Eddie Daniels: To Milton With Love

Even in a field as conducive to covers as jazz, it is unusual to find a complete reinterpretation of an album with all its tracks in their original order. Interestingly, 2025 has seen several releases of this type, some widely known and deservedly acclaimed, like Branford Marsalis' Belonging (Blue Note Records, 2025), which pays homage to Keith Jarrett's European Quartet. But another project with these same characteristics has gone much more unnoticed, and unjustly so. To Milton With Love is the third consecutive work through which the venerable multireedist Eddie Daniels celebrates Brazil's seemingly inexhaustible expressive diversity. After Egberto Gismonti and Ivan Lins, it is now Milton Nascimento's turn to receive yet another recognition of his visionary career—specifically, of Courage (A&M Records, 1969), a superb and highly inspirational work. Joining Daniels is a quartet as restrained as it is solid, featuring Anthony Wilson, Josh Nelson, Kevin Axt and Ray Brinker, to which must be added the refined strings of the Lyris String Quartet.

A Bit of Musical Archaeology

It is worth pausing over that source album, which, as will become clear, is only partially so. The session was cut in the late '60s at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in New Jersey, with the participation of Herbie Hancock and other names associated with the jazz orbit like Hubert Laws, Airto Moreira and Bill Watrous, also featuring Eumir Deodato on orchestrations. In essence, it was the introduction of an emerging Nascimento to the American market. The crux of the matter is that Courage was based, in most of its numbers (seven out of ten), on a previous disc by the Brazilian, his debut Travessia (Codil, 1967), recorded two years earlier in his native country with local players, and on which Deodato was already involved, arranging a couple of themes.

Certainly, the harmonic conception of that 1967 record did not aspire to the stereotypical or the commercial (listen to "Três Pontas" or "Gira Girou") but rather to establish its own soundscape, in which the influences that permeate the imagination of the Minas Gerais-raised artist—the saltworks, the mines, the fazendas and the humble people who inhabit and labor in them—converge with melodic wisdom germinated from the sprawling roots of samba, bossa and MPB. A musical blossoming beyond bossa nova, which, with the passage of years, blazing stars and multinationals, would later become a style in its own right with worldwide impact. More clues will follow in the next paragraphs.

Fortunately, the genre's discography is there to testify to what is no less true, though intangible. And if one has the time and the willingness to listen to the three albums grouping the successive versions of each piece (the attached Spotify list can help with this), one can verify how the "strange" initial treatments progressively lose their wild, telluric pulsation with each new reading: the rawness expressed through diverse chants from the deepest Brazil is dressed up and tidied under a homogenizing mainstream mantle; or, put another way, the "discordant" arrangements of Travessia, by Luiz Eça, are sweetened in the A&M album under Creed Taylor's production and Deodato's scores in search of commercialization more in line with US and global tastes. Needless to say, the metamorphosis is even more pronounced with To Milton With Love: almost six decades later, the rusticity of the 1967 record and its subsequent refinement in Courage adapt to a contemporary, stylized instrumental post-bop, whereby its lyrics, which mix the costumbrist with the socially conscious, end up disappearing beneath a very carefully crafted production.

From the Communal to the Universal

One may be more or less in tune with this progressive tempering of edges and content, but what is indisputable is that Daniels' voice shines above any idiom, whether classical, pop, straight-ahead jazz or crossover—the latter standing as the territory where the versatile New Yorker seems most at ease. His unfailing soloist imagination and his tonal and timbral elegance—with all his instruments— make him a reference point for various generations, especially clarinetists, and have led him to collaborate with such disparate luminaries as Thad Jones & Mel Lewis, Freddie Hubbard and Richard Davis, or, in other sonic spheres, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Billy Joel and Diana Ross.

George Klabin, recording engineer and producer of this release, and a Nascimento devotee since meeting him in 1969 during his stay in the Big Apple for the making of Courage, proposed to the reedman that he try to keep the Brazilian's singing in mind as he played. This is a significant challenge, as it increases the risk—always present when instrumentalizing vocal parts—of falling into simplistic, frustrating paraphrases. But Daniels' stature, a figure perhaps under-recognized for his excellence as a performer, allows him to overcome it in utterly brilliant fashion. He is aided by the compositional lucidity of the honored singer and composer, which, together with his very special vocal color, seduced—in addition to those already mentioned—stars like Wayne Shorter, who based his Native Dancer (Columbia Records, 1975) primarily on Nascimento songs, or Pat Metheny, present on a number from the Rio de Janeiro-born musician's album Encontros E Despedidas (American Clavé, 1985), thus confirming a subsequently evident creative stimulus.

What a Difference a Lyric Makes

"Travessia" launches the disc with cottony opening bars verging on smooth jazz, but when the tenor sax solo emerges to begin its statement, the shift in atmosphere is decisive. This sensation will surface from time to time over the course of a record that expertly balances the exceptional motifs on which it is based, an elaborate crossover approach and the solo mastery of a now-octogenarian Daniels for whom time seems to stand still, at least artistically speaking.

If one listens to "Vera Cruz" in its first version on Courage, Nascimento's enormous influence beyond his style and borders becomes evident, in this case on the more world jazz-inflected Metheny, the one that breaks through on Still Life (Talking) (Geffen Records, 1987). In the reedman's reading, a halo of sadness flickers intermittently, connecting with the song's lyrics, which deal with the disappearance of a love and its consequent search. Daniels stands out on clarinet, giving way to tightly shaped lines from Wilson's piano and Nelson's guitar, followed by a conclusion endowed with a gentle but very welcome forcefulness. Softness also prevails in the introductory phrases of "Tres Pontas," in sharp contrast with the dark echoes of Brazilian mineiro chants that begin it in Travessia, all framed by a rhythmic backdrop that evokes the train's passage—whose arrival in Três Pontas, the cradle of his musical identity, is recounted in the text. The leader alternates flute and clarinet here, chiseling a compelling statement with the latter; Wilson and Nelson exchange a brisk dialogue, and the track closes assertively punctuated by Brinker's drums.

The deeply haunting beauty of "Outubro" should not be seen as a romantic ballad: its words speak to us of entering late maturity and the vital disenchantment this can bring, though it offers an exit to renewed joy through song. Daniels substitutes that song with an emotive tenor, and his discourse, despite the excessive cloying of the chorus, manages to move us through an inescapable sincerity. The same melancholic mood is maintained in the beginning of the magnetic "Courage," but the New Yorker's clarinet infuses it with a firm corporeality, negotiating a solo endowed with a certain classicism over one of the band's best joint passages, the two quartets magnificently assembled. Another of the more a priori jazz-oriented selections, "Rio Vermelho"— which in its early rendition opens deceptively as if it were a reading of "Watermelon Man" (Hancock's presence notwithstanding)—enjoys more straight-ahead manners, with the clarinetist overdubbing himself on flutes. Then, he develops an energetic outing, in keeping with its combative lyrics, which speak of an angry chant that, turned into a knife, stains the river waters crimson. By contrast, there are no tragic connotations in "Gira Girou," a piece already luminous in its previous versions and which here is strengthened by a marked groove that swings between blues and soul-jazz. Grammy-nominated Wilson channels George Benson, Nelson delivers a spirited improvisation and the reedman alternates tenor sax and clarinet, joining a collective finale with some unexpected and fleeting free-like moments.

"Morro Velho" conceals beneath its arresting sonic envelope lyrics that shroud social denunciation in a veil of nostalgia. Necessarily, the composition here finds itself stripped of its poetic gaze upon classism and rural Brazil, but Daniels compensates for this loss with an elegant performance. "Catavento," already a beat-driven instrumental in its first interpretation, maintains the flute's prominence and its vivacious, playful air, like the object to which its original title alludes—a weather vane. This is followed by "Canção do Sal," a theme once again subtly protest-tinged about the harsh working conditions of the salt miners from the country's northeast. The leader delivers the seemingly optimistic exposition on clarinet, then develops it with an incisive soprano, followed by brief interventions from the reliable Wilson & Nelson partnership and surgical incisions from the string quartet, which join the party in the excellent collective finale. And closing the disc is "For Milton," a Nelson composition cast as a direct dialogue between the pianist, who establishes a subtle bossa vibe, and an impressive, ethereal Daniels on soprano. The evocation of Hancock and Shorter's duos is here as probable as it is splendid.

An Outro in Digression

To Milton with Love successfully rises to the considerable challenge of crafting an instrumental record derived from another in which both the vocal technique and the verses themselves are truly essential. One might have wished for greater space and presence in the mix for the other soloists, but that is something that does not diminish the gratifying sensations that remain with the listener after the album has played. Kudos, then, to all its protagonists, including Klabin, who, on a distant October day in '68, while still a twenty-something sound engineer, captured with extraordinary finesse (a sophisticated tube equipment, separate microphones for each instrument) two sets by Bill Evans' then brand-new trio at the much-missed Village Gate: 44 years later, under the label he founded and leads, those tapes would be released on the phenomenal Live At Art D'Lugoff's Top Of The Gate (Resonance Records, 2012), a limited-edition box set that remains the pianist's only official recording at that venue. OK, that is another story—one that deserves to be told more fully, and certainly beyond these lines. But it evidences the same care, dedication and respect toward the music and its architects that Daniels and his two quartets pour into this moving enterprise: their honesty stands above trends and strategies, proving that it is possible to artistically reconcile disparate languages and perspectives when talent and a genuine love for the material at hand keep it from slipping into an interpretive rut or purely commercial aims. And, as a bonus track, it succeeds in overturning whatever prejudices we may hold toward certain aesthetic proposals or stylistic tendencies.

---

Comments