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Miles Davis/Robert Glasper- Everything’s Beautiful

Eleven tracks built from Miles Davis's own master tapes, released for what would have been his ninetieth birthday, and far stranger than a tribute album.

 

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Miles Davis & Robert Glasper: Everything's Beautiful (2016)

Columbia/Legacy gave Robert Glasper access to the Miles Davis archive and told him to make something. What he produced is not a covers record and not a remix album: it is a set of new compositions built from fragments of Davis's tapes — isolated trumpet lines, studio chatter, rhythm parts — recombined into songs that never existed.

Released in May 2016 to mark what would have been Davis's ninetieth birthday, it divided people sharply, which is appropriate for a musician who spent his career alienating purists.

The defence of the method is Davis himself. He rebuilt his own music every few years, took whatever was happening in popular music and absorbed it, and was contemptuous of the idea that jazz should be preserved. A reverent tribute would have been the less faithful option.

What to listen for

"Talking Shit" opens the record with Davis's speaking voice from the studio, which establishes immediately that this is a record about a person rather than a catalogue.

"Maiysha (So Long)" with Erykah Badu is the best track here and the most complete song — she writes and sings new material over the 1974 original, and it works as a record in its own right.

"Ghetto Walkin'" with Bilal is the most haunting, and "Silence Is the Way" with Laura Mvula is the most beautifully arranged.

"Little Church" with Hiatus Kaiyote is the boldest pairing — an Australian future-soul band placed against one of the quietest things Davis recorded, and it is remarkable.

"Right On Brotha" with Stevie Wonder closes the album, and having Wonder play harmonica over Davis is the kind of idea that only works because both men earned it.

"Violets" with Phonte, "Song for Selim" with KING and "Milestones" with Georgia Anne Muldrow are the deep cuts, and the Muldrow track is the most radical reworking on the record.

Go deeper

Go to the sources: In a Silent Way (1969), Bitches Brew (1970) and Get Up with It (1974) are the Davis records this album draws most heavily on, and all three were controversial in their own time for exactly the reasons this one was.

Robert Glasper's Black Radio series is the wider project, and Hiatus Kaiyote's Choose Your Weapon is the album to hear next.

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