"Summertime" (Miles Davis)

I took voice lessons for a hot second back in high school.  My voice teacher (and I use the term "teacher" loosely) was a music professor at the small liberal arts college in my hometown.  He was consistently late to our appointments and was always distracted.  That is, when he bothered to show up at all.  Which really sucked, because I had to pay the guy for a month of lessons in advance, and the money was coming out of my own measly checking account.
One afternoon, we're plodding through Giordani's aria "Caro Mio Ben."  He's bored and distracted, which is making me bored and distracted.  So I start scanning his bookshelf (while I'm still belting out the song in Italian), and I see a copy of the Miles Davis-Gil Evans 1958 reimagining of George Gershwin's Porgy & Bess on the shelf.  So during a short water break, I ask him about it.
"I have a Miles Davis compilation album of his early Blue Note recordings.  Is this one good, too?"
He looked at me like I'd ripped one.  "Is it good?"
As I stumbled and stammered, trying to explain that I was just getting into jazz, and that I'd heard a mid-60s album Davis had recorded and didn't care for it, he stopped me.
"Yeah.  It's good."
He cut the lesson short by 15 minutes that afternoon, in an obvious rush to be somewhere else.  Incidentally, there was no next lesson.  Not because I pulled the plug.  (I should have, though.)  He just never showed up again.
About a month later, I ran into a girl I knew who'd also been taking lessons from him.  She filled me in that he'd been having an affair with the Dean of Students.  Apparently, they had both packed up and left town together right after my final lesson without giving anyone, including the college, any notice.
Anyway, when he cut my last lesson short, I walked across the street to our town's lone record store, where I asked the owner about Davis's Porgy & Bess.  There was no eye-rolling or irritated looks.  He just popped in the CD, and we listened to it over the PA system and talked music for about an hour.  I ended up spending the money set aside for the next month's voice lessons on Davis's Porgy & Bess and Kind of Blue.  Good investments, I'd say.
Regarding "Summertime" specifically, it's one of my favorite pieces of instrumental jazz.  Evans's arrangement strips Gershwin's aria down to its skeleton, turning it into a modal piece built upon lush, sultry chords, thereby giving Davis the freedom to stick to or stray from the melody as he pleases.  In three sophisticated minutes, it captures the swelter of a South Carolina Lowcountry summer night and also pays homage to Gershwin without being a carbon copy of the original.