"Autumn Leaves" is probably the best known song on this album which is straight out of grammar school music class (or maybe high school for you public school kids), "It Never Entered My Mind" is a classic as well, Jane Monheit does an excellent version on "Live From the Rainbow Room" Anyway, I feel that this is a well known song but every time I mention it in a conversation the person looks at me as if I am speaking in Latin.
So, One For Daddy-O, eight and a half minutes of pure jazz bliss. Miles's second solo starts off with a loooong held note, in it he is telling you he is the coolest, blackest motherfucker on the planet and everyone else is a high school algebra teacher who drives a K car from his parents house to class everyday. This song is everything jazz should be, it is edgy, it is cool (the word cool in the way we use it today was invented by jazz musicians as a description of this type of music in opposition to Bird and Dizzy or Ellington type bop and swing). The song is women in black dresses sipping gimlets, men who wear hats and are not afraid to smoke. It is about stockings and affairs...everything you pictured (or at least I did) adults doing before you became one. And while all that was happening in the white section of town, up in Harlem, downstairs in a small club it was blacks drinking gin, sweating through the smoke and the stench of too much cologne watching some of their own prove that indeed they are not equal to the whites, here they are the superior race.
So if you're missing a little romance in your life and you feel about as cool as the first time you tried to take a bra off in your teens throw this song on and down a martini...not today's definition of one either. Pour a half a bottle of Gin over ice and wave a bottle of vermouth in front of the mixer (that's enough) pour it into a nice big glass, throw a black suit on and a crisp white shirt, leave the top three buttons undone; select this song on your iPod and put it on repeat. That broad across the way you've been thinking about having a drink with? Mix another one for her and give a knock on the door, Miles has your back, just make sure you have that bra removal step down because you'll be putting those skills to work in about ten minutes.
