India, June 28 -- On the podcast Go with Elmo Lovano, the pianist, composer and producer Robert Glasper describes walking into the Miles Davis vault for the first time. He doesn't reach for obvious metaphors about legacy. He talks instead about fearlessness: how Davis's archived material, even the unfinished fragments and discarded experiments, radiated a quality of the late jazz maestro's absolute refusal to repeat himself. The vault is an archiving effort led by the Miles Davis estate. Glasper says it changed how he thought about his own work. Listening to him, you understand that this is not a musician paying tribute to a hero. It is one restless spirit recognising another, across decades. (Davis died in 1991, aged 65.) Now Glasper is back in Davis's orbit, as composer-producer of the score for Miles & Juliette, an upcoming period romance directed by Bill Pohlad, who also directed the superb Love & Mercy (2014), a biopic of Beach Boys co-founder Brian Wilson. The new film focuses on Davis's 1949 trip to Paris, where the 22-year-old finally escaped the suffocating segregation of America and fell into a passionate romance with the French singer and actress Juliette Greco. Damson Idris plays Miles; Anamaria Vartolomei plays Greco; and Mick Jagger produces through his Jagged Films banner. There is no release date yet, but the project was announced at Cannes last year. The Paris story is an extraordinary one. In the 1940s, France felt like a different universe to Black American musicians, a place where their genius was celebrated rather than suppressed, and where a young man from East St Louis could walk into the Salle Pleyel concert hall and be treated as the visiting royalty he was. The Davis-Greco romance was brief. The imprint was lasting. There is a tenderness in Davis's early recordings that some trace directly to those Paris weeks. Miles & Juliette is, remarkably, the third time Glasper has formally engaged with the Davis legacy. The first was the soundtrack for Miles Ahead (2016), working alongside Don Cheadle on Cheadle's audacious, semi-hallucinatory biopic. Glasper curated the music, contributed five original compositions, and assembled a closing studio jam, What's Wrong with That?, which envisioned Davis playing in the present day alongside Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Gary Clark Jr and Esperanza Spalding. The soundtrack, unsurprisingly, won a Grammy. His second Miles project, Everything's Beautiful (2016), was an album formally credited to Davis and Glasper: a collaboration between a legend long gone and someone who could well be a legend in the making. Granted access to the Davis archive by Sony Music after Miles Ahead, Glasper reworked material from it into something totally new: not a remastered collection, but jazz remixed with hip-hop textures. Miles's trumpet is reimagined as a voice in a living conversation. On Ghetto Walkin', master tapes of Davis from the 1960s are woven around the voice of the singer Bilal, to create something that sounds curiously like both the past and the present. It shouldn't have worked. It very much did. But to understand why Miles & Juliette fits Glasper, now 48, so perfectly, one must unpack what he actually does, and how differently he thinks about this music. The standard story of the jazz and hip-hop crossover involves sampling. Here, a producer lifts a chord progression or a bass line, loops it, and builds a beat around it. Glasper's approach is entirely different. In the Lovano conversation, he talks about the sessions for Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly, specifically the track These Walls, as evolving almost organically. The recording wasn't a formal arrangement. Glasper was responding in the moment, finding the harmonic space between jazz improvisation and hip-hop groove instinctively, the way a jazz soloist finds space in a live ensemble. Nothing was pre-agreed. The connection between the two genres, as Glasper hears it, is not architectural but biological: hip-hop grew out of jazz the way a branch grows from a trunk, and retains cellular memory. His job, as he sees it, is simply to make that memory audible. Miles & Juliette should be worth the wait, not least because it gives us another chapter in one of contemporary music's most compelling ongoing dialogues: a living genius and a dead one, still finding new things to say to each other....