Ron Miles: No Labels, Please

On My Cruel Heart (Gramavision), trumpeter Ron Miles scampers out from under any label you could pin on him. As soon as one funky, guitar-drenched track pegs him as a Miles Davis fusion player, he'll turn around and sputter and shriek his way through a free-jazz rave-up. Miles has a deft touch at interweaving funk, swing and free pulse, insinuating melodies, and layers of white-hot guitar riffs, bass vamps, and counter-melodies into a haunting, personal music. Despite his chameleon ways, there's no mistaking his concise turn of phrase and his opalescent tone. My Cruel Heart signals the arrival of a startlingly original composer and instrumentalist.

Now an assistant professor of music at Denver's Metropolitan State College, Miles is currently best known as a member of the Bill Frisell Quartet that made its recording debut earlier this year with a quirky homonymous release on Nonesuch. But as a couple previous releases as a leader on small jazz labels prove, the 33-year-old trumpeter has ideas of his own. He pays more than the usual jazz musicians' lip service to rock and hip-hop, using elements from both for the grooves and melodies in his compositions. He says U2's Achtung Baby inspired the piano bass line on the title track. On "Finger Palace," guitarists Farrell Lowe, Todd Ayers, and Eddie Turner crank out a rocking vamp over Rudy Royston's tightly wound hip-hop beat. The model seems to be Miles Davis's multiple-guitar bands of the '70s and hip-hop-influenced albums from the '80s. But unlike the songs and open-ended vamps Davis favored, Ron Miles orchestrates his composition for variety, moving melodies, textures, and beats around like chess pieces.

Even when he works with acoustic instruments, Miles piles up contrasting vamps, drum patterns, and melodies that generate tense, dynamic layers in which individual parts clash, resolve, and break apart. The album's trio performances, with Royston and bassist Artie Moore, make maximum use of independent written lines and parallel improvisations. And his orchestrations generate dark, energized settings for his improvisations. On "Finger Palace," his trumpet snakes furtively through the thick, grungy layer of rhythm and guitar noise, raising a vulnerable voice in a harsh world. In the stormy swirl of "Erase Yourself," Miles feints and weaves through the shifting textures, never coming to rest at expected places or settling for an easy resolution.

Despite this restless, searching quality, he doesn't waste notes. He can play with a folksong-like directness, as he does in heated exchanges with tenor-saxophonist Fred Hess on "Fire Downtown," or use abstract twittering and strangled notes to dramatic effect, as he does on "Rachel Has a Secret." He builds his secretive solo on the trio version of "Howard Beach" out of pithy, almost epigrammatic phrases; yet he strings closely related variations into a longer statement and a larger whole. He's a master of saying a lot with a little.

Because Ron Miles feeds off all kinds of influences besides jazz, his music speaks to contemporary audiences in the language of their time. Melodic grace and precision and rhythmic drive aren't the exclusive domain of hard bop after all.

-- Ed Hazell