photo courtesy of That Jazz Girl

Album Review of Jason Miles: Cosmopolitan

Jason Miles (keyboards, synth) recorded Cosmopolitan back in 1979 with Michael Brecker (tenor sax), Gerry Niewood (saxophone), Marcus Miller (bass), Ricardo Silveira (guitar), and Jeff Williams (drums), with Badal Roy on tabla, percussionists Armen Halburian and Henry Castelanos, and vocalist Clarice Taylor. However, that record was shelved for… 46 years before its 2025 release.

image courtesy of That Jazz Girl

The jazz fusion album that resulted from those 1979 sessions, Cosmopolitan, is simply remarkable. The title track is so engaging that its 7:15 runtime simply flies by. The entire album is that way, in fact. Album-opener “Cosmopolitan,” though, in addition to incorporating some actual city sounds in the opening, delivers a lively very city-like tempo, with energetic, sometimes abrupt horns, an occasional funky beat… it’s a jazz fusion representation of the sound of a lively city, of the City. Very cosmopolitan.

And yeah, that’s my favorite track among the six on this 37-38 minute-long album. But not by much. The next song, “Powder,” meanders a lot more, slowing the pace down a bit, before “Gale Warnings” splits the difference a bit more. While the first two tracks leaned heavily into wind instruments (Spotify lists featured performers for each song, and saxophonist Gerry Niewood was featured on the first two cuts), “Gale Warnings” gets things rolling with some noticeable synth-work before the song notably begins to delve into other instrumentation, as Michael Brecker (tenor sax) is mentioned as the featured collaborator on this track.

“The Man Who Pushes the Buttons,” also featuring Brecker, is a bit more angular and frenetic than the record’s preceding songs. “Kashmirian Twist,” meanwhile, lists as featured artists both Niewood and Badal Roy, who plays tabla, which I was completely unfamiliar with. (Google found me this “What is Tabla?” article.) And indeed, the tabla (pair of drums) did add a unique sound as a co-featured instrument, probably bringing forth the suggestion – for me, at least – of a subway car rattling a bit as part of yet another cityscape-evoking number.

“Poetry” closes the record with a smoky barroom-scented piano opening that belies the forthcoming liveliness, as this number, with Niewood again listed as the featured artist, recovers some of the liveliness of the album-opening title track, providing nice bookends to this broad-appeal jazz fusion collection.

As I hope you know by now, I love sharing music that’s brilliantly-assembled and fun to listen to, and that is most definitely true of Cosmopolitan. With its lively rhythms and cool cityscape-recalling sounds, this record is likely appeal well beyond its particular subgenre’s core audience. So give it a listen. And yes, start with the opening number because it’s the most likely to get you hooked. But then play the record in order to appreciate Miles and his collaborators’ collective vision.