Brass Trax

Miles in a reggae way? This year, the 50th anniversary of Miles Davis’s landmark Kind of Blue, the world finally has the answer. A Reggae Interpretation of Kind of Blue, does what the title says it does. It takes the well-worn tracks from Miles’s classic, chops up the rhythm and licks in a one-drop beat. There’s even dub versions of each track on the B side.

A gimmick? The blue vinyl notwithstanding—record label Secret Stash hasn’t released the album in a digital format—it was actually an academic exercise. A Reggae Interpretation of Kind of Blue was born in a New York studio in 1981, the brainchild of Jeremy Taylor, a NYU professor and jazz whiz who wanted to prove a point. Impressed by the music he heard on a trip to Jamaica, he once wrote “[In Jamaica] I met so many incredible players who had been brushed off by the snobby musical establishment at institutions such as the ones I was affiliated with. They showed more musicality, taste, and rhythmic comprehension that some of the most revered musicians in the States.” The album was to be definitive proof of their skill.

In the early 1980s, music departments were reluctant to include popular music in their repertoire. With the exception of jazz, with its high modernist bona fides secured by albums like Kind of Blue, popular music was relegated to musicologists, and its players were regarded as oddities to study, not practitioners to emulate. The kind of success that came to jazz conservatory proteges like Pat Metheny would be denied to performers working in other popular idioms for another decade or so.

Choosing Kind of Blue to showcase the talents of reggae performers was a careful choice on Taylor’s part. Aside from being the best-selling and best-known jazz record in history, Kind of Blue was the seminal album for modal jazz, jazz that based its harmonies on modal scales, rather than chords. Inspired by the theories of George Russell, Davis transformed jazz into a black art music that caught the ear of music theorists as well as the jazz buying public. More than any other album, it was the grand statement that jazz was a serious music.

And how does Taylor’s reggae ensemble treat Miles? Gently, at first. The group’s take on “So What” sounds pretty straight. It’s not the work of jazzmen, exactly, with the exception of the silky trumpeter, but it’s not an obvious fusion, either. It sounds more like the work of a gifted funk band that also has a weekly jazz date. It’s true that a heavily syncopated beat anchors the melody, but reggae hardly has a monopoly on syncopation. Without knowing for certain, a listener can guess that “So What” was intended to lull listeners into the album, thinking that reggae-jazz fusion isn’t that weird it at all.

But it is that weird. By the time the band takes on “Freddie Freeloader,” it’s clear that there is something entirely new going on. The tune’s rhythm has been arranged completely differently, and the band finds a new kind of groove at the core of the jazz chestnut. And Taylor and company’s take on “Blue in Green” gave this listener a new appreciation of the harmonic complexity at the core of that particular composition and highlighted the shared inheritance that the blues bequeathed to jazz and reggae alike. But it’s “Flamenco Sketches,” with its nearly chaotic trumpet soloing and its billowing, dubby rhythmic skirt that realizes the full potential of combining the languages of reggae and modal jazz: a blunted, ad hoc soundscape.

Davis makes good fodder for reggae musicians because of his heavy reliance on echo, silence, and implied musical gestures—the very same type of stew that you’d find in a good dub track. And the dub side of A Reggae Interpretation of Kind of Blue gives the listener a chance to hear the two dissolving into a sticky gumbo. It’s also an opportunity for Secret Stash’s crack engineers to strut their stuff.

A Reggae Interpretation of Kind of Blue should be on the record shelf of every collector of historical oddities, but it’s also a serious addition to the annals of jazz fusion. The project sat in a can for 28 years not because it was a failed experiment but because, tragically, Taylor died shortly after its recording. The current release was recorded by Secret Stash in collaboration with Taylor’s family, which means it’s as official as you can get. And it’s a rare chance to hear a musical fusion project that could have been.

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