"Miles Davis was doing something inherently African, something that has to do with all forms of American music, not just jazz"
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Cassandra Wilson is staking a claim about lineage, not genre. By calling Miles Davis "inherently African", she sidesteps the tidy museum label of jazz-as-style and points to jazz-as-method: rhythmic intelligence, call-and-response thinking, timbral nuance, and the primacy of feel over formula. It is a cultural move as much as a musical one, nudging listeners away from chord charts and toward ancestry.
The phrasing is doing quiet political work. "Inherently" risks sounding essentialist, but Wilson uses it to correct a different distortion: the tendency to treat Black innovation as an American novelty detached from African continuities. In her frame, Davis isn't "influenced by" Africa as an exotic spice; he's operating inside a diasporic logic that survived enslavement, segregation, and commodification. That's why she widens the scope to "all forms of American music". The subtext is blunt: the nation markets rock, blues, R&B, country, hip-hop, even pop as separate commodities, but their shared engine is Black rhythmic and vocal practice, often laundered through whiteness before being called "mainstream."
Context matters: Wilson came up as a jazz singer who refused the polite, repertory role, folding in blues, folk, and experimental textures. Hearing Davis this way also defends her own boundary-crossing. Davis becomes the precedent for restlessness: an artist who treated tradition as a living resource, not a rulebook. Wilson's line is less homage than blueprint - a reminder that the deepest "American" sound is a set of African-descended strategies for turning constraint into invention.
The phrasing is doing quiet political work. "Inherently" risks sounding essentialist, but Wilson uses it to correct a different distortion: the tendency to treat Black innovation as an American novelty detached from African continuities. In her frame, Davis isn't "influenced by" Africa as an exotic spice; he's operating inside a diasporic logic that survived enslavement, segregation, and commodification. That's why she widens the scope to "all forms of American music". The subtext is blunt: the nation markets rock, blues, R&B, country, hip-hop, even pop as separate commodities, but their shared engine is Black rhythmic and vocal practice, often laundered through whiteness before being called "mainstream."
Context matters: Wilson came up as a jazz singer who refused the polite, repertory role, folding in blues, folk, and experimental textures. Hearing Davis this way also defends her own boundary-crossing. Davis becomes the precedent for restlessness: an artist who treated tradition as a living resource, not a rulebook. Wilson's line is less homage than blueprint - a reminder that the deepest "American" sound is a set of African-descended strategies for turning constraint into invention.
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| Topic | Music |
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