Miles Ahead, Don Cheadle’s new film about Miles Davis, takes place in 1979, toward the end of his silent years that began in 1975 after a perfect internal storm of burnout, creative block, and various health issues. In 1982, when Musician Magazine asked what he did during that time, Miles answered: “Nothin’. Gettin’ high. I didn’t feel like playing the trumpet, didn’t feel like listening to music. Didn’t want to hear it, see it, smell it, nothin’ about it… I didn’t come out of the house for about four years… But then Dizzy came around and said, ‘What the fuck are you doing? You were put here to play music!’ So I started back.”
When the comeback finally commenced, soon after Miles Ahead leaves us, the ideas poured forth, and he was as prolific (and focused) as ever until 1991, when he passed away at 65. Call it his Second Electric Period (the first being 1968–75), and it can be divided into two short chapters: ’81–85 and ’86–91, after he left longtime label Columbia. Among listeners it’s his least explored phase, and the easiest to overlook — or unfairly write off. Critics were usually divided in this period: Some would say (name-record-here) “was his best in five/ten years,” while others were sure to poo-poo it.
And while even the most contrarian fans aren’t likely to underscore these works as definitive, it’s still Miles Davis, about as deep a thinker as there’s been in American music. He was always searching, rarely satisfied, never static. If there are spots in this period that lack heft, there’s still innovation, quality, and virtue. (Frankly, Miles almost never made a bad record; even 1963’s Quiet Nights, which he hated, might feel truncated, but it isn’t that bad.) Here’s a look at his work post-comeback, which were also his final years at Columbia. ____
The Man With The Horn (1981)
Finally, the return. With the exception of longtime producer Teo Macero and Al Foster on drums, Miles started fresh. In were young musicians like guitarist Mike Stern and bassist Marcus Miller, a few years out of New York’s famed LaGuardia High and an alum of the “Saturday Night Live” band, and saxophonist Bill Evans, forever known as the other Bill Evans. It’s an electric album, but so different from the stirring, free-form funk of Miles’s mid-’70s group, when he was last heard from. The session was a bit all over the place, as evidenced by the sounds that emerged. There are elements of rock-and-funk fusion (“Fat Time,” “Back Seat Betty,” “Aida”); pop-fusion (“Shout”); kind-of straight-ahead jazz with Miller walking on electric bass (“Ursula”); and even — gasp! — an R&B vocal (the title track, supplied by Randy Hall) with quiet-storm aspirations.
We Want Miles (1982)
On this live double album — recorded in 1981 in Boston, New York, and Tokyo — Miles sounds re-born. Marcus Miller, the cousin of former Davis pianist Wynton Kelly, sets the tone immediately with a dense funk bassline on “Jean Pierre.” His bandmates — Stern, Foster, Evans, and percussionist Mino Cinelu — seem enthralled that they’re on stage with the returning, triumphant legend. The energy ping-pongs between stage and crowd. Miles, too, is inspired, especially on “Back Seat Betty,” with staccato utterances followed by long soaring notes on open trumpet. And then, voilà, a standard: Gershwin’s “My Man’s Gone Now,” from Porgy and Bess, a reinvented version that swings, then veers back to the funk ethos of the set, with Miles in fine form on open and mute. The crowd, per the title, does seem thrilled to have him back.
Star People (1983)
While Miles sequestered himself in his West 77th Street lair in the late 1970s, the one thing he did do — besides coke — was paint. He wasn’t Edward Hopper or Jacob Lawrence, but formally speaking, he was good. So is this outing — very good, in fact — and it features one of his paintings on the cover. The band — the same as above, with the key edition of guitarist John Scofield — drives on, with grit and gravity, through blues and funk. On “It Gets Better,” a blues, Scofield takes lead with rhapsodic results. Miles is full of brio on the title track, another blues; elsewhere, as on “Speak,” he unleashes the swag and plays trumpet and keyboards at the same time. Gil Evans lends arrangement throughout but shines especially on “Star on Cicely,” named after Miles’s wife, actress Cicely Tyson.
Decoy (1984)
Of all of Miles’s albums, Decoy receives the least acclaim, but it still has its moments. Again, Gil Evans — who, Miles wrote in his autobiography, was the best friend he ever had — lends another arrangement, this time on the eleven-minute “That’s Right,” a slow, brooding blues. There were more personnel changes — Miller was gone, so was Macero, plus Robert Irving III was added on synthesizer and drum programming — but Scofield was back and slashes through the funk piece “What It Is,” enhanced later by a soprano sax solo from Bill Evans. Also on soprano, though painfully underutilized, is Branford Marsalis, the older brother of Wynton, with whom Miles had an iffy relationship. Where Star People was raw and full at 58 minutes long (lengthy for the era), Decoy feels overly-polished, slight, and undernourished, at 20 minutes shorter.
You’re Under Arrest (1985)
In the midst of the Reagan-Bush ’80s, Miles bookended his latest effort with two mini-medleys, both ominous. The opener, “One Phone Call”/“Street Scenes,” in which Sting makes a silly cameo as a screaming French cop, is about his ongoing concern with police brutality and racism — he’d been harassed for decades, usually for merely being black and enjoying high-performance foreign cars — while it closes with “Jean Pierre”/”You’re Under Arrest”/”Then There Were None,” with the sounds of explosions and crying children. (“It’s the nuclear threat that is really a motherfucker in our daily lives,” he wrote in his book.) Despite that, the record is best-known for his tender, enduring interpretations of Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” and Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time,” not to mention an uptempo version of D Train’s “Something’s On Your Mind,” a huge hit on urban radio at the time. It’s a single album but it unfolds, as in Decoy, with a replica of one of his paintings on the inside cover. (Even the sleeve is his filled with his figurative doodles.)
Aura (1985; released 1989)
In 1984, the nation of Denmark awarded Miles Davis its prestigious Sonning Award, which usually went to classical musicians like Igor Stravinsky and Leonard Bernstein. This was the first time it went to a jazz musician — or a black musician. Miles went to Copenhagen to record an album, with the music written by Danish trumpeter and composer Palle Mikkelborg for a large ensemble. It’s a 67-minute suite of nine tone poems (each named for a color) set to a mixture of traditional jazz fusion (it even features “guitar god” John McLaughlin, who was there with Miles at fusion’s advent, 1970’s Bitches Brew), classical, and ambient. Except for the McLaughlin-dominated, rock-guitar introduction — which feels out of place, if not passe — it’s glorious. One of the highlights — and there are many — is “Green,” the quiet duet with Miles and bassist Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen, Denmark’s most heralded jazz musician. Miles himself wrote of Aura, “I think it’s a masterpiece, I really do.”
As exceptional as it was, Columbia refused to release Aura right away, holding on to it for four years. Miles left the label in 1986, in part because of that and, as he told Musician, because the company told him to call fellow label-mate and up-and-comer Wynton Marsalis to wish him happy birthday. At Warner Bros., his new home, Miles hooked up again with Marcus Miller, one of the few people he consistently praised in his now infamous 1989 autobiography. Miller co__-__produced the excellent Tutu (1986), Amandla (1989), and the soundtrack to Siesta, a 1987 film that was barely seen despite its all-star cast (Ellen Barkin, Martin Sheen, Grace Jones, Jodie Foster). Miles was an admirer of Prince and they discussed collaborating. He listened carefully to hip-hop and recorded with a producer experienced in the genre, Easy Mo Bee, in his final years with mixed results. If he’d lived longer, maybe his music may have gone further in that direction, or toward trip-hop, or electronica, or even classical. You never knew. His mind was always workin’ — and steamin’ and cookin’.
