Miles From India

We Say...

Review by Steve Smith

Mixing the music of jazz icon Miles Davis with sounds and instruments from India, as producers Bob Belden and Yusuf Gandhi did on Miles from India, was far from an outrageous proposition. Davis set the precedent himself — not only with his use of Indian players like the tabla virtuoso Badal Roy in sessions issued on albums like Big Fun and Get Up with It, but also with his sinuous modal compositions stretching back to 1959's epochal Kind of Blue and continuing through his electric period of the '70s.

Belden, who masterminded the long series of Davis box sets issued by Sony, knows the trumpeter's back pages better than anyone. Together with Gandhi, he arranged a globe-spanning series of sessions that mixed the cream of India's impressive upstart jazz scene with an unprecedented cadre of Davis sidemen spanning the leader's greatest decades: Kind of Blue drummer Jimmy Cobb; bassist Ron Carter from the second great quintet of the late '60s; electric-era sidemen like Chick Corea, John McLaughlin, Pete Cosey and Michael Henderson; and '80s collaborators including Marcus Miller and Mike Stern.

What makes Miles from India so endlessly compelling is its complete avoidance of easy cultural appropriation. Instead, this is a true meeting of minds and cultures, pointing out connections that were always latent in this much-explored canon. Listen, for example, to trumpeter Wallace Roney's sublime Davis evocations in the opening track, "Spanish Key," and compare the vocalized contours of his lines to the spirited singing of Shankar Mahadevan. A common spirit could hardly be more evident.

In that same track, Indian-American alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa offers an even more organic integration of two seemingly disparate traditions, while Davis alum Dave Liebman sets aside his saxophones to offer a sublime improvisation on Indian flute. So it goes throughout this endlessly fascinating set. More than simply a new look at Davis's towering achievements, Miles from India provides compelling evidence of jazz's endless capacity for growth and revitalization through an influx of strong personalities, found both on the corner and around the world.