‘Tutu’: When Miles Davis thrust jazz into the 1980s
Nobody sailed the 20th century’s evolving pop trends in jazz quite like trumpeter and bandleader Miles Davis.
Ever shrouded in nonchalant cool, the pioneering Illinois composer would stand as one of the lauded giants of jazz history. Cutting LPs since the early 1950s, successive records would document his influential developments in hard bop’s chord complexities, before arriving at 1959’s Kind of Blue, a landmark of jazz’s modal style pursuing improvisation within scale parameters, still standing as the best-selling jazz album of all time.
As the 1960s rolled along during his Second Quintet period, Davis found himself in the centre of a rapidly shifting musical climate by the decade’s close, parading rock as the new artistic primacy in both the charts and the counterculture. As groups like Grateful Dead, Soft Machine, and Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention began to soak up jazz arrangements, Davis inversely grew enamoured with the plugged-in albums conjured by the Woodstock generation.
“The music I was really listening to in 1968 was James Brown, the great guitar player Jimi Hendrix, and a new group who had just come out with a hit record, ‘Dance to the Music’, Sly and the Family Stone,” Davis recalled in his 1989 autobiography.
1969’s In a Silent Way heralded his electric era, as well as scorn from jazz purists who didn’t appreciate Davis’ new fusion experiments. Bitches Brew would follow the next year, shared bills with everybody from Steve Miller Band to Neil Young, and even a slot at the hippy zenith of 1970’s Isle of Wight Festival, playing to the biggest crowd of his career with crowd numbers up to 600,000. Seeds of an emerging interest in the possibilities of electronic music began to sprout during this time of experimentation, soaking up the musique concrète theories of Karlheinz Stockhausen for 1972’s On the Corner ‘space music’.
Davis had charted a creative course defined by unwavering compromise and unabashed embrace of new, artistic terrain, reinventing himself several times over. Yet, a bad spell of drink and drug abuse would scupper original material for nearly ten years, staying afloat with various compilations and albums comprised of studio sessions already recorded. 1981’s The Man with the Horn would pull Davis into the new decade and a creative awakening, and the surrounding pop trends would be absorbed in Decoy three years later with its synth and keyboard textures, and You’re Under Arrest would even see instrumental covers of Michael Jackson and Cyndi Lauper.
Davis had caught the technology bug, too. Having struck up a fruitful professional relationship with bassist and multi-instrumentalist Marcus Miller, the pair sought to embrace the latest recording developments in samplers, drum machines, and sequencers for his much-awaited next album. Corralling a team of expert session players, Miller crucially roped in keyboardist Jason Miles for his authoritative synth knowledge. Keen to shape each instrument track with Davis’ unmistakable sensibility, Miller’s co-production overseeing ensured every sketch or demo never supplanted his singing trumpet.
“A lot of times I would hear stuff that people wrote for Miles, and the track was killing and sounded modern,” Miller once recalled, “Then I’d say, ‘OK, what’s Miles gonna do?’ and they’d go, ‘You know, Miles is just gonna do his thing’. Big mistake. You have to know in your head what the main instrument is going to do…every track was created with his voice in mind. Miles was never incidental to the track, trying to fit the horn in. Miles’ sound led the whole thing.”
Dropped in September 1986, Tutu, titled after the famous South African bishop and translated as ‘cool’ in Nigeria’s Yoruba language, heralded Davis’ final, confounding hurrah, dropping an LP that still rankled the jazz community but garnered critical praise for its contemporary sonic flourish and easy gel with the pop around it. Plastered with Irving Penn’s dynamic photographic cover, Tutu would stand as Davis’ last vital record before his death in 1991, the finale to an unrivalled jazz oeuvre never afraid to take chances.
“Thanks, man,” Miller recounted Davis saying at the time, “You brought me back”.
