A piece of jazz trivia that I’ve always found interesting: jazz icon Miles Davis made his first television appearance on April 2, 1959 (coincidentally, 58 years ago to the day I am writing this). I find this fact interesting because April 2, 1959 was nearly 14 years after Miles Davis appeared on Charlie Parker’s first recording sessions in 1945, the sessions that introduced the world to bebop and became the seed of modern jazz. And April 2, 1959 was a full decade after Miles Davis recorded Birth of the Cool, introducing a sound so startling that it seemed to split jazz itself in two, launching an eternal quest to reconcile the genre’s great intellect and curiosity with its unquenchable visceral drive. April 2, 1959 was four years after Miles had fallen deep into heroin addiction, lost everything, gotten clean, and come back stronger than ever with a new group featuring John Coltrane that would once again revolutionize the form. And then, on April 2, 1959, shortly after Davis recorded Kind of Blue, now considered by many to be the greatest jazz record in history, someone finally thought: “Hey, we should probably film this guy.”