Miles Davis would have turned eighty five today.  It is hard to believe he has been gone twenty years.  This rendition of “So What” comes from the 1959 special The Sound of Miles Davis, which was something of a sequel to the 1957 The Sound of Jazz.  Both programs were organized by Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice and Whitney Balliett of the New Yorker and produced by early television pioneer Robert Herridge.  Coltrane’s playing is especially confident during this period, and he would of course strike out on his own just a few months later.  Today we take it for granted that such things are easily available to us at the click of a mouse and the touch of a keyboard; up until even the late 1990s, however, such was not the case.  I remember watching this for the first time at the Museum of Television & Radio (now the Paley Center for Media) when I came to New York City for a job interview in 1997.  Enjoy.