MUSIC-USA: Cassandra Wilson Explores Many Moods of Miles

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Dec 9 1997 (IPS) - When trumpeter Miles Davis died in 1991, arguably the most controversial figure in jazz, he was under fire from traditionalists for what they deemed his ‘sell-out’ collaborations with soul and pop music. But even even his worst critics honoured his pioneering work in bebop, ‘cool’ and modal jazz.

Now, Cassandra Wilson, one of the most popular vocalists to work in jazz in many years, has decided to tackle Davis’ complex legacy, as she performs new vocal versions of many of Miles’s most prominent original compositions and reworkings of show tunes.

Wilson intends to put out a new record, ‘Traveling Miles’ on the Blue Note label, by next spring and, in preparation for this event, she has led a large band – including conductor Onaje Allan Gumbs, longtime bassist Lonnie Plaxico and the Quartette Indigo string ensemble – on a series of live performances. The concerts included a week-long stay this month at New York’s Lincoln Centre where Wilson sang to a cheering, full house.

The Lincoln Centre concerts drew attention to the many similarities between the late jazz trumpeter and the newly-famous vocalist, the latter of whom has attracted the largest audiences of her career following her last two, pop-influenced albums, ‘Blue Light ‘Til Dawn’ in 1993 and ‘New Moon Daughter’ in 1996.

For one thing, Wilson’s ethereal, moaning tenor and whispery falsetto share the same muted, plaintive tone as Davis’s trumpet. Both can conjure up a sensation of sweet sorrow, and both offer notes that are slow and drawn out enough to seem as if they exist in a world where time has stopped.

Wilson has studied Miles’s playing for some time, so it should be no surprise that she can plumb the depths of his eerie, spare style. “Miles is the mysterious one,” she says. “There’s something in his sound that is so strong, so masculine. But at the same time there’s another thing so intimate that it seems almost feminine.”

Amazingly, Wilson’s voice can capture many of the effects that Davis achieved with a trumpet and an array of plungers and mutes. In her version of his composition ‘All Blues’, she reaches both the original’s high notes and vocalises liquid syllables in a manner uncannily similar to Davis.

Like Davis, she is able to find the heartbreak in even so jaunty a melody as that of ‘There’s a Boat Dat’s Leaving Soon for New York’, from the George Gershwin musical ‘Porgy and Bess’.

That’s not the only resemblance. Wilson – who has leaped from the funk-based music of the M-Base Collective to the sensitive, acoustic folk of her recent albums – is just as restless to explore new types of music as Miles was, Both delight in the popular, commercial styles that jazz traditionalists shun.

Just as Davis was loudly criticised for the funk albums of his later years, so too has Wilson been panned for covering songs by such pop musicians as ‘U2’ and ‘The Monkees’.

Wilson pays homage to the funky Miles by recording his late- period song ‘Tutu’ (itself a tribute to the South African Archbishop and Nobel laureate), updating its languid, dignified pace with her own haiku-like lyrics, which capture Miles’s mood: “The quiet night/ Stillness before the light.”

Cassandra Wilson’s growth as a lyricist is evident in her new tunes, including a blues, ‘Prancing’, that is related to Davis’s ‘Pfrancing’, where she wittily evokes a new romance: “Is it love for me that makes you call at half past three?/ Well, if you really loved me/ You’d let me get some sleep.”

The Lincoln Centre concerts not only highlighted Wilson’s interest in Miles, but also offered other musicians’ interpretations of Davis’s ouvre. The all-female Quartette Indigo, led by violinist Akua Dixon Turre, performed an intriguing, swinging version of ‘So What’, one of Davis’s career highlights, while Gumbs arranged a surprisingly moving version of one of the later Miles remakes, Cyndi Lauper’s mournful pop ballad ‘Time After Time’.

Although several months remain before Wilson is expected to come out with ‘Traveling Miles’, her wide-ranging appreciation of Miles Davis is already evident.

“He covers everything,” she says. “His music speaks to all of us on a very real level. That’s all I want to do and have ever wanted to do, ever since I heard Miles Davis play ‘Sketches of Spain’ on my father’s record player when I was a little girl.”