Travelling Miles

For reasons best known to herself, Cassandra Wilson, the finest jazz singer of her generation, has recorded an album of Miles Davis covers (with added vocals) as a follow-up to 1996's New Moon Daughter, an inexplicably acclaimed effort which was so far up its own arse it probably caught sight of a few jazz critics.

The idea here was to add Wilson's voice to some of Davis' best-known tunes, like 'Blue In Green', 'Seven Steps To Heaven' and 'Someday My Prince Will Come'. But it's apparent from the opening cut, a perfunctory rewrite of 'Miles Runs The Voodoo Down', that things have come unstuck. The original is taken from Davis' notoriously difficult fusion album Bitches Brew, and I wouldn't wish the task of singing over it on my worst enemy. Wilson's voice, a throaty, deep contralto which is far more resonant than most female vocalists, can do little when placed against such a freeform backdrop.

Bravely, the cover of 'Blue In Green', a track from the trumpeter's seminal Kind Of Blue, is largely unrecognisable from the original, save for the fact it's played at the same slow pace. The update of 'Seven Steps To Heaven' also works well, being propelled along by a hyperactive piano and an urgent, finger-clicking rhythm. But, by and large, the songs just don't work, even though Wilson and her musicians are doing nothing wrong - which, come to think of it, is probably the problem.

The words she's added to the songs, too, err on the side of the metaphysical. There is a school of thought which holds that lyrical deficiencies don't matter when a singer as talented as Wilson is singing the words, but there's little excuse for lines like "Under hues deepest blues hereafter/ We touch souls and the moment glows/ Here and now we are far more than our senses" ('Never Broken'). Yet Wilson's own vocal performances are technically flawless, even if they generally don't sit well with the music.

In truth, Traveling Miles is doomed by the sheer level of homage it pays to the man whose spectre hangs over it. You'll get some idea of what I mean if I tell you that none of the musicians present on this record has dared to play trumpet at any stage of the proceedings.