The Making of Miles Davis' Tutu

The long road to making Miles Davis' album Tutu, his first recording for the Warner Brothers label, influenced by Prince and Marcus Miller.

Tutu, released in 1986, was a controversial album among jazz fans, but it reinvigorated Miles’ career, providing him with a fresh audience for his live shows and extending his recorded legacy into the next decade. For Warner Brothers, Tutu provided the splash that was needed for the debut of their new, famous recording artist.

In 1985, Miles Davis signed a contract with Warner Brothers, ending his thirty-year relationship with Columbia. Miles wanted to take a definitive step forward and do something new to revitalize himself and his playing, and he also wanted to demonstrate to Warner that they had signed a player and not a has-been.

He no longer saw himself as a renegade jazz musician, preferring instead to think of himself in terms of his relation to the popular music scene in general. For nearly 20 years Miles had blazed his own path, moving away from the jazz he had grown up playing and helped develop and revitalize.

He had worked hard to make his music relevant, particularly in terms of what was happening in black popular music, incorporating funk and the rhythms of the street. His take on funk and the studio techniques he and Teo Macero had used to create albums like Bitches Brew and On the Corner were partially responsible for the ways that technology was developing in the creation of music.

He’d helped inspire Brian Eno’s ambient music with the Duke Ellington elegy “He Loved Him Madly.”

He’d put Herbie Hancock on the road to using electric keyboards and other technological innovations, and Hancock had inspired the artists who would soon be creating various styles of electronica as well as the turntablists who would develop both electronica and hip-hop.

Members of his early ‘70s and now early ‘80s groups had gone off and produced major mainstream R&B records, scored films, and influenced the ears of countless listeners, many of whom knew only peripherally of him. Miles was right in the middle of the music industry’s cutting edge, so it was only natural that he should be drawn to one of the biggest performers in black popular music in the ‘80s: Prince.

---

In many ways, Prince was able to define the era in which he recorded. He became one of the biggest and most influential stars of the 1980s just as Jimi Hendrix had put his imprint on the 1960s.

Prince

Prince had contacted Davis about working together on Tutu, and the trumpet player was quite interested. According to Nick Kent, Davis was absolutely enthralled by Prince’s work, particularly his album Around the World In A Day, which seamlessly combined funk, psychedelic rock, and top 40 pop. It was just the type of combination that Davis had been trying for on his 80s recordings, except that he had never had much interest in psychedelic music unless one counts the bluesy, Hendrix-induced guitar that had been integral to his music since the early ‘70s.

Just as Davis had found himself somewhat at odds with the younger black audience (and many critics) in his earlier electric period, many saw Prince’s direction following his breakthrough album 1999 as an abandonment of his black roots in search of (white) rock chart success.

Prince, born Prince Rogers Nelson, negotiated an amazing record deal with Warner Brothers at the age of 19 on the strength of demos of songs he had written and recorded single-handedly. He was signed to Warner for six figures and multiple albums and given the unprecedented freedom to produce his own albums as well as to record his own material as he saw fit.

His first two albums didn’t quite display his talents to their best effect, even though the second, Prince yielded a hit song, “I Wanna Be Your Lover.” In 1980 and 1981 he released Dirty Mind and Controversy, respectively. Though both depended heavily on the “Minneapolis Sound” Prince had developed with his distinctive synthesizer voicing, they also incorporated some of the edgy quality of new wave rock and the then-developing techno sounds that would later burst out of the Detroit scene.

There was a distinctive mixture of rock, funk, R&B, and avant-garde European sounds in Prince’s music that, though it sounded vastly different, recalls the way Miles had been working to bring similar elements together for much of his career. In 1982 he crossed over into mainstream stardom with the ambitious double-album 1999, following that up two years later with a remarkable album and semi-autobiographical film Purple Rain.

1985 saw the release of Around the World In A Day, and by this time it is easy to see the parallels between Davis and Prince and the reasons that The Artist held such allure for the Prince of Darkness. Both were fiercely independent, determined to go their own way no matter what critics or fans said, and they both preferred to continue to develop and grow as artists, not standing still or rehashing previous victories.

As Davis prepared to record Tutu, he was interested in working with Prince. Warner Brothers’ A&R man, Tommy LiPuma, wanted to pair Miles with a contemporary music figure as well, though he had been considering Thomas Dolby, a brilliant composer and keyboard player who had scored a huge hit with the song “She Blinded Me With Science.” Dolby also co-produced Joni Mitchell’s 1985 album Dog Eat Dog. A whiz in the studio and with electronic keyboards and technology, Dolby seems like a good choice to help move Tutu in the direction of working with more programmed musical elements and a smaller band overall.

Another possible choice for collaborating on Tutu in LiPuma’s mind is keyboardist Lyle Mays, who is an integral part of Pat Metheny’s band. But Prince is on Miles’s mind, and he is definitely interested. LiPuma is quoted in Nick Kent’s piece “Lightening Up With the Prince of Darkness” as being a little ambivalent about the idea: “I felt that Prince might not be too conversant with certain idioms pertaining to Miles’s playing. But his work on the Family album displayed a keen awareness of the dynamics inherent in be-bop so, yes, indeed, Prince was ideal.”i

Interestingly, Prince had hired a trumpet player by the name of Matt Blistan, who Prince referred to as ‘Atlanta Bliss,’ for his band. Blistan was known for being able to do an uncanny impersonation of Miles’s famous trumpet sound, which makes it difficult at times to sort through bootlegs and unreleased recordings where Davis and Prince were supposed to have played together.

What is known is that as Davis and LiPuma were beginning to work on ideas for the Tutu sessions a tape arrived from Prince featuring the track “Can I Play With U?”

According to Miles, the accompanying letter read “Miles, even though we have never met, I can tell just from listening to your music that you and I are so exactly alike that I know whatever you play would be what I’d do. So if this tape is of any use to you, please go ahead and play whatever you feel over it. Because I trust what you hear and play.”ii

Indeed the piece was worked on, with keyboard player Adam Holzman and Miles adding parts to it, and it was slated to be part of Tutu’s final release, but Prince pulled the track at the last moment because he didn’t feel that it fit in with the direction that the album ended up taking.

It was to have been part of Warner Brothers’ box set Miles Davis: The Last Word in 2002, but that release was also canceled at the last moment, again over some legal complications with Prince/Davis tracks. It is worth noting that this was also the time when Prince was having problems with Warner Brothers that ultimately resulted in his leaving the label. The track, also known as “Red Riding Hood”, turned up on a Prince bootleg entitled Crucial. When The Last Word was finally released it was missing this as well as other tracks that had been planned for the project.

Prince’s adversarial relationship with Warner Brothers became well known in the years that he sought release from his contract, the word “slave” written on his face.

Prince’s overall attitude to the situation echoes Miles’s disgust with the music business and his relationship with Columbia Records:

“They treat you like a slave because they’re giving you a little money, especially if you’re black,” Davis said. “Record companies were still pushing their white shit over all the black music and they knew that they had taken it from black people…All the record companies were interested in at that time was making a lot of money and keeping their so-called black stars on the music plantation so that their white stars could just rip us off.”

Prince clearly exerted an influence on Miles (and vice versa), and it would be interesting for fans of both artists to get a glimpse of the collaborations they might have been planning but which never made it onto Tutu. More than ten years after Davis’s death, Prince seemed to be following in his footsteps, preferring to move forward rather than endlessly rehashing past glories, as this excerpt from a review of an October 2002 concert at London’s Hammersmith Apollo makes clear:

“’I’m not gonna play Purple Rain,” pouts the 44 year-old Artist Once Again Known As Prince. “I’m not interested in what you already know. I’m interested in what you’re willing to learn.” The lesson involves 90 minutes of new material referencing Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix and James Brown, plus a cover of Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love, and then some old songs including Raspberry Beret and How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore? as covered by Alicia Keys.”

---

Producer Tommy LiPuma had reason to be somewhat concerned by the approach Miles and his cohorts were taking towards recording Tutu.

To LiPuma it is absolutely essential to develop the material and a sense of the entire album’s direction before recording:

“I’m very much into pre-production. It is one of the most important aspects of making a record. The more you’re prepared as things come up, the quicker you’re able to respond. Deciding on the material is a crucial part of this phase. Once you have the songs, then it’s time to start working it out, through rehearsals with the act, which is usually the best way. You get some sense as to what the form is and what will happen before it happens.”v

Davis had initially taken his band into the studio in September of 1985 to record the track “Maze”, which is a continuation of his “chromatic funk” concept, but which also seems to bring some new influences into the mix. The song became a staple of Miles’s live shows, and it is somewhat unclear why he chose not to continue to move in this direction. It is possible, of course, that this seemed to be too close to the work the group had already been doing, and Miles wanted to make a clean break with Columbia and get a compelling, fresh start at Warner Brothers.

Miles also asked Randy Hall, who had done some writing for The Man With the Horn to contribute material. Hall worked with guitarist Zane Giles and Adam Holzman. Bringing in other members of Miles’s band as needed, the two recorded some work between October of 1985 and January of 1986 in what has become known as the “Rubber Band Sessions.” These yielded a variety of funky grooves that utilized synthesizer bass lines and drum machines, including the track “Rubber Band”, which Davis was apparently fairly excited about. There were also tracks in a wide variety of styles, including ballads, pop, and Latin rhythms. Miles laid down trumpet parts on at least some of these tracks, but others went untouched.

“Rubber Band” is a pretty pedestrian track, but it does demonstrate that Miles and his cohorts had indeed absorbed a great deal from the development of hip-hop since its emergence from the underground in the early ‘80s.

The track lacks any real melodic development, continuing Miles’s trend of organizing his music around rhythm. The problem with this technique is that there is no cross-rhythm here, just a drum machine and artificial handclaps that relentlessly accentuate the second and fourth beat of each measure throughout the piece’s five-plus minute length. It’s the kind of groove that Miles could play in concert quite successfully because the use of a live drummer allowed for rhythmic interplay and variation that just wasn’t possible with a drum machine.

It may be unfair to judge tracks that were not really completed for release (though once Miles had laid down solos on the track, it is questionable how much further they would have been developed) but there is simply not enough on “Rubber Band” to hold the listener’s interest. Davis’s playing is solid on these tracks, but without vocal or other elements to grab onto, the listener’s attention is inevitably going to wane.

Despite the obvious references to funk, hip-hop, and R&B in the settings that Davis was now employing, his music was still not destined for the dance floor, so there had to be enough texture to hold a listening audience’s interest.

“Rubber Band” did accomplish some things, however. First, it showed that Davis was committed to being absolutely modern in his approach to recording and that he wanted to integrate the dance, hip-hop, and techno styles that had recently developed in black music more deeply than he had done so far. It also showed that Davis was in no way averse to using drum machines, MIDI synthesizers, giving Tutu’s eventual collaborators Marcus Miller and Jason Miles a great deal of freedom in preparing the demo tracks that ultimately comprised the setting for Davis’ trumpet playing on Tutu.

Besides “Maze”, the Rubber Band sessions, and the Prince track, there was also a contribution from keyboardist George Duke. Duke was prolific and played with a wide range of musicians, from Frank Zappa to Cannonball Adderley. In fact, he replaced Joe Zawinul at the electric piano in Adderley’s band. In 1979 he had played on Michael Jackson’s album Off the Wall. In short, he was the perfect amalgam of a jazz-trained musician in touch with the black street and pop sounds of the time that Davis was seeking.

Duke offered up an R&B-tinged number entitled “Backyard Ritual,” a track that did make it onto the finished Tutu album. To Tommy LiPuma, who was head of Warner’s jazz department at the time, the George Duke tune was the best and most promising of the bunch in terms of a new direction for Miles. The Prince tune was also considered a starter, but LiPuma wasn’t that enthused about the other material Miles had recorded thus far. Miles needed a new collaborator and a new approach.

Re-enter Marcus Miller, the brilliant young electric bassist who had worked with Miles on Man With the Horn and We Want Miles, and who had left primarily because he was so in demand as a session bassist that to stay with Miles meant losing money.

Marcus Miller

During his time away he had worked with Luther Vandross, Aretha Franklin, Grover Washington, Jr., David Sanborn, and Bob James. His track record demonstrated his ability to move easily between jazz, R&B, and other pop music forms.

Miller is completely comfortable with the intersection between jazz, R&B, rock, hip-hop, and electronica as well as the dichotomy between commercially viable and highly creative music because he grew up at a time when many artists, including Miles Davis, were living comfortably in that intersection.

As a session musician, Miller had seen that drum programming and synthesized bass lines could be used to replace working musicians. As hip-hop grew from its infancy in the shadow of the Bronx projects to fully produced studio music, machines and editing were used to recreate the sounds that DJs had created by hand in the playground with nothing more than a couple of turntables and some 12-inch discs.

Yet he still saw the opportunity for a sharp musician to use the machines creatively. “I don’t ever blame bad music on the tools. Put a drum machine in Prince’s hands and you got something else. You can’t blame synthesizers and overdubbing for a lack of soul in music. Listen to Songs In the Key of Life. Stevie overdubbed that whole record and that thing is just bad.”

In 1984, Miller started the group The Jamaica Boys with drummer Lenny White and keyboard player Bernard Wright. White had been known as the drummer with the most popular lineup of Chick Corea’s Return to Forever, and Wright had joined Lenny’s band at the age of 13. He had also played with trumpeter Tom Browne, who scored a huge fusion/funk hit in 1980 called “Funkin’ for Jamaica.”

Wright also recorded with Cameo, a synthesizer funk outfit that had probably served as a model for some of the Rubber Band Session material, perhaps including “Rubber Band” itself. The Jamaica Boys were doing things that sounded fairly similar to what Miller ended up doing for his demo tracks on Tutu, working what was something of a synth-created dub bassline into what was otherwise a funk track, creating a great deal of space for whatever would go around it. It made Marcus the perfect candidate to create a modern setting in which Miles Davis’s trumpet could be the star attraction.

Miller didn’t expect the demos he put together for LiPuma and Davis to be used on the actual album; he thought they’d be fleshed out by additional musicians. But LiPuma liked the sound and the feel of the demos, and he asked Miller to go ahead and reproduce them as multitrack recordings in the studio.

In order to do this Miller used drum machine programs as well as MIDI. MIDI does not record the actual music itself, as a digital sample would. Instead, it records the information required to produce the music: note-on, note-off, pitch blend, etc. The sounds that are played are sounds that are already stored in a library of digitized samples of recorded sound contained in the receiving instrument or the soundcard of the receiving computer.

Davis could reproduce the sounds he and Miller created in the studio by supplementing his working band with programmed synthesizers to provide the additional tonal colors, making his band sound larger. This meant that the live working groups Davis led from 1986 on were a combination of live musicians with pre-programmed synthesizer parts, a remarkable precursor of the live-musician-with-DJ music that started to be produced in the late 1990s.

Davis’s live bands during these years were exceptional bands playing well beyond the parameters of what could be heard on recordings. Davis concentrated on directing the band, deciding what soloists should play when, for how long, and when the group would segue into the next number, all while adding his unique trumpet sound to the mix.

It is not at all far-fetched to see Davis operating as a DJ in these groups, adding, mixing, and manipulating the various elements of his band to provide listeners with a unique emotional experience at each live performance.

Miller also worked with producer/keyboardist Jason Miles on the programming for Tutu. Jason had definitely become known for his synthesizer programming skills and his ability to create new, unusual sounds that created perfect settings for the performers he was working with, which included Vandross, Michael Jackson, the Jamaica Boys, and Whitney Houston.

By the time Tutu came up, Miles and Miller had been working together for some time. In addition, LiPuma’s emphasis on pre-production enabled him to focus on the development of the settings Miller was putting together, since there wasn’t going to be much “working it out, through rehearsals with the act.” In fact, Miller tried to have things set up and ready to go with his programming in the studio so that when Miles arrived they could get going and get his first take or two down on tape, as both Miller and Davis felt that was where the magic happened.

This is a far different approach to making records than the one Davis had used from the Bitches Brew sessions until his retirement in 1975, when Teo Macero had simply let the tapes roll and the emphasis was on allowing the musicians to explore certain areas of the music without worrying about whether the results would be part of a master take. The change reflected changes in the recording industry itself as well as in the way music was being composed and produced.

Tutu is very much like the electronic popular music being produced today, in which a single musician or DJ, or sometimes a duo, works in a home studio to create, produce, and record their musical vision, then send it off to the record company. Ultimately, Davis saw the advantages of working this way in much the same terms as any DJ or synthesizer programmer sees it—as a question of control:

“Doing it the old way, recording like we used to, is just too much trouble and takes too much time. Some people say they miss that spontaneity and spark that comes out of recording with a band right there in the studio. Maybe that’s true; I don’t know. All I know is that the new recording technology makes it easier to do it the way we have been doing it.” viii

Davis and Miller continued to work this way on Siesta and Amandla, though the latter album did bring in a number of musicians from Davis’s touring band, but again, they were adding to and playing against what had already been committed to tape.

Miles Davis was not primarily producing music for the dance club, and so Tutu, while utilizing the fusion of live musician and technology that has become the hallmark of music production, is still primarily a jazz-based album aimed at the listener. Miller’s use of drum programs is very loose and organic for the time in which it was done, and the cool colors and harmonies he uses on tracks like “Tutu” and “Tomaas” have been called reminiscent of Gil Evans, though Miller was actually aiming for chord voicings like those used by Herbie Hancock in the second great quintet.

“The harmonies and layers were directly influenced by Herbie Hancock but I came to find that Herbie was very influenced by Gil Evans”, Miller has said. What’s interesting to note is that black music, which had been carefully separated into a variety of mutually-exclusive genres by the record companies, seemed to have found a way to bring them all back together as well as to become part of the mainstream musical culture. If bebop was, as someone once said, jazz with the soul removed, it had taken the better part of the next thirty years for jazz to get that soul back.

Likewise, dance music, which had taken a long, slow route from funk to disco to hip-hop to electro, techno, and house to acid jazz, drum ‘n’ bass, trance, and other electronic hybrids, was finally finding its way back into the mainstream after years underground. But much of this was momentum from the seventies. By the mid-eighties, the social divisions between black and white (as well as the musical divisions) were beginning to reassert themselves.

According to Miller:“…Things started to polarise again. ‘The jazz guys ran back to the real far end of jazz. They’re all wearing suits and doing the jazz of the sixties. And I don’t just blame Wynton Marsalis. The thing is a lot of people followed him because they were getting uncomfortable with not being able to define things…’Musically everybody ran to the edges. R&B got really hard and primal. Hip hop took over, then classicist jazz took over, then all of a sudden people weren’t interacting anymore. And that was always my thing. You know E, W&F (Earth, Wind & Fire) and Herbie (Hancock). I grew up loving that music and I refused to let that go.”ix

One of the charges made against Tutu is that there is no give and take between the musicians because one of the musicians is not a musician per se, but rather the programs set up by Marcus Miller. The argument is rather similar to the objection of some critics to the use of drum loops on On the Corner.

Miller played soprano sax, bass, and bass clarinet on the album, at times playing in the studio right along with Miles. His bass work helps to create an illusion of a real drummer, as does Miles’s trumpet work, weaving in and out of the landscape, sometimes playing a brief ensemble passage along with the programmed synthesizers, and then taking off into a chromatic flurry. There’s an illusion studio bassist Carol Kaye shows her students called the “syncopated metronome” which allows her to make a metronome appear to be “swinging” while she is playing along with it—this is the kind of skilled work a real musician can bring to the studio and Marcus Miller certainly brought it on the Tutu sessions.

To those who say that Tutu is like a tennis pro playing against a serving machine, Davis replied: “If a musician is really professional he will give you what you want in terms of performance in the studio by playing off and against the band that’s already down on tape. I mean, the motherfucker can hear what is being played, can’t he?”x

Miles took it as a challenge to weave his trumpet sound and feel for the music into the tracks laid down by Miller, Jason Miles, and George Duke, and the result is an album that is beautiful, completely of its time, and yet completely Miles.

At the 1986 Grammy Awards, Miles won Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist for “Tutu.” Prince won Best R&B Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocal for the song “Kiss.” Wynton Marsalis took home Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Group for his album J Mood.

New Directions in Music is written by a single real person. It is not generated by AI. Please help spread good content by reading (Thank you!) and sharing this post with a music loving friend. If you like what you see, please sign up for a free subscription so you don’t miss a thing, or sign up for a paid subscription if you can.