Trumpeter
Russell Gunn has always been a forward-thinking musician, incorporating his love of hip-hop and electronics along with his obvious talent for edgy post-bop improvisation. So, it should come as no surprise that
Russell Gunn Plays Miles, while obviously a record paying tribute to one of
Gunn's biggest influences, the legendary trumpeter
Miles Davis, is an edge-of-your-ear experience. Not only has
Gunn not made a straight-ahead, acoustic jazz album, he's made a '70s-'80s fusion-era
Davis album that defies expectations even on those far-reaching terms. Which isn't to say this is the most "next level" or innovative jazz album in recent years; on the contrary, many of the jazz-funk sounds
Gunn re-appropriates on
Plays Miles will be almost cozily familiar to any longtime fans of such similarly minded funksters and
Davis acolytes as
Herbie Hancock,
Eddie Henderson,
the Jazz Crusaders,
Donald Byrd, and others. The rub here is where and when
Gunn has chosen to employ these sounds. By the third track in, after you've grown accustomed to
Gunn's layered groove on such iconic
Davis cuts as the leadoff track, "Tutu" (in itself a bold statement of purpose), and "Bitches Brew," his slow-jam, R&B-infused version of "Blue in Green" is at once tantamount to sacrilege and the hippest joint imaginable. Similarly,
Gunn's propulsive and Latin-esque take on
Davis' usually spare and dreamy "Eighty One" is unexpectedly rootsy in its dance-oriented funkiness, and comes off as something along the lines of
Bootsy Collins backing the Fort Apache Band. Ultimately, the real tribute here is not so much that
Gunn is playing
Miles, it's that he gets
Miles. ~ Matt Collar