The story of "So What"

While we were discussing the convoluted story of the "Rhythm-A-Ning" riff, my worthy constituent Michael 'Jazz Lives' Steinman, purveyor of happiness, said that

certain riffs and variations are "in the air"

which is absolutely true. From outright plagiarism to excessive, but unintentional, "inspiration", these things can happen (I once put together a really pretty set of chords worth of Rachmaninov, so much so that... you get my drift). And it can happen to anyone, even master composer Benny Golson, as he explains to another master composer, Horace Silver, here.

That's all very well, but in American popular music there was ("was", hopefully) laxity when it came to naming the author(s) of a tune. Take Thelonious Monk's "'Round Midnight". How much did Cootie Williams have to do with it, beyond being the first band leader to record it? This is just an example: any unlikely name, from disc-jockey Alan Freed's name on rock'n'roll records, to manager Irving Mills's on Duke Ellington's, it'd be healthy to raise a brow or two.

Another example: Gil Evans only discovered that "Donna Lee" was not Charlie Parker's tune when he asked him about it, to arrange it for Claude Thornhill, and Parker sent him to his  sideman, Miles Davis, who was just 21 at the time.

Music in the air

One of the defining characteristics of jazz music, especially in the first 2/3 of the 20th century, is its mixture of oral and mechanical tradition, so to speak. Oral (aural?) because musicians learnt their craft by sheer listening, and mechanical because that learning was done primarily from records, playing them over and over again till they were worn down. In the case of simple, short phrases, like "Rhythm-A-Ning", records sometimes were not even needed for the music to live on through the years. Some time ago I wrote about Lester Young's pervading influence on subsequent generations of jazzmen. A few months ago, Doug Ramsey talked about the President's closing tenor solo on "Sometimes I'm Happy":

which immediately reminded me of Gerry Mulligan's "Jeru", premiered a few years later by Miles Davis's "Birth of the Cool" nonet

Mulligan was one of those staunch followers of Lester Young, and it's likely that Lester Young's solo was the inspiration for his composition. What's interesting is where this melody turns out again, practically untouched

I say practically untouched because both (the three melodies, actually) are in the same key, and the contour of "Jeru" and Bud Powell's "So Sorry, Please" are almost identical. The connection between Lester Young and Gerry Mulligan is quite clear, but the link between Mulligan and Powell is more unexpected, and can actually be narrowed down to quite some specific details: we'll be able to read the very likely explanation in the extraordinary biography of Powell by Peter Pullman.

As part of his comprehensive research, Pullman discovered that Powell had actually played on one gig by Miles Davis's Nonet. Given that their repertoire was rather limited, it is safe to assume that they must have played "Jeru". Days after that gig, Powell went into the studio and did a session where he recorded several standards and only one original, "So Sorry, Please". ¿Residual memory from the gig with the Nonet? Possibly.