Time Out Ten
Miles Davis
So What
For this item you need to be able to stop for ten minutes.
We are often moving on to the next job, the next meeting, scrolling down social media, taking the next call ......'Time Out Ten' asks you to stop for ten minutes and listen to a particular piece of music; to find a time when you won't be interrupted, when you can put in/on your headphones and chill out. Ten minutes isn't long.
“In the middle of the road, in the moment you want to give up, shout out even louder: So what?" (BTS : Bangtan Boys)
The 1959 Miles Davis album Kind Of Blue is one of the best known recordings in jazz, in fact, the best selling jazz album of all time. You might have heard it countless times or perhaps you have never heard it, but it is worth spending time listening to one of the tracks again in this ten minute break we give ourselves during the day (or night).
For the recording, Miles Davis (trumpet) led a sextet featuring John Coltrane (tenor sax); Julian 'Cannonball' Adderley (alto sax); Bill Evans (piano), Paul Chambers (bass) and Jimmy Cobb (drums). Wikipedia sets up the information about the track So What from the album: "The piano-and-bass introduction for the piece was written by Gil Evans for Bill Evans and Paul Chambers ..... The use of the double bass to play the central theme makes the piece unusual ..... The distinctive voicing employed by Bill Evans for the chords that interject the head: from the bottom up, three notes at intervals of a perfect fourth followed by a major third, has been given the name "So What chord" by such theorists as Mark Levine. So What is also quoted as one of the best examples of 'modal jazz' where rather than improvisations being based on the tune's chords, musicians improvise based on different scales (it is set in the Dorian mode (scale) and consists of 16 bars of D Dorian, followed by eight bars of Eâ™ Dorian and another eight of D Dorian).
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So take ten and listen to So What :