Gil Evans wrote the abstract intro section, partially inspired by “Voiles” by Debussy. The tune proper begins at 0:34. If you want to learn how to improvise jazz, you should definitely learn Miles’ solo. A guy named Steve Khan posted this nice transcription of it, but you’re better off figuring it by ear. Learn to sing it first, and then work it out on your instrument. Miles’ solo isn’t too challenging technically, and it can teach you a ton about melody, phrasing and build.

Here’s a live television performance of “So What.”

“So What” is famous for being one of the first modal jazz tunes. This just means that it doesn’t have a lot of chord changes compared to the usual harmonic density of bebop. Because “So What” is relatively easy to play, it’s a standard piece for beginners and high school jazz bands. The main part uses the D dorian scale, the mode you get when you play the C major scale from D to D. This scale is especially easy on the piano — just play the white keys. To play the bridge, you slide up a half step to E flat dorian.

The So What riff

The melody of “So What” is a call in the bass followed by a response from the piano and horns. The response part of the melody is known as the So What riff. It’s a pair of minor seventh chords, one a whole step above the root, the other on the root, played in the particular rhythm shown above. Miles Davis didn’t invent the riff. It’s a jazz accompaniment cliche, widely used by pianists, guitarists and horn section arrangers. Miles just had the wisdom to pluck it from the memepool and place it front and center in a tune. The riff is built on the So What chord: a stack of fourths with a third on top. The fourths make the chord sound ambiguous and open-ended. It’s a hip sound, and in fact you can use the So What chord for a variety of harmonic purposes, not just minor sevenths. It’s an especially useful voicing for guitarists, since it’s really easy to play and sounds good in so many different situations.

“So What” and “Impressions”

Casual music fans use the term “sampling” to mean any kind of musical quotation, interpolation or reference, not just digital manipulation of audio recordings. I think they’re correct to conflate all these different practices, since they all stem from the same desire to repurpose existing ideas in new context. In the broader sense of the term, “So What” has been sampled extensively. Most famously, John Coltrane, the tenor sax player on the original recording of “So What,” used its chord changes for his own classic tune, “Impressions.”

“Impressions” is more of a mashup, really, since its melody is sampled from Morton Gould’s composition “Pavane” — listen at 1:28.

Coltrane probably learned this composition from Ahmad Jamal, who recorded a popular  arrangement of it in 1955. Miles Davis was a big Ahmad Jamal fan too, and is said to have drawn inspiration from this passage’s harmonic setting for “So What.” Lewis Porter says that Coltrane got the B section for “Impressions” from Ravel’s “Pavane pour une Infante Défunte.” This piece was also the basis for a 1930s standard, “The Lamp Is Low.”

How’s this for a sample chain? McCoy Tyner was Coltrane’s pianist on “Impressions.” Later McCoy recorded his own version of “Impressions.” A piece of the bass solo from this recording was sampled by Black Sheep in their classic track “The Choice Is Yours.” The memes do get around, don’t they?

Coltrane and his bandmates got a lot of mileage out of the So What riff, both in their writing and improvisation. Hear the riff at work in “Song of the Underground Railroad.”

The So What riff in funk, soul and R&B

Pee Wee Ellis, the trombonist and arranger for James Brown, says that he unconsciously copied “So What” when he wrote the horn part for “Cold Sweat.” It’s fitting, then, that “Cold Sweat” has itself been sampled many times.

The inspiration flows both ways. Miles loved James Brown and imitated him explicitly during his funk period. For example, Miles instructed Tony Williams to play the “Cold Sweat” beat on “Frelon Brun.”

And now, here’s where it gets really convoluted. One of the many songs sampling “Cold Sweat” is “Welcome To The Terrordome” by Public Enemy. The track also includes a sample of James Brown’s “Give It Up Or Turnit A-Loose.” Miles actually sampled that same beat himself, on his late-period tune “Blow.”

The So What riff also shows up in the horn line from “Let a Woman Be a Woman And A Man Be A Man” by Dyke and the Blazers. This is another tune that’s been sampled extensively, most prominently in “How You Like Me Now” by The Heavy, as heard in tons of TV commercials.

The Heavy’s usage of the Dyke and the Blazers sample has been the subject of intense litigation, which I think is funny, because Dyke and the Blazers copied their tune almost note-for-note from James Brown. The irony of the situation merits a full blog post of its own.

More recently, Erykah Badu repurposed “So What” for her live version of “Rimshot.”

Teena Marie makes similar use of “So What” in her tune “Harlem Blues.”

For all of the influence “So What” has had, I’m surprised to find that there are hardly any hip-hop tracks that sample it directly. Maybe it’s too sacred even for hip-hop producers. If you can think of a good example, hit the comments. Meanwhile, here’s a diagram of all the songs mentioned above.

Hear a mashup of many of the tracks discussed in this post:

So What megamix by ethanhein

Other Miles Davis samples

Busta Rhymes‘ “Everything Remains Raw” gets its moody chord progression from the ending of “Bess, You Is My Woman Now.” It’s not on YouTube, sadly, but it’s worth chasing down, it’s a beauty. OutKast uses Miles’ trumpet scream from “Sivad” on “Ain’t No Thang.” See a map of many more Miles Davis samples. And read all about how Miles remixed himself on the album In A Silent Way.

Doing this kind of genealogical tracing of music has convinced me that ultimately, there is no originality. There’s just the splicing together and hybridizing of memes. Some people find this realization dismaying. I find it exciting. I enjoy tracing the lineage of the music I care about. Hope you’re enjoying it too.

There’s probably a whole generation of producers who have sliced and diced this beat without having heard the actual song. I’m sure the same is true of “The Funky Drummer” and “Apache.” Beyond the break, “Cold Sweat” is a remarkable piece of music, way out ahead of its time. On James Brown’s album of the same name, it’s sitting alongside jazz standards like “Nature Boy” and some boilerplate blues and R&B. Compared to those more traditional songs, “Cold Sweat” sounds like it belongs in another era entirely. It has a radically simple two-chord structure and an African-influenced intricacy to its rhythmic groove, and it still sounds pretty fresh more than thirty years later.

“Cold Sweat” was written by the Famous Flames’ bandleader Pee Wee Ellis, seeded by a bassline James Brown came up with vocally. Ellis says he got his horn line from “So What” by Miles Davis, which has been the basis for many other tunes as well. Hear a mashup of “Cold Sweat” with “So What” and other related tunes.

So What megamix by ethanhein

As befits a song based on a musical quotation, “Cold Sweat” has been sampled widely. Here’s a sample map; click to see it bigger.

“Cold Sweat” has been a particularly rich source of inspiration for Public Enemy — they sample it on “How to Kill a Radio Consultant,” “Prophets of Rage” and “Welcome To The Terrordome.”

“Welcome To The Terrordome” is an unusually dense web of samples, even by Public Enemy standards. It includes several other James Brown samples, including “Give It Up Or Turnit A-Loose,” “Get Up, Get into It, Get Involved” and “Soul Power.” And “Welcome To The Terrordome” has itself been sampled and quoted many times, by KRS-One, Non Phixion and Ice Cube, among others.

“Cold Sweat” is so influential that Mongo Santamaria’s cover version spawned a hot breakbeat of its own. It’s at 2:21.

RJD2, composer of the Mad Men theme song, uses Mongo Santamaria’s beat in “The Chicken-Bone Circuit.”

Ultramagnetic MCs love “Cold Sweat” almost as much as Public Enemy. They use the James Brown version on “Kool Keith Housing Things.”

And they use the Mongo Santamaria version in “Feelin’ It.”

Finally, I myself use the Cold Sweat break in the first track from my forthcoming Delia Derbyshire remix project.

Planetarium Remix

Me vs James Brown vs Delia Derbyshire vs Babsy Singer

mp3 download, ipod format download

Here’s how to program the Cold Sweat break on a drum machine. Give the drummer some!

Here’s the real video, which sadly I can’t embed. In its place, enjoy a fan video.

I’ve loved this song for years while barely being able to make out any of the words. I finally had to look them up on Google. MJ isn’t exactly Cole Porter, but his lyrics have nice body logic, they sound good and are super pleasurable to sing. MJ had the same songwriting strategy as the Beatles: he started with a melody over a rhythmic groove, developed using nonsense syllables. Only later, once the whole song was in place and recorded as a demo, did he find words that fit the metrical scheme.

Verse one:

Lovely is the feeling now
Fever, temperatures rising now
Power (ah power) is the force, the vow
That makes it happen
It asks no questions why
So get closer
To my body now
Just love me
‘Til you don’t know how

The melodic nut meat of this tune is on the words “lovely,” “fever,” “power,” “happen” and so on. The first syllable of these words is sung on D#, the major third in the key of B. The second syllable is on the A below, the flat seventh in B. The interval between these two notes is a tritone. It’s a sound with a richly conflicted emotional resonance. If you’re willing to follow me through a little music theory, it’ll help you understand what makes this song so awesome.

Western music theory is based on the buildup and release of tension. One of the best ways to create tension is with dissonance. The tritone is considered by European tradition to be a very dissonant interval. Every major key has a tritone in it, between the fourth and seventh notes of the scale (fa and ti, for Sound Of Music fans.) If you’re a typical western listener and you hear a tritone, your ear wants it to resolve to a less dissonant interval. You want the fa to resolve down to mi, and the ti to resolve up to do.

African-American music treats the tritone very differently. The blues uses tons of unresolved tritones. In blues, chords with tritones can functionally feel stable and resolved, “dissonant” though they may be. (The music has lots of other intriguing harmonic grittiness, like microtones, and the simultaneous use of minor and major thirds.) The blues passed the unresolved tritone on to its many musical descendants: jazz, rock, funk and so on.

MJ is squarely within his musical tradition to be basing his melody on an unresolved tritone. Still, it’s startling to hear it featured so prominently and starkly in a pop song, on the very first two notes of the vocal melody no less. It gives a jolt of intensity to what might otherwise be a harmless piece of disco fluff.

Music is fundamentally all about math. Most of the musical intervals in the western tuning system are based on simple ratios, the kinds of numbers you can count on your fingers. The interval between A and the next A up is an octave, meaning that the ratio between the two notes’ frequencies is one to two. The interval between A and E is a fifth, a ratio of two to three. The interval between A and C# is a major third, a ratio of four to five. The tritone is different. The interval between A and D# is one to the square root of two. Your ear might not know which specific irrational number it’s hearing, but it knows that something weird and complex is at work, something you can’t count on your fingers.

“Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” asserts further non-European quality in its extremely minimalist chord progression. It has just two chords, A major and B7. The A major has B as its bass note, which really makes it more of a B9sus4 chord. The music term for this kind of unvarying chord pattern is a modal groove. In this case the mode is B mixolydian.

Western music is mostly linear. The chord progression tells a story of dissonance leading to consonance, or vice versa. Modal tunes are more Eastern, trance-like and drone-oriented. They’re about creating a cyclical ambiance, a mood rather than a narrative. “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” shares its modal quality with my other favorite Michael Jackson original, “Wanna Be Startin’ Something,” which he wrote around the same time.

MJ’s chorus adds to the trance-inducing vibe by repeating the same line over and over:

Keep on with the force, don’t stop
Don’t stop ’til you get enough

It’s more of a mantra than a semantic idea. It helps keep the mind clear for the business at hand, the business of getting your groove on from the waist down.

The harmony and lyrics might be static, but there’s a lot of music packed into this track. Ben Wright’s string arrangement chases up and down the chromatic scale, adding another dash of unsettling dissonance. There are multiple layers of bells, handclaps and other percussion, and the bass and guitar mostly function as percussion too. Jerry Hey’s tight horn chart makes the brass into yet another percussion element, rather than a melodic one. Check out the stab at 1:37, the end of the first chorus. Hot!

As with all of MJ’s hits, “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough” has been sampled many times. Some highlights, more or less in chronological order:

• Jazzy Jay – “Def Jam”
• Public Enemy – “Can’t Do Nuttin’ For Ya Man”
• Double Trouble & Rebel MC – “Just Keep Rockin’ (Remix)”
• Slick Rick – “Impress The Kid”
• Mase ft Jay-Z, 112 and Lil’ Cease – “Cheat On You”
• Beyoncé – “Black Culture”
• People Under the Stairs – “Tuxedo Rap” (the sample is pitch-shifted way down, cool)

Purists might find it jarring, but I’m enjoying this remix with Jay-Z.

Here’s my own contribution:

MJ Makossa

mp3 download, ipod format download

Don’t stop!

Part one:

Part two:

Part three:

Part four:

Part five:

Part six:

Steve Albini says that sampling is cheap and easy. He’s right about that. Anyone with a computer and a few pieces of inexpensive software can do it. Mr Albini also thinks people should be “embarrassed by sampling, like a bad dance move.” It’s a funny analogy, because while I like the albums he’s produced for the most part, they aren’t dance friendly. Pick any song that you’ve danced socially to in the past thirty years and the odds are high that it was produced electronically.

Anyway, in response to the charge that sampling is cheap and easy, why is that a bad thing? George Clinton points out that rock and roll was originally all about cheap and easy: three chords, repetitive beats and structures, singable choruses. Now, rock music is expensive and difficult, and thanks to people like Radiohead, every bit as technically inaccessible as jazz or classical. This is why rock has mostly become every bit as lame as jazz or classical. Making an art form expensive and inaccessible makes it elitist and conservative. The big artistic risks are mostly being taken by the electronic musicians, not the guitar tribe.

The documentary makes the intriguing analogy between DJs and photographers. DJs are to traditional instrumentalists as photographers are to painters. You can’t make blanket statements about the validity of the entire medium; you need to go on a case-by-case basis. DJs and photographers have a lower barrier to entry than cellists or painters but the path to mastery is every bit as long.

We’ve become accustomed to lavish production values in our recorded music, and that comes at a steep price tag if you want live instruments and analog tape. The expensiveness of lavish, dense live recordings forces conservative choices. The effortlessness of sampling leads to more risk taking, more experimentation, more innovation. Also more amateurish nonsense, but that’s the nature of the beast. A low penalty for failure is a necessary precondition for success.

Even if money is no object, there are still some strong artistic arguments in favor of sample-based music. The loop is different from a human playing a phrase over and over. I used to play in an R&B group. The singer and I wrote the songs with samples and loops and then taught them to the band. We had a Miles Davis sample that the trumpet player was supposed to use for his part. He played it pretty accurately, but never with the exact phrasing, tape compression and ambiance of the original loop, and it never quite sounded as good. It was cool that he could riff and improvise, but it gave us a looser, jazzier sound than we were going for. The identical repetition effects you to hypnotic effect. Check out the squealing trumpet sample under Public Enemy’s “Don’t Believe The Hype” – even James Brown couldn’t have that disciplined a horn player, not with all that insane noise swirling around. Humans get bored and distracted, they have opinions. Computers don’t. What if James Brown and band had been necessary to appear in person in order to create “Fight The Power”, and they had refused? What a loss.

The entertainment lawyer in the movie equates my sampling your song to me coming into your house, helping myself to the food in your fridge. Sampling might recontextualize old recordings in ways their creators find offensive, but very often sampled works add something of benefit to old recordings’ cultural standing. I’m thinking of all those classic seventies funk and disco songs with incredible beats but outdated lyrics and arrangements. George Clinton is outspokenly grateful to hip-hop producers for putting him back on the map, culturally and then commercially.

Meanwhile, the law is a serious obstacle. Clearing all samples in advance is crushing to the creative process, which depends on immediacy and spontaneity. It’s a lot cheaper and easier to get a license to perform or record a full cover of a song than it is to get the rights to a three second sample. Some copyright holders are laid back or indifferent, but some charge extortionate license fees. Erick Sermon had to pay Marvin Gaye’s estate a hundred thousand dollars for a sample clearance. Unless you’re a major pop star with serious backing, this is prohibitive, and we’re back to the conservatism imposed by high costs that plagues instrumental music.

Clyde Stubblefield’s reaction on first hearing how widely he was sampled: “Cool!” But he’s bitter about not getting credited. He’s not as upset about not getting royalties, maybe because he wasn’t getting those before sampling either – James Brown owns all the copyrights to “The Funky Drummer” and “Cold Sweat” and so on. Public Enemy explains they have to be secretive about their sources to not get sued. A healthier sampling culture would make it easy to use samples and encourage attribution and reasonable payments.

Sampling artists like to use the phrase “fair game” – I’ve used it myself to describe the contents of my iTunes library, and some of the musicians in Copyright Criminals use it too. What’s fair game? Depends. The Beatles are notoriously litigious copyright holders, but they themselves use unauthorized samples in “Revolution 9″, “I Am The Walrus” and “Tomorrow Never Knows.” I’m hopeful that as sampling moves from the fringe into the mainstream, the law will eventually catch up and the absurdities will iron themselves out.

Update: this post and another of mine are quoted in a Brands Plus Music post about the impact computers are having on music making. It’s a good one, thought-provoking, worth a read.