This album review looks back at Miles Davis’s Tutu, the record where he let a 27-year-old bassist build the room he’d walk into, which turns 40 this month.
Genre: Jazz-Funk, Pop Jazz
Label: Warner Bros. Records
Release Date: September 29, 1986
Vibe: 🎺🌆
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I’m a weirdo when it comes to the Miles Davis experience.
Plenty of jazz and fusion fans I know reach for the tried-and-true classics when they’re in a Davis mood, and I guess that’s nothing to sneer at. After all, they are classic records for a reason. I’m talking about Kind of Blue, In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, and the like. I love them too. All that said, the older I get, the more I find myself gravitating toward the darker, stranger corners of the East St. Louis legend’s catalog instead. Get Up With It rarely gets the reverence it deserves (though I did my best to give it some well-deserved love in this newsletter), nor does his 80s re-emergence, which has historically received a ton of bad PR because it didn’t sound like Miles at his peak. But after spending five years away from music in what he described in his autobiography as a drunk and high stupor, there’s no way you could come out of that experience the same person, never mind the same artist.
I think there’s plenty to admire in Miles’ studio discography post-1980. Star People is a seriously underrated work, partly because of its self-referential nature. He reinvents and reimagines his early blues roots, flanked by the dueling guitars of Mike Stern and John Scofield. On almost every track, his sense of play and flair for the dramatic are on full display, especially on the title track, which makes excellent use of the negative space created by silence between notes. Of nearly the same caliber are 1989’s Aura and Amandla, respectively, with the former being an ambitious interconnected suite of nine movements that somehow marries longtime collaborator John McLaughlin with a full orchestra. It’s a regal example of Davis’ refusal to be pigeonholed in a specific genre or style for more than a few years. Maybe that’s why Columbia only released the record five years after he left the label: they couldn’t make heads or tails of it.
But I digress. The cream of the jazz impresario’s divisive, infinitely listenable crop is 1986’s Tutu, which turns 40 this month. Improbably so, if you consider where Davis was physically when they began the recording process in February and March of that year. He was about to turn 60, diabetic, and requiring daily insulin injections. A few years earlier, he suffered a stroke that had left his right hand temporarily paralyzed. Father time had come knocking, and even if Davis wasn’t ready to go away quietly, the universe kept sending him sign after sign. Tutu was also his first full-length effort for Warner Bros. Records, who had inked him to a lucrative deal after his previous musical home had unceremoniously let him go. For the first time in decades, Davis may have had something to prove. Tommy LiPuma, who was running Warner’s jazz operations at the time, was one of several voices pushing for a more contemporary sound. After all, You’re Under Arrest had shown flashes of what this album ultimately became, with covers of recent pop hits like “Human Nature” and “Time After Time” gracing the tracklist.
LiPuma found Davis a more-than-capable running mate in Marcus Miller, who’d played bass in the jazz legend’s band from 1981 through 1983, starting with The Man With the Horn. He’d since moved into production and session work, collaborating with artists like Luther Vandross and, later, in the early-1990s, Mariah Carey. LiPuma asked him to put together some ideas, and Miller, who was 27 at the time, built demo tracks with samplers, sequencers, and drum machines, expecting them to be redone with live musicians before any of the compositions were finalized. LiPuma thought they were brilliant as-is and, with overdubs and tweaks, most of what was heard on those temp tracks made it into the final cut. Davis would arrive for sessions in Los Angeles and New York and lay his trumpet over instrumentals that were mostly complete. That reality tends to split critics, since the purists in the room will tell you that pre-programmed jazz should make you gag, not sway in a state of sonic bliss. But if you’ve read up on Davis’ career, that kind of pushback hasn’t thrown him completely off his axis before. Why should it now?
The opening title track ends up being a neat little thesis for the entire album’s mood and objectives. The bass is patient and structured, pushing the layered synths and drum machine along at such a leisurely and unbothered pace that it calls to mind Birth of the Cool-era Miles Davis. The opening few seconds build an underrated amount of pressurized stillness before the trumpeter enters, slinking into the mix like a caped outlaw strolling into an Old West saloon. These are shorter compositions clearly aimed at a crossover audience, too, with only one (”Portia”) daring to go beyond the six-minute mark. Even then, the atmosphere is readily accessible, with syncopated drums and soft-focus synths that walk right up to the Quiet Storm line without teetering into self-parody. I imagine those aforementioned purists lost their minds when they first heard “Perfect Way,” more for how 80s it is than anything else. It’s an upbeat, charming gem that proved Davis had, somewhere beneath his brusque exterior, a deep infatuation with mainstream pop music. More than he let on, anyway.
And that’s not all. This tracklist gets even stranger from there. “Tomaas” is this intriguing mishmash of R&B, reggae, new wave, and electric jazz, with a repetitive single-note bass figure driving the entire arrangement from moment to moment. It’s also Tutu’s best showcase for Davis’ playing, as well as its most traditional-minded when it comes to soloing. Miller gets the soprano sax credit on this cut, and his call-and-response instincts extend the vocabulary that Davis had with other “sidemen” like John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley. You hear him reaching back in time as much as he’s willing to, and it’s a pleasure to hear. “Backyard Ritual,” written by the late, great George Duke, is the funkiest jam on this album, with drums that hit you a bit harder and a groove that’s a bit looser than anything else here. It’s definitely of its time but also, somehow, doesn’t sound as dated as maybe it could’ve, falling somewhere between a Kool & the Gang deep cut and a Mtume 12-inch just waiting for a hip-hop producer to breathe new life into it. “Full Nelson” merits mention as a highlight in all the same categories, too. Close your eyes, and you can pick out the bones of some melodies that Millet would later reshape and remix into other pop classics.
Tutu won two Grammys: Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist for Davis, and Best Album Package for art director Eiko Ishioka. Her stark packaging, built around Irving Penn’s stunning photography, carries the weight of the album’s entire identity. Penn’s severe close-up of Davis’s face, austere and sculptural, became the defining image of his late-period success. After Spike Lee directed a video medley of the first four tracks, Davis was officially back in the broader cultural conversation in a way that I don’t think anyone had anticipated. Critics split immediately, though, of all the mixed reviews I read during my research, Robert Christgau, then at The Village Voice, might be the most interesting. He called it “pop-funk Sketches of Spain, with the starperson’s trumpet glancing smartly off an up-to-date panoply of catchy little tunes, beats, and rhythm effects. I cried fraud at first, and if you have no use for catchy little anythings you’ll agree, but I changed my mind.”
What cemented Tutu as a classic album was hearing Marcus Miller perform several of the tracks live during a Miles Davis centennial. Flanked by Stern, Bill Evans on saxophone, Mino Cinelu on percussion, and trumpeter Russell Gunn in the Davis role, it was a testament to how lasting an influence “pop Miles” has been over the past 40 years. The melodies more than held up. The arrangements, stripped of some period-specific production elements, still oozed darkly seductive appeal. On top of that, you could tell that Davis’ former bandmates were having a blast revisiting these compositions, right as their stature in the eyes of music lovers kept growing year after year. When Davis died, only five years after this album was released, his obituary leaned on Kind of Blue and Bitches Brew as the top-drawer releases the curious should prioritize. I think that’s changing, slowly but surely. Davis could’ve found his arrangement with his new label and with Miller, this young upstart at the time, some kind of humiliation: a musician of his stature overlaying his parts on tracks someone else had already finished. Instead, he told Miller it was his resurrection.
What’s your favorite moment from 1980s-era Miles Davis? Let us know in the comments.
Any Miles is good Miles for me.
Tutu was my ‘gateway’, smoother than the punk/funk I was listening to but it had a Scritti track so….After going deeper I can’t say it’s my favourite Miles but it’s one I love coming back to.