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.
