"So What" is an instrumental composition by Miles Davis and the opening track of his album Kind of Blue, recorded on March 2, 1959 and released by Columbia on August 17, 1959. It is a piece of modal jazz built on the Dorian mode: sixteen bars in D Dorian, then eight bars in E-flat Dorian and eight more in D Dorian. The piece follows an AABA form in the thirty-two-bar format of American popular song. The piano and bass introduction was written by Gil Evans for Bill Evans and Paul Chambers.
The central theme, played on double bass, is unusual. Bill Evans's chord voicing for the interjections in the head is called the "So What chord" by theorists. John Coltrane used the same structure for his composition "Impressions". Live versions by Davis's quintet were played much faster than the studio recording, and by the second quintet even faster, as heard on Four & More. Rolling Stone ranked the song 492nd on its 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list in 2024.
