Miles Goes Wes is a collection of songs from Miles Davis and Wes Montgomery with today’s groove’s and sounds. Jim Casey takes on the Wes Montgomery parts and Steve Howard steps into Mile’s shoes and they both create interplay that stirs the soul!! Jim conceived the project, in fact, as a tribute to his own heroes, Miles Davis and Wes Montgomery.

“Because they’ve never failed to inspire me as creative artists,” says Jim, “I wanted to honor them by interpreting their material. For Wes, the compositions I chose—`Road Songs,’ ‘4 on 6,’ ‘Angel’ and `Day in the Life’—come from sixties. For Miles, I dipped into his classic stuff from the fifties—like `So What’ and ‘Four’—as well as three songs from Tutu, the record he made with Marcus Miller in the eighties that had a huge impact on me. With every tune, though, my goal was to reimagine the songs in a contemporary context. To do that I needed help. That’s why I turned to Frank Hames who essentially serves as my co-producer and main arranger, not to mention engineer and mixer. Frank’s genius informs every second of this record. I met him back in the early seventies when I left my home of Pampa, Texas for college at North Texas in Denton. North Texas—with its incredible One O’Clock Lab Band—was the first time I found myself in a sophisticated musical environment. So many of the great players on Miles Goes Wes—drummers John Bryant, Greg Bissonette and saxist Randy Lee, bassist/drummer Mike Medina, drummer Kirk Covington, bassist James Driscoll–are connected to North Texas.”

North Texas—both the university in Denton and the geographic area encompassing Dallas/Fort Worth—is the fertile territory that gave birth to bands like Phyrework, the legendary jazz-rock-soul group founded by Frank Hames and John Bryant around the same time Jim formed Buster Brown. In that sense, Miles Goes Wes has the feeling of a warm homecoming, a reunion of musicians whose connections have stayed strong over a lifetime.

“I also must mention Bernard Wright,” Jim is quick to add. “He’s all over this record, playing with impeccable taste, style and imagination. Of course he became a funk star in the early eighties as Nard, a contemporary of Marcus Miller and Lenny White from Jamaica, Queens, New York. Marcus recruited him to play on Tutu. I met Bernard when he moved to Dallas some thirty years ago and worked with Buster Brown. We lost touch for a while, but hooked up again for this project. I treasure his solos here, especially the haunting introduction he wrote for ‘Nardis.’ Randy Lee, another forty-year-friend and the original tenor saxist in Phyrework, also knocked me out. I love how he tears up `Day in the Life.’” Continue reading →