Miles Davis' Tutu...
- By Shawn C. Baker
- Published 09/22/2009
Shawn C. Baker
Shawn lives in sometimes sunny San Pedro, California with his beautiful wife Sara and their two cats Lily and Thompson. He works full time at a bookstore for bread but spends 90% of the rest of his time writing novels, screenplays and opinionated soapboxes that, although sometimes crass, are really just meant to
make the world a better place. Shawn drinks coffee all day and good beer all night. He loves comics even more than he loves movies, but he loves music most of all.
Miles Davis.
What does that name mean to you? To most folks into music it is a force to be revered and reckoned with. Saying his name incites one to reflect on key phrases such as: Legend. Master. Innovator.
Ah, there we go, let's stick with that last one, shall we? Innovator. Say the word, let it roll around on your tongue for a moment, and think about true innovation. Innovation is not rage against the machine for hyper-stylizing an image or a 'cause' with their music.
That my friends is marketing.
Innovation is not The Strokes, a band considered by some to have started a 'movement' (ugh, there's that word) when really all they did was re-hash an old familiar formula at just the right time and in front of just the right set of A&R people.
Innovation is not always 'good' or likeable. In fact, true innovation often stinks to high heaven when seen from a short enough distance of retrospection. Innovation is new ideas and new ways of looking at old things. Merriam Webster online defines Innovation as:
'You say that everything sounds the same
Then you go buy them'
So in 1986 when Miles Davis hooked up with Tommy LiPuma and Marcus Miller to make an album that for all intensive purposes gave birth to Smooth Jazz, the future bane of the Jazz world, I'm sure not everyone was happy. Of course they didn't know what would follow when they recorded Tutu so it's hard to say whether the album was received with animosity at the time for it's texture or if it wasn't until all of the Smooth Elevator stations set in and became their own self-fulfilling prophecies that people did the detective work and traced it's dark origins back to Davis' mid-80's album. From the mouths of a lot of old Jazz hounds I've met this one is particularly hated. I've heard a lot about this but it wasn't until I found a $.99 copy of Tutu on cassette at a Goodwill recently that I actually heard the album first hand for myself.
Wow.
Okay, it's pretty bad, in that new age salon kinda way that smooth Jazz banks on. The basslines are Nightcourtish with their constant slap/pop. The keyboards are waft and dawdle, their textures often similar to unwanted lavender bubble bath choking an otherwise refreshing gulp of water. But the trumpet... it's not my favorite production on Miles' instrument of choice, but there is something to it. The sound is over-produced and a bit tinny perhaps, but it perfectly conjures a strange otherworldliness. More throat than horn, so it comes across more like a voice than the instrument we're maybe used to hearing from a Jazz legend like this.
There are also places where this album made me want to give myself papercuts in the webbing between my toes. And yet, to the ears of someone having grown up knowing the cliches and pop-culture connotations of Smooth Jazz*, even while godawful to listen to in theory, sometimes it's just nice and, well smooth.
Smooth and actually, if you're able to free up your ears from what you've been taught, quite mystical. And that is what they were hoping for anyway, right? Smooth Jazz was the terminus point of a two-and-a-half decade romp with consciousness expansion musicians embraced, from the pot and acid of the 60's, to the coke and heroin of thte 70's and early 80's, on into, recovery and, well, I guess banality**. Hippies moved to the burbs, took out business loans and opened New Age shops that thrive on Eckert Tolle and Sylvia Browne and musicians, well some of them, created Smooth Jazz.
Same thing.
But with his own drug romps Davis flirted with and produced some incredible Innovations. Bitches' Brew - C'mon, if you look at the footage from them playing that live at the Filmore West it just looks (and sounds for that matter) like Acid.
That was innovation.
And Tutu, yes, this is innovation too. It just sounds a little bit lame now that it's a couple decades under our social belt and it helped pave the way for guys like Kenny G, but again, innovation is like anything else in life - sometimes you gotta take the good with the bad. I don't know that I'd call Tutu 'good' perse, but if you're into Jazz and it's evolutuion it's worth $.99 at a thrift store.
........................
* I don't understand it either and it's a recent development. When I go home to visit in Chicago and stay at my parents' house there is a small room above our garage and in it my Dad keeps a radio playing Smooth Jazz 24/7. He says it keeps raccoons away (there's a hole in the roof that everytime he fixes the raccoons re-open). I'm usually there drinking with friends into the wee hours of the morning and the last couple times, stumbling around in the dark, some of it actually worked for me. I know, I know. I can't determine if this is a sure fire sign that I'm 'Thirty Something' or what, but in my defense I'll just say if you want to lambast all things smooth I've got just one thing to say, Sade. She's always ruled and always will. So there.
** Look at Aerosmith. Perfect example. Drugs = great albums, sober = shite. Sorry guys, just how it is...
What does that name mean to you? To most folks into music it is a force to be revered and reckoned with. Saying his name incites one to reflect on key phrases such as: Legend. Master. Innovator.
Ah, there we go, let's stick with that last one, shall we? Innovator. Say the word, let it roll around on your tongue for a moment, and think about true innovation. Innovation is not rage against the machine for hyper-stylizing an image or a 'cause' with their music.
That my friends is marketing.
Innovation is not The Strokes, a band considered by some to have started a 'movement' (ugh, there's that word) when really all they did was re-hash an old familiar formula at just the right time and in front of just the right set of A&R people.
Innovation is not always 'good' or likeable. In fact, true innovation often stinks to high heaven when seen from a short enough distance of retrospection. Innovation is new ideas and new ways of looking at old things. Merriam Webster online defines Innovation as:
- Date: 15th century
1 : the introduction of something new
2 : a new idea, method, or device : novelty
'You say that everything sounds the same
Then you go buy them'
So in 1986 when Miles Davis hooked up with Tommy LiPuma and Marcus Miller to make an album that for all intensive purposes gave birth to Smooth Jazz, the future bane of the Jazz world, I'm sure not everyone was happy. Of course they didn't know what would follow when they recorded Tutu so it's hard to say whether the album was received with animosity at the time for it's texture or if it wasn't until all of the Smooth Elevator stations set in and became their own self-fulfilling prophecies that people did the detective work and traced it's dark origins back to Davis' mid-80's album. From the mouths of a lot of old Jazz hounds I've met this one is particularly hated. I've heard a lot about this but it wasn't until I found a $.99 copy of Tutu on cassette at a Goodwill recently that I actually heard the album first hand for myself.
Wow.
Okay, it's pretty bad, in that new age salon kinda way that smooth Jazz banks on. The basslines are Nightcourtish with their constant slap/pop. The keyboards are waft and dawdle, their textures often similar to unwanted lavender bubble bath choking an otherwise refreshing gulp of water. But the trumpet... it's not my favorite production on Miles' instrument of choice, but there is something to it. The sound is over-produced and a bit tinny perhaps, but it perfectly conjures a strange otherworldliness. More throat than horn, so it comes across more like a voice than the instrument we're maybe used to hearing from a Jazz legend like this.
There are also places where this album made me want to give myself papercuts in the webbing between my toes. And yet, to the ears of someone having grown up knowing the cliches and pop-culture connotations of Smooth Jazz*, even while godawful to listen to in theory, sometimes it's just nice and, well smooth.
Smooth and actually, if you're able to free up your ears from what you've been taught, quite mystical. And that is what they were hoping for anyway, right? Smooth Jazz was the terminus point of a two-and-a-half decade romp with consciousness expansion musicians embraced, from the pot and acid of the 60's, to the coke and heroin of thte 70's and early 80's, on into, recovery and, well, I guess banality**. Hippies moved to the burbs, took out business loans and opened New Age shops that thrive on Eckert Tolle and Sylvia Browne and musicians, well some of them, created Smooth Jazz.
Same thing.
But with his own drug romps Davis flirted with and produced some incredible Innovations. Bitches' Brew - C'mon, if you look at the footage from them playing that live at the Filmore West it just looks (and sounds for that matter) like Acid.
That was innovation.
And Tutu, yes, this is innovation too. It just sounds a little bit lame now that it's a couple decades under our social belt and it helped pave the way for guys like Kenny G, but again, innovation is like anything else in life - sometimes you gotta take the good with the bad. I don't know that I'd call Tutu 'good' perse, but if you're into Jazz and it's evolutuion it's worth $.99 at a thrift store.
........................
* I don't understand it either and it's a recent development. When I go home to visit in Chicago and stay at my parents' house there is a small room above our garage and in it my Dad keeps a radio playing Smooth Jazz 24/7. He says it keeps raccoons away (there's a hole in the roof that everytime he fixes the raccoons re-open). I'm usually there drinking with friends into the wee hours of the morning and the last couple times, stumbling around in the dark, some of it actually worked for me. I know, I know. I can't determine if this is a sure fire sign that I'm 'Thirty Something' or what, but in my defense I'll just say if you want to lambast all things smooth I've got just one thing to say, Sade. She's always ruled and always will. So there.
** Look at Aerosmith. Perfect example. Drugs = great albums, sober = shite. Sorry guys, just how it is...
