Miles From India

[Chuck Nessa]

Might be time to move on.

[Chuck Nessa]

I've heard Miles "fucking bananas" and it ain't pretty.

[jazzbo]

I know where yous guys are coming from, but I'm enjoying this one, I think Bob did a great job of pulling this off. I let it wash over me and be a sonic backdrop and it's nice for that purpose. My favorite sections are Spanish Key and Great Expectations, not surprising since I love the originals so much.

Years ago I was excited by Yo!Miles and yet they haven't held up that well for me. Hard to say what this will evoke in me years from now but I'm digging it now. I wish that there were official releases of the live recreations Bob did a few years ago.

[Larry Kart]

I know where yous guys are coming from, but I'm enjoying this one, I think Bob did a great job of pulling this off. I let it wash over me and be a sonic backdrop and it's nice for that purpose. My favorite sections are Spanish Key and Great Expectations, not surprising since I love the originals so much.

Years ago I was excited by Yo!Miles and yet they haven't held up that well for me. Hard to say what this will evoke in me years from now but I'm digging it now. I wish that there were official releases of the live recreations Bob did a few years ago.

IMO, Leo Smith on "Yo! Miles" is a big step up from Wallace Roney. In fact, I'd rather hear Smith play this music than Miles himself, all things being equal, which I guess they're not.

[jazzbo]

I hear you there, but Roney isn't the draw for me on this one. Though I must say, if he were selected to play "Miles-like" he really fits the bill.

[Rooster_Ties]

I really love the "You! Miles" series. I'm with Larry -- Leo Smith is amazing on all this electric Miles material. (And the two later volumes also include Greg Osby, who I feel is a real joy to hear play in this context.) Roney's good, but Smith is great!!

[7/4]

I should be able to borrow a copy to check it out. I'm at least curious.

.

[jimi089]

I must admit to being underwhelmed by the whole affair. I've given it a few spins and it's elicited little more than a shrug.

[WD45]

I know where yous guys are coming from, but I'm enjoying this one, I think Bob did a great job of pulling this off. I let it wash over me and be a sonic backdrop and it's nice for that purpose. My favorite sections are Spanish Key and Great Expectations, not surprising since I love the originals so much.

Years ago I was excited by Yo!Miles and yet they haven't held up that well for me. Hard to say what this will evoke in me years from now but I'm digging it now. I wish that there were official releases of the live recreations Bob did a few years ago.

Wasn't the word that there would be a release around that? I remember reading that here, IIRC.

I am going to add this to my emusic list tonight!

[BFrank]

Thanks for the heads-up on eMusic! I'm downloading it now.

This is what eMusic is perfect for. You get 2 hours of music and only use 12 tracks, total!

Especially interesting since I just heard this well done piece about the album on the radio this afternoon - PRI's "The World".

[Free For All]

Miles in Tallahassee

[BFrank]

YOU could record that album, Free!

[david weiss]

I did some very minimal work on this record but don't feel particularly close to it and think my opinion is un-biased.

I have to wonder about a record that sounds it's best to me when it is most emulating it's source material. The biggest difference to me is that Miles used only some elements of Indian music that suited his needs to get the sound he was looking for. This record is much more balanced between Indian and Miles' music. I think if you are a big fan of Indian music than you will probably enjoy this CD a lot. Miles fans who enjoyed his '70s records might get something out of this as well. I'm a big fan of Wallace Roney and I really question those who say Leo Smith is a big step up from Wallace but hey, to each his own......

[Larry Kart]

I did some very minimal work on this record but don't feel particularly close to it and think my opinion is un-biased.

I have to wonder about a record that sounds it's best to me when it is most emulating it's source material. The biggest difference to me is that Miles used only some elements of Indian music that suited his needs to get the sound he was looking for. This record is much more balanced between Indian and Miles' music. I think if you are a big fan of Indian music than you will probably enjoy this CD a lot. Miles fans who enjoyed his '70s records might get something out of this as well. I'm a big fan of Wallace Roney and I really question those who say Leo Smith is a big step up from Wallace but hey, to each his own......

By and large, when I hear Roney, I hear one exercise/substitution pattern after another strung together. While he's certainly recognizable as himself, doesn't every Roney solo sound a good deal like every other Roney solo? Also, the patterns that he favors are by their nature virtually climax-less, especially harmonically -- that is, each step seems to exist primarily as a step to a step to a step to a step. On the other hand, there's a Verve Geri Allen album from the late '90s I think where her intense presence kind of breaks through Roney's glass dome.

[Larry Kart]

This is the Allen album (with Roney) I was thinking of, "The Gathering" (1998):

http://www.amazon.com/Gathering-Geri-Allen/dp/B000009QU2

[WD45]

I d/l this from emusic last night, listened on the bus this morning. I am an Indian music fanatic, and 70s Miles is some of my favorite music of all time, but this left me ambivalent.

Maybe my liking of those two things puts me at a disadvantage when evaluating a project like this...

For one, it is always hard to know where to put a sitar in the mix. It has one of those sonorities that can easily get lost; too low in the mix and you risk losing those resonances that make it so distinctive. As a result, it gets pushed higher in the mix than what would sound natural [or what i would perceive as natural in most other contexts, classical-wise.]

I was hoping for a harder edge on some of the pieces, too. That is one of the things I love about Miles' 70s output -- that frenetic urgency. I find that same intensity at the apex of some of my favorite Carnatic performances, but was missing from this.

[ejp626]

I like the first disc better. Mostly the second disc doesn't move me. One of the main draws for me was Rudresh Mahanthappa, but he plays on relatively few tracks, which of course I didn't know ahead of time. On balance, I would have preferred to download it from eMusic. I'll spin it a few more times to decide if it is a keeper.

[CJ Shearn]

I bought it last night and like what I've heard-all of disc 1 so far. it's really eerie how much Lenny White sounds like Tony circa "Miles in the Sky" on "Spanish Key", not just in playing but the way he's mixed, its got that dry Columbia Studio B sound like on "Miles in the Sky"

Edited April 26, 2008 by CJ Shearn

[Stefan Wood]

I like the first disc better. Mostly the second disc doesn't move me. One of the main draws for me was Rudresh Mahanthappa, but he plays on relatively few tracks, which of course I didn't know ahead of time. On balance, I would have preferred to download it from eMusic. I'll spin it a few more times to decide if it is a keeper.

Yes, I like the first disc as well. A lot of the second disc meanders around alot. This would have made for a really tight single disc issue. I like Mahanthappa's playing as well.

[JSngry]

http://www.theworld.org/taxonomy_by_date/2/20080423

"East is east, and west is west, and never the 'twain shall meet." So said Rudyard Kipling in his poem "The Ballad of East and West." Often overlooked though are the words that come two lines later. "But there is neither East nor West, border, nor breed...when two strong men stand face to face." And perhaps that was on the minds of the record producers who just released the album "Miles from India." The World's Marco Werman tells us about the project.

The whole idea of "Miles from India" may seem to some like a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. Hey, you got Miles Davis on my sitar. Hey, you got sitar on my Miles Davis.

On first listen, it's the perfect concoction of east and west. But really, the recording was only mildly concocted. Yusuf Gandhi is the executive producer of this concept album.

For Gandhi, the concept began to germ when, well, you'd have to go back to the early sixties when he was a young man living in Bombay. He was getting into Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley, and collecting lots of records.

“I grew up listening to a lot of jazz, so I did listen to Miles in India, I mean I had his records, I mean I had "Kind of Blue" and "Bitches Brew" and all the records. We had them in India, I would have people bring them for me. So I used to listen to his music. At that time jazz music was sort of in the major cities, it wasn't a national thing. But the people who went to college and were a little more westernized audiences, they listened to jazz music, they knew who Miles was, they knew who Cannonball was, they knew who Horace Silver was. They listened to the music.”

Some forty years later, Yusuf Gandhi was visiting with renowned jazz producer Bob Belden. Belden was remixing the Miles Davis jazz-funk-fusion record "On the Corner" for CD release. And during the mixing session, Belden commented to Gandhi...

“I was surprised at the amount of Indian music influences on that album. And I said, "Yeah." So he says, "How would it feel to have Indian musicians doing music from Miles Davis?" That's when I said "Miles from India," and the whole project just took off.”

It wasn't an easy undertaking. Yusuf Gandhi runs a small independent record label. And to get former Miles Davis bandmates together in the same studio with the best Indian musicians of the moment just wasn't in the budget.

So Gandhi and producer Bob Belden came up with their dream list of musicians and decided that the Indian artists would be recorded in Mumbai and Chennai.

And the US-based musicians would base their parts on what they heard from those sessions in India. Gandhi says the American jazz players liked the idea...in theory.

“Before we went to India, we had sounded off a lot of the musicians, they all said 'Wow, that sounds like a great project, we'd like to be a part of it,' but they were still wary about what it would sound like. But once we had recorded the Indian musicians, and then we sent the tapes out, basically everybody who heard it, heard the Indian musicians, said 'We want to play on this project.'”

You could argue that with the Indian and American musicians contributing their parts separately, the resulting sound doesn't reflect a group effort.

But as it turns out, the way Bob Belden and Yusuf Gandhi planned these sessions, the musicians really got to learn their parts and dig in to the process.

For example, if horn player Wallace Roney was a bit wary at first, he tucked right into the producers' vision when he arrived at the studio. Roney is a Miles Davis disciple. He's also the trumpeter on many of the "Miles from India" tracks.

“American musicians got a chance of really listening to the music before they came into the studio and play it, because remember they are working in, some of them are in different time signatures and different scales, and they have to work with it. And even Wallace when he came in, actually he was not supposed to be on so many tracks. We thought he'd do two or three tracks, but it came out so well, and he himself said, "I'd like to do more songs," you know. And he came and he came in and did more songs because once he realized he could interact with what was happening, they were having fun.”

The fun is evident on "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down."

Another track that excelled in bringing out the best of Indian and American improvisation was the cover of the classic "Blue in Green." It features something the original never had, a vocal part.

Its ethereal performance is courtesy of Shankar Mahadevan:

“Shankar is a major pop star in India, for people who don't know, and he's a Bollywood music director, he's a singer, he's one of the most sought after music directors in films in his own right, but he's a classically trained musician, but he's also into western music. You know he sites his early musical influences as Weather Report and musicians like that, so, to get Shankar in this was a no-brainer actually because he's listened to all types of music. But he made time to come. He said 'I start my sessions at 11 o'clock for my films, so I'll come at 8 o'clock to do my parts,' and he came at 8 o'clock, did his parts within two hours and left.”

Producers Yusuf Gandhi and Bob Belden were overjoyed with the results. For Gandhi though one of the best parts of the whole project was watching Belden -- who had never been to India.

“The fun was to see Bob get excited when he saw these musicians play. And you know, he would suddenly pick up the phone and call Joe Zawinul and put the phone to the speaker and say, 'Listen Joe, listen to what's happening,' he'd call Herbie Hancock and tell Herbie, 'Listen to this!' It was like that, it was fun watching him get excited, it was like a kid in a candy store just hearing these guys playing.”

It's an inevitable question: what would Miles Davis have made of Miles from India?

Yusuf Gandhi believes it's wrong-headed to ask it though.

After all, says Gandhi, Miles never really expressed what he was thinking when he wrote sitars and tablas into his own compositions.

Miles would just show up and play.

“One of the things about Miles was he never really told anyone what was in his mind. He just wanted to do something and did it, from what I know, and from what I've heard of from stories of musicians who've played with him. No one really knew what his motivations were anyway, it's like, if he liked a sound, he incorporated it, that's it, you know?”

[Lazaro Vega]

Waddada Leo Smith revisits the Miles bag, some, on "Rosa Parks" from his new album with the Golden Quartet (Vijay Iyer, Shannon Jackson included).

[shadowhillway]

I haven't heard the record yet. Some thoughts about the NYC concert.

The music desperately needed direction -- a leader to give focus to what was going on. I am not necessarily saying that the music needed Miles. Trying to imagine what he would have done would be pure speculation.

The KoB arrangements were not clever.

I came away with a greater interest in Badal Roy and tabla, as a result of his solo.

At one point, Roney and White really dug in together, which was nice.

In the balcony, the sound sucked. The sprawling ensemble made matters worse. Of course, live sound is rarely good.

It looked like Belden wasn't wearing socks.

[7/4]

It looked like Belden wasn't wearing socks.

Good thing I didn't go.

.

[7/4]

Recalling Miles Davis by Crossing Cultures

[bobbelden]

It looked like Belden wasn't wearing socks.

Good thing I didn't go.

I did wear socks. But in India, it's not uncommon to be sockless. The socks I wore were ankle socks. Of course I did wear a nice Italian suit with

and Indian shirt and Gucci shoes

.