and subsequently removed from the video-sharing site for such reasons: Paul Gonsalves "sleeping" on the Duke Ellington's bandstand at Newport, just feet away from the pounding drum kit.

So I'm sharing with you (while I can) this clip of the Miles Davis Quintet performing "So What" on CBS in 1959, near the time of the release of "Kind of Blue," which is appropriately the best-selling jazz album of all time and one that any music-lover should own. This quintet features Davis and John Coltrane playing at peak form, and also includes drummer Jimmy Cobb, bassist Paul Chambers, and pianist Wynton Kelly.



Sometimes, my generation can really take for granted the technology that is available to us, and can't truly appreciate the simplicity of typing a few words into a search engine, which returns gems such as this.