Gregory Hutchinson Honors Miles Davis Centenary With All-Star Tribute Album

Gregory Hutchinson didn't set out to recreate Miles Davis. "This project is not about trying to recreate Miles," the New York-based drummer says. "It's about continuing that conversation he started."

Released April 3, Kind of Now: The Pulse of Miles Davis assembles one of the more compelling all-star jazz lineups in recent memory to work through Davis's catalog alongside Hutchinson originals that span the full arc of Davis's stylistic evolution. The band includes Ambrose Akinmusire on trumpet, Ron Blake on tenor sax and bass clarinet, Gerald Clayton on piano, Joe Sanders on double bass, and Jakob Bro on guitar. The personnel choices are deliberate: groove-oriented players paired with soloists known for forward harmonic thinking, holding the tradition open rather than sealing it shut.

The release is timed to Davis's centenary year, and Hutchinson's programming reflects genuine immersion in the historical record. The album alternates between pieces that swing hard and others that push into electric-era textures, mirroring Davis's own movement across the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Hutchinson traces the drumming lineage directly: Kenny Clarke and Philly Joe Jones anchored the bebop and hard-bop bands; Jimmy Cobb held the center on Kind of Blue; Jack DeJohnette, Billy Hart, and Al Foster redefined what pulse even meant once Davis went electric. Kind of Now maps that evolution in real time, letting listeners hear the seams between eras rather than papering over them.

The album's single, an ensemble reinterpretation of "Seven Steps to Heaven," sets the tone: reverent in material, active in approach, and genuinely uninterested in imitation.

For drummers and educators, the pedagogical density runs deep. Hutchinson frames the central questions Davis's drummers faced in terms that translate directly to the kit: placement versus propulsion, space versus density, and the continual redefinition of pulse as a band concept rather than a fixed timekeeping function. With Akinmusire and Bro pushing the harmonic edges, hearing those ideas worked out in live ensemble context makes Kind of Now a legitimate study document alongside its value as tribute.

Centenary projects often default to reverence without reinvention. Hutchinson threading his own compositional voice through Davis's lineage while holding space for contemporary soloists makes a strong case that the most useful tributes are the ones still asking questions.