Trumpet Luminary RON MILES
Releases Quiver (Enja/Yellowbird), October 9
Live Recording Featuring Trio with
BILL FRISELL and BRIAN BLADE
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Master trumpeter Ron Miles injects his radiant, lyrical tone directly into the lifeblood of American music on his latest release, Quiver. A compelling, inviting trio date with guitarist Bill Frisell and drummer Brian Blade, Quiver
combines the singing melodicism of American folk musics, the heightened
communication of the most progressive jazz forms, and an entrancing,
airy openness. The album finds three genre-defying musical masters at
their creative best, lacing easy camaraderie with virtuosic interaction.
“I
conceived it so that there was a lot of space in the music,” Miles told
writer and session annotator Chip Stern, “which just makes it a perfect
vehicle for Brian and Bill, who are so purposeful in the way they think
through a phrase with all of the silences intact and create all of this
motion and energy without any wasted gestures or by playing a whole
bunch of notes.”
Miles
is solidly grounded in the jazz tradition yet open to all manner of
ethnic, popular and classical sources - let alone down-home American
folk. Just try not to be intoxicated by the joyous hoedowns and hosannas
of “Just Married,” in which country music and blues share a glorious
two-step. Miles’ keen sense of those qualities which elevate the joy and
drama of the very earliest jazz recordings enlivens the trio’s forays
into roots elements of the music as well as its more modern iterations
on Quiver. On “Guest Of Honor,” Miles infuses post-modern nods towards Scott Joplin with personal and political feeling.
“Honor
is my son’s name,” Miles explains. “I always wanted to do something
syncopated in a ragtime manner, and it got me thinking about Scott
Joplin and the opera which preceded ‘Treemonisha,’ which was ‘A Guest Of
Honor.’ We don’t actually know what the music sounds like, because it
was never sent to the copyright office. Apparently ‘A Guest Of Honor’
referenced the story of how Booker T. Washington was invited to the
White House by Teddy Roosevelt, with all the controversy that
subsequently ensued. And so while we tend to think of Joplin writing
upbeat music such as “Maple Leaf Rag,” here he was writing political
operas as far back as 1903.”
On
Miles’ more modernist conceptions, from the jagged hesitations and
stutter steps of “Bruise” to the Ornettish exposition of “Rudy Go
Round,” the composer’s love of extended forms, asymmetrical
abstractions, and dramatic syncopated dances between dissonant and
consonant elements rings just as true as his forays into the music’s
earliest roots - as do the torchy tenderness and lyric splendor of his
balladic interpretations, such as “Days Of Wine And Roses” and “Queen
B.”
The music on Quiver
expands brilliantly on the technical and spiritual foundations this
Denver-based, 49-year-old musical trailblazer has crafted for himself
since graduating from the Manhattan School of Music in 1986. The album
is a logical evolution of Heaven, his deceptively quiescent 2002 duet
recital with Frisell. “If we were going to add a third person,” Miles
says, “we both agreed it should be Brian more than anyone else because
he is one of the most musical drummers on the scene.” In fact, it’s hard
to imagine many other drummers approaching this music with both the
pianistic elegance and intellectual discretion to lay back and allow the
action to come to him - never truncating the conversation with some
nervous compulsion to fill every inch of space with excitement.
Witness
how Blade sets the table for the old-timey jazz feeling of Miles’
brilliant re-working of that Roaring Twenties chestnut “There Ain’t No
Sweet Man Worth The Salt of My Tears” with some of the most beautifully
inflected mallet phrases this side of Big Sid Catlett and Elvin Jones,
even as Frisell gets up on his Charlie Christian soap-box, while Miles
seemingly channels the spirit of Lester Bowie in his solo passages.
In short, on Quiver
Miles brings the history of jazz up to date by neither disregarding its
history or by remaining enslaved to it, instead giving an extremely
personal account of the divergent branches of the music’s immeasurably
rich family tree.
“Listening
to composers the likes of Scott Joplin, James Reese Europe, Jelly Roll
Morton and Duke Ellington on one hand, and improvisers such as Miles
Davis, Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry on the other, is
both humbling and inspiring,” Miles concludes. “And as much as anything,
after a lifetime’s study, what this music has given me is a sense of
the enormity of spirituality; of being American, of being
African-American; of how privileged I am to walk that path and how much
work I still have to do. There are so many people who’ve inhabited this
music: living it, writing it, playing it, listening to it. So you just
find a way to be you in it, to find your way in it. That’s what we’re
trying to do on Quiver.”
Release Date: October 9, 2012 |
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