Marcus Miller Presents "We Want Miles!"

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Image courtesy of Festival de Jazz de Barcelona.

Miles Davis (1926-1991) changed the history of music, not just jazz, several times over. His influence is still everywhere today. We listen to his records and watch his video recordings with devotion, and the history of the Barcelona Jazz Festival is also steeped in anecdotes and experiences shared with him. Marcus Miller, an essential collaborator in his comeback in the 1980s, has assembled a team of other key former students of Davis—Bill Evans and Mike Stern—and frequent collaborators (Mino Cinelu, Russell Gunn, Brett Williams, and Anwar Marshall) to celebrate the centenary of one of the pivotal figures in 20th-century music.

The idea, Miller explains, is to perform music from the iconic 1981 album We Want Miles!, recorded live in Japan, along with other classics from the trumpeter's repertoire, spanning the 1950s and 1660s up to the era of Tutu (1986) and Amandla (1989). “We’ll be playing music from all eras of Miles’ career,” Miller wrote, “but I also want to use these incredible musicians I’ll be bringing to Barcelona to take Miles into the future and explore things he surely would have been interested in investigating.” Because, ultimately, “Miles never looked back; he was always focused on the future.”

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