Source: Billboard, March 6, 1999 v111 i10 p11(1).
Title: Wilson finds Miles Of Inspiration.(Cassandra
Wilson's new album Traveling For Miles borrows
from Miles Davis' style)
Author: BILL HOLLAND
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Companies: Blue Note Records - Product introduction
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1999 BPI Communications
Singer/Songwriter Explores Davis' Style On Blue Note's 'Traveling'
With the March 23 U.S. release of Cassandra Wilson's new album on
Blue Note, "Traveling For Miles," the award-winning singer/songwriter debuts
in another role: producer.
"Traveling For Miles," Wilson's homage to the late jazz giant Miles Davis, is not exactly a tribute album but rather a set inspired by Davis' lyrical, bared-to-essentials approach to music. The album is an outgrowth of a series of Wilson concerts commissioned by Jazz at Lincoln Center in November 1997 to honor the artist.
Rather than tackling the project the easy way--producing tracks that were imitative templates of well-known Davis tunes and arrangements-Wilson chose the more risky path of entirely remolding Davis favorites, adding lyrics to compositions both from his straight-ahead acoustic-band albums as well as his electric fusion-funk albums. She also wrote some new songs for the 12-cut project, which features a guest appearance by Afropop star Angelique Kidjo.
Fans of Wilson will hear songs similar in style to the roots/folk/pop efforts on her earlier albums for the label, as well as several others that explore the rhythmic territory of straight-ahead jazz. The resulting mosaic required a production balancing act.
Wilson says she's happy with the results. "I'm surprised I'm happy," she admits. She says she was anxious about the daunting task of shaping an album herself.
"I wasn't too confident in what I had to do, but I knew I had to do it," she says.
Wilson says she tried first to enlist Craig Street, the producer of her first two critically acclaimed albums for the label, but his schedule was full. So she took on the job, with trepidation.
Although her producer's role is new, Wilson is on firm footing as an artist. In addition to topping several magazines' jazz polls, Wilson won a Grammy Award in 1997 for best vocal jazz performance for her second album for the label, "New Moon Daughter." She was nominated for the same award in 1995 for her breakthrough Blue Note debut, "Blue Light Til Dawn."
The albums, with their ineffable mix of her glorious contralto voice, dreamlike grooves, slide-resonator roots guitar, and other nontraditional jazz instruments, won her a following beyond core jazz listeners. Her new set will only add to the momentum of her expanding listener base, according to industry supporters.
"It's been building and building, and her press has been unbelievable, so we're very excited," says Saul Shapiro, Blue Note sales and marketing VP "Cassandra can offer something special to non-jazz audiences. So we're taking a couple of different angles on it, taking it to triple-A and smooth jazz stations, college, pop, even some urban outlets and alternative radio."
RADIO, RETAIL ARE READY
Bruce Wong, PD of triple-A WXPN Philadelphia, says, "I think it's a natural progression from her last album. I think this one will turn a lot of new people onto her."
Rita Houston, music director at noncommercial triple-A WFUV New York, describes the new album as "beautiful," adding, "Cassandra is one of those artists that cross over from jazz and work for us."
Retail buyers share the enthusiasm. "It'll be a high-profile record for us," says Steve Diesel, senior music buyer at the Minneapolis-based Best Buy chain.
"We're very excited," says Chris Osborne, jazz buyer at Tower Records' Lincoln Center store in New York. "There's a lot of interest, and we're huge supporters, and so the orders on it are very good, and there'll be full endcap [feature displays] and listening stations for the album."
Borders is also giving the set an extra push. "I'm really behind this record," says Jessica Sendra, jazz buyer at Borders' headquarters in Ann Arbor, Mich. "We're putting this in the 'gratis' program we have where it gets pricing and positioning out of the box--we don't charge the vendor for that." She adds that Wilson's set is "one of the few jazz releases" to get into the program.
MIX OF STYLES
For the album, Wilson wrote lyrics for five pieces of music recorded by Davis during the last half of his 50-year career--"Run The Voodoo Down" and "Blue And Green" (retitled "Sky And Sea"), both Davis compositions; the Davis/Victor Feldman classic "Seven Steps To Heaven" (retitled "Seven Steps"); Wayne Shorter's "ESP" (retitled "Never Broken"), and Marcus Miller's "Tutu" (retitled "Resurrection Blues").
She sings two standards also associated with classic Miles albums--the Churchill/Morey evergreen "Someday My Prince Will Come," which Davis recorded in 1961, and his recasting of Cyndi Lauper's 1984 hit "Time After Time."
Additionally, Wilson wrote four tunes of her own for the album--"Traveling Miles," "When The Sun Goes Down," "Piper," and the song Blue Note has picked as the first single, "Right Here, Right Now"
Several of these could pass muster as Miles-influenced, but
others don't--at
least not on an obvious level. Wilson says she wanted it that
way; she
didn't want the album to seem too pat.
"That's why I included them," she says, laughing, "because
they don't have
anything to do with anything, you know?" She says she "felt
compelled to
throw a wrench in the works" to add an element of mystery.
"But I think there's some connection," she adds, "some underlying
thing,
though. And that's why I listen to it, like, 'Why is this
tune here?'"
Wilson adds that it's much easier to bridge stylistic gaps
by working with
musicians who don't worry about artificial boundaries. "You
can do both if
you do it right, and I really have a great cast of characters,"
she says. "I
have to give it up to the people who are on this record--they're
the kind of
musicians who 'get it.'"
The musicians on 'Traveling Miles" include names familiar from
previous
Wilson albums, such as longtime collaborator bassist Lonnie
Plaxico and
guitarists Marvin Sewell and Kevin Breit. Guest instrumentalists
include
Steve Coleman on alto sax, bassist Dave Holland (who worked
with Davis),
vibraphonist/pianist Stefon Harris, violinist Regina Carter,
pianist Rodney
Kendrick, and guitarist Pat Metheny, among others.
Wilson says she had a chance to meet Miles--although she only
got close. "I
opened for him in '89 at JVC Festival in Chicago," she says.
"I was
backstage, and I saw him down the hall ... and just stood
there looking at
him. I was too afraid to go up to him."
Wilson says Davis' musical approach and sound, his musing lyricism,
the tone
of aching longing, the occasional crackling bravado in his
playing, his deft
sense of rhythm and time, and, most of all, his grounding
in the blues have
all imbued her own quite distinct approach to the music.
INTERNATIONAL APPEAL
The appearance on the album by Kidjo--who duets with Wilson
during the
reprise of the CD opener, Davis' "Run The Voodoo Down"--enhances
the
international attractiveness of the album, which will be released
March 22
in France, Germany, and the U.K., according to Felix Cromey,
Blue Note's
senior director of international.
Kidjo leads off the track's vocal with a refrain in Yoruba,
and Wilson
answers. Then both sing long-note harmonizations in difficult
next-door
intervals musicians call "seconds."
"It was tough, singing that section, but I love that weird
intervalic
stuff," says Wilson, who previously guested on Kidjo's Grammy-nominated
album "Oremi" on Island Records.
"We're pals," adds Wilson. "We first met three or four years
ago at the Montreux Jazz Festival. She comes to New York a lot. She's
just amazing."
Wilson has just returned from a week of press interviews in
the U.K., and
Blue Note is planning follow-up visits to France and Germany.
Wilson also
did an interview CD that is being distributed to EMI markets
around the
world.
"We're getting strong orders from every market," Cromey says.
"I'm looking
forward to the next phase," he adds, referring to a two-month
tour
throughout the U.K. and Europe planned for the fall.
The album was released in Japan on Wednesday (3) with an added track--Davis' composition "Francing" with lyrics by Wilson. Wilson was in Japan in November for a series of press interviews.
A U.S. tour supporting the album begins March 21 and runs through
May 14.
The tour will take Wilson to 24 cities. In addition to the
normal
jazz-performer stops on both coasts, she'll perform in cities
like
Burlington, Vt., and Hanover, N.H. She'll also tour throughout
the South
including stops in Greenville, S.C.. and Knoxville, Tenn.
Wilson says she'll carry a six-piece band on the tour--two
guitars. bass,
drums, and percussion, plus a pianist who'll double on vibes.
"Right now, I'm thinking over how to take it into the live
form." she says.
"to create structures, what to do. so that down the line,
when we're, like,
three nights into it, we can keep it real and challenging."
With all this on tap, Wilson says, she hasn't thought about
future projects
vet. "I take things one thing at a time," she says. "It helps
me to focus,
to really focus."
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Source: The Nation, April 19, 1999 v268 i14 p40(1).
Title: The Jazz Singer.(Review)
Author: Gene Santoro
Abstract: Jazz is a great genre of music, but it faces
difficulties in finding an audience because most music lovers prefer
music that contains lyrics, thus the reason jazz makes up only three percent
of the music market share in the United States. Artists like Louis
Armstrong and John Coltrane have found their niche audience and are considered
among the greats in jazz music.
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Subjects: Sound recordings - Reviews
Nmd Works: Traveling Miles (Sound recording) - Reviews
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Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1999 The Nation Company Inc.
Most Americans don't like instrumental music. Just ask any radio station program director, any record label head, Nissan (which threw in the piano after sponsoring two years of the Thelonious Monk Institute gala on network TV) or any of the guys and dolls slouching down today's mean streets with Walkmans clipped onto their bobbing heads.
Historically speaking, this has created some problems for jazz (current US music market share: under 3 percent). No matter how you slice it, jazz can hardly avoid being labeled a mostly instrumental music. What may be worse, it often insists on making you think. That's not so bad if you can dance to it-witness the Jazz Age, when Americans apparently liked the idea of jazz best.
And before you bring up Louis Armstrong: Yeah, he revolutionized music by outplaying Gabriel on cornet and reinventing the virtuoso, improvising solo that European classical music had lost, and he did it inside a new, home-grown musical format. But he became every American's Satchmo only after he opened his mouth to sing.
Even apparent exceptions like Duke Ellington-whose centennial this month has spilled over into the whole year to remind us how widely he should have been loved-really aren't. Duke wrote hit songs sung endlessly as pop fare by others. For the rest, his elegant charm, his iron will-touring 300-plus days a year for decades, including stops at roller rinks and aquacades-and his nonstop composing on trains and in hotels kept his name out there. Meanwhile, the steady stream of composer's royalties from his pop hits subsidized his beloved instrument, his orchestra.
Let's get really heretical. If John Coltrane hadn't hit with his exotic version of "My Favorite Things," a Broadway hit that every right- thinking American could hum by the time he tackled it (thanks to Julie Andrews), many folks who know his name but not his revolutionary music wouldn't know either one. With that tune, Trane was operating very much in the jazz tradition: Take the latest pop music and tweak it, move its parts around, adding jazz's inevitable irony as it undercuts or toys with pop's contrived innocence or sleek sophistication. Why is the irony inevitable? Because of jazz's historical role in our culture as a vehicle for the return of the repressed-even in a time, like now or the Jazz Age, when it's marketed as a lifestyle choice.
The notion here is that jazz has to sharpen its teeth on its far more successful sibling rivals in pop or risk becoming purely historical art music. The second choice hasn't exactly worked wonders for the European classical tradition's, uh, relevance or audience share. (Subtract the Titanic soundtrack from classical sales, and even jazz looks healthy. Of course, subtract Kenny G and all his clones from jazz sales, and jazz looks like the cottage industry it still actually is, lost and usually orphaned inside all those dysfunctional corporate entertainment megafamilies.)
Want more validation? Just ask Miles Davis, Trane's last boss, who took ditties like "Surrey With the Fringe on Top" and "Someday My Prince Will Come" and bent them with centripetal forces, sculpted them with surgical tools, subjected them to wind-tunnel velocities. Of course, he also crossed the line with 1969's Bitches Brew (Columbia). Davis had decided (as had many of his contemporaries, moving in different directions in the postwar era) that postbop jazz needed dramatic course corrections and new ideas. He sinned against jazz purists by believing that some of those ideas should come from contemporary rock and pop reimaginers like Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson and Prince. He made Cyndi Lauper's haunting ballad "Time After Time" a concert staple-and a showstopper.
For these and other heresies, Davis was forever, and proudly, jazz's Prince of Darkness. Which brings me to Cassandra Wilson and our topic for today: If you want to find out what most Americans know about jazz, run down a list of jazz divas.
The genealogy of female jazz singers reaches back to Bessie Smith,
who took blues out of juke joints and put it into vaudeville theaters.
It snakes its way through the distinctly unbluesy Ella Fitzgerald, who
otherwise followed Satchmo's lead and sang and improvised like a horn,
and a bit later through Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughan, who bridged
postwar jazz and r&b. Thence it runs into the present-day motley
crew. Talent aside, all divas have had a mission, historically speaking:
to personalize and make audible (if not
sexy) the music's often esoteric art for folks who short out on
sax and piano solos unless they're trapped in supermarkets or elevators.
Enter Wilson, she of the smoky voice, languid phrasing, sharp chops and ear-opening aims. Working with astute producer Craig Street, she's fashioned two albums in recent years, Blue Light 'Til Dawn and New Moon Daughter both on Blue Note), that blow apart the old jazz diva image- the one holding the microphone in front of a kickass big band or an intimate piano trio. Instead, they create a rural, bluesy atmosphere, a studio back porch of acoustic guitars and bass, gently persistent percussion and odd daubs of color, like a floating steel guitar or a skirling fiddle. The dense arrangements sway to allow improvised solos and ideas into radically revamped material ranging from Son House's raw country blues to The Monkees' "Last Train to Clarksville."
After all, this 40-something diva grew up on rock and blues, Joni Mitchell as well as Betty Carter. And like Miles Davis a generation ago, she's bent on redefining the interplay between contemporary pop and jazz. It's no accident she also produced her provocative new album, Traveling Miles.
With her back porch here accommodating guests like violin supremo Regina Carter, alto ace Steve Coleman and vibes hotshot Stefon Harris, as well as her usual atmospheric crew, Wilson has selected and revamped (sometimes radically) tunes from all over Davis's long and checkered history, including the evil postfusion days. There's no doubt this diva, whose gauzy, closed-eyes head shot fills the CD cover, can make Miles sexy in a whole new way for a whole new audience.
Traveling Miles opens with "Run the VooDoo Down," a funky, syncopated vamp laced with neopsychedelic touches and muscular bass, courtesy of x-Davis sideman Dave Holland, that cycles around Wilson's never- exactly-repeated vocal incursions. "Seven Steps," a challenging set of musical hurdles, opens with Wilson's husky humming behind Carter's capering fiddle, then quotes Dizzy Gillespie's "Salt Peanuts" lick before breaking into a bop-style doubletime lope-and a spicy, spiky solo from Carter that underlines why she's got so many Gen-X-and-under fans. There's the reharmonized "Someday My Prince Will Come," complete with a yearning Carter solo. And don't forget Wayne Shorter's "ESP," written when he was in Davis's mid-sixties quintet, here retitled "Never Broken," given a Latin feel and characteristically filigreed with odd stringed things like mandocello and resophonic guitar,thus recalling how the sixties brought all kinds of odd ideas and instruments out of the American attic.
You get the drift. The results are fascinating and sure to be controversial. In fact, one of the first singles (for easy-listening, jazz-lite radio) is Wilson's deep-blue revision of Davis's version of Lauper's hit.
Amid an upsurge of Gen-X jazzers infusing hip-hop and trip-hop and
other contemporary pop ideas into jazz, our current Prima Diva is claiming
the mantle of one of its best-known instrumental stars, whose name is a
byword because his parched, existential trumpet, so unmistakable, struck
listeners with the impact of a human voice. Even Miles would have grinned.
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She's Traveling Miles : On her new CD, Wilson hits a high note.
Source: Newsweek, April 5, 1999 v133 i14 p72(1).
Title: She's Traveling Miles : On
her new CD, Wilson hits a high
note.(Review)
Author: Veronica Chambers
Nmd Works: Traveling Miles (Sound recording) - Reviews
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Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1999 Newsweek Inc.
Growing up in Jackson, Miss., Cassandra Wilson was the daughter of a middle-class man who loved jazz and derided the blues as common folks' music. At the age of 5, she fell in love. Her crush was Miles Davis and the album was "Sketches of Spain." Her father approved. In the mid- 1980s, when she opened for Davis at the JVC Jazz Festival, her father traveled from Mississippi to take a picture of the marquee that read, simply: Cassandra Wilson. Miles Davis.
Wilson never actually met Davis, but he has wielded a lifelong influence on her innovative work. Now she has released her 12th album, "Traveling Miles" (Blue Note), a spellbinding collection of songs recorded or composed by Davis. During her research, she confronted Davis's well-known misogyny and decided she had to move past it. "Miles was such an enigma," Wilson says. "How could this person be so abusive of women and at the same time create this incredibly beautiful, fragile, tender music? I don't know." She sets lyrics to the legend's compositions and the result is a haunting and romantic duet: as if Wilson's whisky-smooth voice was slow-dancing with the deep, baritone tones of Davis's trumpet.
Miles Davis fanatics are sure to find fault. Let's be real, nothing short of a Lazarus-like resurrection of the man could please them. Cassandra Wilson fans will be thrilled. Like Davis, the 42-year-old singer has blazed an eclectic path that has consistently shattered the boundaries of jazz. In recent albums, she has covered a stunning array of artists from blues guitarist Robert Johnson to Joni Mitchell, from The Monkees to U2. "Ten years ago I certainly would never have admitted that I liked Joni Mitchell," says Wilson. "I couldn't have. As an aspiring jazz songstress, you don't mention those kinds of people as being your influences."
The vocals on "Traveling Miles" are Wilson at her best: her voice is sultry and mysterious, her phrasing entirely her own. Wilson won a Grammy for her last album, "New Moon Daughter," and is widely recognized by critics as the best jazz singer of her generation. But there's a tradition in jazz of canonizing male musicians as dark geniuses while dismissing the women as mere vessels for the music: gardenia-wearing beauties with voices that break your heart.
What emerges on this new album is Wilson's mastery as a bandleader and composer. In her songs, we learn of a woman who "likes to fight, who cuts menfolk"; of a woman who waits and watches as "the devil's days unwind"; of a woman who walks all the way to Mississippi with a pocket full of healing herbs. Like the women in her songs, Wilson has traveled miles. Her tribute to Miles Davis is so compelling because she is far more than another jazz siren. She is part dark genius herself.
Photo: House of Blues: Wilson's home is the Harlem building
where Duke
Ellington once lived
Copyright 1999 Newsweek Inc. All rights reserved. Any reuse,
distribution or
alteration without express written permission of Newsweek
is prohibited.
http://www.newsweek.com
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Source: Down Beat, April 1999 v66 i4 p54(1).
Title: Traveling Miles.(Review)
Author: John McDonough
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Subjects: Sound recordings - Reviews
People: Wilson, Cassandra
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Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1999 Maher Publications
Traveling Miles Blue Note 54123
*** - Good
Writh so many superb titles in the Miles Davis song book that could serve a singer so well, Cassandra Wilson has patched together her Miles project the hard way, eschewing the many masters he played in favor of three new songs of her own and a selection of rifles (to which she has added words) that touch equally on his '50s, '60s and '70s albums. It's a measure of her chutzpah that she feels she can take on such material and still bring to it enough to make it worthwhile. Though her skills as a musician and actress pretty much bring it off, the overall atmosphere she chooses to create has an almost unrelentingly grim, yogi-like introspection about it. Was this Miles or the Miles image?
Only three of the pieces are actually based on Davis compositions, which is not to admonish the set, since only one of them holds together with any kind of melodic integrity. That is the short, lively "Seven Steps," to which Wilson has added a lyric. "Blue In Green" also acquires a Wilson lyric and a new rifle, "Sky And Sea." Coming from one of the most famous of all jazz albums, Kind Of Blue, her words and tempo are careful not to tamper with the meditative character of the original. "Run The VooDoo Down" springs from the weakest source material (Bitches Brew), but her words bring to it a remarkable sense of form.
The weakness of the melodic material is strikingly evident when we hit track seven, "Someday My Prince Will Come." It makes you wonder if it wouldn't be better if singers left the writing to the pros. Case in point is the title track, "Traveling Miles," a direct homage to the trumpeter. But alas, performers make poor subjects for other performers to sing about. The resultis typically a slice of failed seriousness that comes off as camp unless relieved by a wink of self-awareness of the silliness of it all, which here it is not.
Wilson gives us nine lyrics in all. "Right Here, Right Now" has a '70s folk quality, with a cycle of observations keyed to the recurring phrases "everybody seems ... "and "I got a feeling...." Wilson demonstrates solid sense of structure in her lyrics, and Marvin Sewell and Doug Wamble's acoustic guitar work has lovely presence. Pat Metheny also contributes a fine cameo on "Sky And Sea."
Traveling Miles: Run The VooDoo Down; Traveling Miles; Right Here, Right Now; Goes Down; Seven Steps; Someday My Prince Will Come; Never Broken; Resurrection Blues; Sky And Sea; Piper; VooDoo Reprise. (62:37)
Personnel: Cassandra Wilson, vocals; Olu Dara, cornet (1); Vincent
Henry, harmonica (5); Regina Carter, violin (6, 7, 8); Stefon Harris, vibraphone
(6); Cecelia Smith, marimba (3, 9); Eric Lewis, piano; Marvin Sewell, Kevin
Breit, guitar; Lonnie Plaxico, Dave Holland (1), bass; Jeffrey Haynes,
Doug Wamble (3, 9), percussion; Marcus Taylor (1, 6, 7, 12), Perry Smith
(2, 3, 9), drums; Angelique Kidjo (12), vocals.
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