I played this song at a gig recently, and as usual I couldn’t resist writing a chart for it. It’s also another example of what I’ve called on this site a “double contrafact”, in that it explicitly references a song that itself is a contrafact (that is, a new melody written over an existing chord progression). But the provenance of this particular song is more complicated than most.
To work backwards in time, this song was written in 1965 as a tribute to John Coltrane, whose song “Impressions” was written on this set of chord changes (in the key of D minor) in early 1960. That was about a year after Coltrane had recorded “So What” on the Kind of Blue album with Miles Davis, which features the same chord progression, but both these songs are inspired by an even older composition.
The melodic motif of “Impressions” is lifted directly from a small excerpt from “Pavanne”, the second movement of Morton Gould’s American Symphonette No. 2 from 1938. Pavanne was recorded many times by jazz orchestras, and twice by the pianist Ahmad Jamal, who Miles Davis openly admired and copied. So, this song has deep roots in the jazz canon.
Noteheads 