Miles Davis had not made a studio record in five years when he entered the studio with Marcus Miller in 1985. He had been through a period of physical deterioration — hip problems, drug use, illness — that had ended a recording career that had not stopped since the 1940s. His return to the stage in 1981, and to recording with The Man with the Horn in the same year, had been greeted with reviews that ranged from cautious to dismissive.

Tutu arrived in 1986 as something nobody had anticipated: a record that was genuinely new rather than an attempt to recover what had been lost.

How the Record Was Made

Marcus Miller wrote and produced almost the entire album, building the tracks in the studio using synthesizers, his own bass playing, programmed drums, and samples. Davis arrived and played over the completed tracks — not as a sideman but as the final and essential element that made the tracks become music.

This is an unusual creative situation, and the unusual situation is what the album’s critics have never fully reckoned with. Tutu is not a jazz record in the conventional sense — it is a production record with Miles Davis as the featured voice. The jazz community received it with some suspicion, and the suspicion was not entirely unreasonable.

But the criterion for evaluating a Miles Davis record has always been: what does Miles do? And what Miles does on Tutu is extraordinary.

The Trumpet Playing

The title track opens with a bass figure and synthesizer textures that establish an atmosphere — dark, spacious, contemporary. Davis enters with a muted line that immediately makes everything that preceded it irrelevant. He is playing with the same quality of selective emphasis that characterised his best work: every note is considered, nothing is wasted, the silences between notes carry as much weight as the notes themselves.

His tone in 1985-86 was not the tone of the 1950s and 1960s Harmon mute work. Age and illness had modified it — it is thinner, occasionally rougher. But this roughness is not a deficiency. It is a different quality of expression, and Davis uses it with complete intentionality.

“Portia” is the album’s emotional centre and its most underrated performance. Miller’s orchestration is deliberately simple — sustained chords, minimal rhythm — and over this Davis plays one of the most nakedly melodic solos of his career. He is not demonstrating anything. He is saying something, and what he is saying is clear and private and beautiful.

The Controversy

The criticism of Tutu — that it represents commercial compromise, that the production overwhelms the playing, that it is not really jazz — is the same criticism that greeted Bitches Brew in 1970 and In a Silent Way in 1969. Miles Davis has been making the wrong kind of music for the jazz community since at least 1968, and the jazz community has been wrong about it each time.

Tutu is not Kind of Blue. It was not trying to be. It is a record of a sixty-year-old musician working in the sonic vocabulary of his moment — the mid-1980s, when synthesis and production were the dominant tools of musical expression — and using that vocabulary to say something that only he could say.

Whether you prefer the acoustic Miles is a matter of taste. Whether Tutu is a serious record made with serious intent is not a matter of taste. It is a matter of listening.

The Record in Context

Tutu is dedicated to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and the cover photograph — a full-face close-up of Davis, cropped to near-abstraction — is by Irving Penn. Both the dedication and the portrait suggest a record aware of its own significance, a musician at the end of his career making a statement rather than simply making an album.

Davis died in September 1991. Tutu was among the last studio records he made that represented him fully. It deserves to be heard on those terms.