Miles Davis

After six years of retirement marked by serious health problems, Miles Davis returned to the studio in 1980 and came back to the public in 1981 with this album. The critics were divided at the time, and the division was understandable. This is not a triumphant return on the level of the Prestige or Columbia eras. It is a cautious, probing record from a man getting his chops back and testing where he wanted to go next.

The best track is "Back Seat Betty," a hard-driving funk piece with Barry Finnerty's guitar cutting through the mix with the kind of rawness that made the late electric records so exciting. The saxophone role has shifted to Bill Evans, a young player who would stay with Miles for several years and provided the kind of technically fluid, slightly conservative foil that Miles always seemed to want. Marcus Miller appears on bass and immediately establishes himself as central to the new sound.

The album has two tracks from the Chicago band built around Miles's nephew Vince Wilburn Jr. on drums, co-written by Randy Hall and Robert Irving III, and they represent a different, softer direction that doesn't quite fit with the grittier material. The result is a record that points in several directions at once, which is perhaps appropriate for a comeback. The Man with the Horn matters more as a historical document than as an aesthetic statement: the man was back, and whatever came next would be on his terms.

The live double album from the comeback tour of 1981, and a considerably more confident statement than The Man with the Horn. Playing in front of audiences again had clearly loosened Miles up: the live versions of "Jean Pierre," his simple, nursery-rhyme-like theme, are joyful and extended in a way the studio album's material rarely was. The crowd reception is audible throughout, warm and enthusiastic, and Miles responds to it.

"Jean Pierre" is the signature of this period: a French children's melody Miles picked up somewhere that became one of the most recognizable riffs of the early-eighties band. It appears multiple times on this double album in different settings. The repetition isn't exhausting; it's more like watching the band find different ways to frame the same simple object and discover that the simplicity is inexhaustible.

Mike Stern's guitar is the MVP of these live recordings. He plays with a wiry, almost punk-inflected attack that keeps the music edgy even when the tempos relax. We Want Miles won the Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist, presented in February 1983, which surprised no one who had seen the band live and surprised quite a few critics who hadn't. It works well as a document of Miles Davis reconnecting with his audience after the long silence.

The album where the blues really enters the comeback period. Star People has a looser, grittier feel than either of its predecessors, and the addition of John Scofield on guitar is a significant reason for the shift. Where Mike Stern was raw and punky, Scofield brings a more sophisticated bluesy vocabulary, full of bent notes and unexpected harmonic choices that push the music in new directions while keeping it firmly grounded.

Gil Evans helped out as an uncredited co-arranger and consultant, one of the last times Miles and Gil worked together on record before Evans's death in 1988; Evans arranged "That's Right" on Decoy the following year. It's a bittersweet footnote: his touch is sympathetic but the material is somewhat slight, and it doesn't approach the scale of what they'd accomplished together in the late fifties and early sixties. But the reunion itself is worth something.

The extended blues vamps that make up much of the record are not sophisticated compositions, and that was clearly intentional: Miles was stripping down to fundamentals, to the blues that had always been underneath everything he played, and playing over them with the kind of unfiltered melodic invention that was his purest gift. Star People is not a great record, but it is an honest one.

The most electronic record in the comeback period up to this point, and the first album where synthesizers start to dominate the texture rather than accent it. Robert Irving III joins as keyboardist and co-producer, shifting the sound toward something closer to pop and R&B production values. Miles also plays synthesizer himself on several tracks, which gave critics at the time something to argue about and still divides listeners.

John Scofield continues to be the anchor of the band's improvisational energy. His playing on "Decoy" is some of his best work with Miles: lyrical, unhurried, and full of the kind of sideways harmonic movement that makes his style so distinctive. Branford Marsalis appears as a guest on three tracks, "Decoy", "Code M.D." and "That's Right", and sounds perfectly comfortable in the electric context, more so than some of the more bebop-trained guests Miles had brought in during this period.

Two of the seven tracks, "What It Is" and "That's What Happened", are drawn from a live performance at the Montreal Jazz Festival; the rest is studio. The live tracks have a rawer energy that the studio material sometimes lacks. As a whole, Decoy represents Miles testing the limits of how far into electronics and pop production he could go while keeping the music identifiably his own. The Scofield years are, taken together, one of the more underrated stretches of the comeback period.

Miles's last album made for Columbia apart from Aura, which the label held back until 1989, and his most pop-oriented record to date. Two covers, "Human Nature" from Michael Jackson and "Time After Time" from Cyndi Lauper, generated the most attention and still get the most plays. Miles plays both melodies with a tenderness and lyrical directness that cuts through any reservations about the source material. His version of "Human Nature" became a touchstone for a certain generation of jazz listeners discovering his catalog through the comeback albums.

Sting's cameo is interesting but slight, a few seconds of spoken French. John McLaughlin is a bigger presence than that: he takes the whole guitar chair on "Ms. Morrisine" and both parts of "Katia". What does make a difference is Scofield's continued presence as a foil: his last album with the band, and it's a melancholy one for that reason. His playing on "Something's On Your Mind" captures something of the guitar-and-trumpet dialogue that had defined the best studio work of the previous three years.

This record was the end of something: the end of the Columbia relationship, the end of the Scofield era, and in some ways the end of the grittier, more improvisationally open period of the comeback. What came next at Warner Bros. was considerably more polished and, for many listeners, considerably less interesting. You're Under Arrest catches Miles in transition again, which is perhaps where he was most himself.

The masterpiece of the comeback years. Marcus Miller wrote, produced, arranged, and played virtually everything on this album, constructing dense, layered tracks that Miles then overdubbed his trumpet onto. The methodology is radically different from any previous Miles Davis record: there is no live band, no spontaneous interaction, no jazz process in any conventional sense. Just Miller's studio constructions, and Miles playing over them with characteristic economy and authority.

The result is one of the most sonically distinctive records Miles ever made. Miller's production is immaculate: synthesizer bass lines that sit right at the edge of funk and electronic music, horn and string pads that create spatial depth, percussion programming that grooves without ever feeling mechanical. Over all of it, Miles's trumpet sounds cleaner and more focused than it had in years. He doesn't play many notes. He doesn't need to.

The title track, named for Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, builds from a quiet synthesizer vamp to something genuinely majestic. "Portia" and "Splatch" explore different corners of the same sonic world. Miles won the 1987 Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist for his playing on Tutu, and Eiko Ishioka's sleeve won Best Album Package the same night. It belongs to those who can hear it on its own terms.

The third Marcus Miller collaboration, after Tutu and the Siesta soundtrack, and in some respects an improvement on Tutu: more live playing, more interaction between Miles and a real band, and Kenny Garrett's alto saxophone adding a voice that Tutu's studio-construct approach hadn't allowed for. Amandla is a Zulu and Xhosa word meaning "power," and was one of the rallying cries of the anti-apartheid movement. Miles named the record in solidarity with the South African liberation struggle.

The title track is one of the most lyrical things Miles recorded in the 1980s: a gentle, flowing melody over a Miller groove that gives his trumpet room to breathe and sing. "Catembe" opens the album with the kind of slowly building energy that the Tutu-era production handled best. The band chemistry feels more present here than on Tutu, which makes the improvisational moments land harder.

Amandla was the last album of his own music Miles released in his lifetime, though not the last he completed: that was Dingo, the film score he recorded with Michel Legrand in March 1990. It has the feel of a confident, mature artist still pushing forward, still curious, still willing to work with collaborators who brought ideas he hadn't explored. For listeners who struggle with the more radical Tutu, Amandla is often the better entry point to the Warner Bros. period.

A one-of-a-kind record in Miles's catalog: a suite written for Miles by the Danish trumpeter and composer Palle Mikkelborg after Miles became the first non-classical musician given the Leonie Sonning Music Prize, in December 1984, and recorded in Copenhagen with the Danish Radio Big Band and a handful of guests. Miles solos over Mikkelborg's large-ensemble compositions, which are built around a ten-note theme derived from the letters of Miles's name translated into musical pitches.

The result is genuinely surprising. Mikkelborg's writing assimilates everything from the Gil Evans collaborations to the electric period to classical and Scandinavian folk elements, and it does so without sounding derivative. Miles plays with focused simplicity against the orchestral backdrop, and several moments, particularly the quiet extended passage "White" and the spare "Intro", reach an emotional depth that the more commercial Warner Bros. productions rarely achieved.

The record sat unissued for four years, Miles saying Columbia refused to put it out and Columbia blaming contract problems on the Danish side, until it appeared in 1989, by which point Miles had been recording for Warner Bros. for three years. It feels slightly out of time, which adds to its peculiar and beautiful quality. Aura is the most underrated record of the comeback years, and also the most musically ambitious thing Miles participated in after the electric period.

Miles Davis died in September 1991 before this album was completed. It was released posthumously in 1992, assembled from sessions Miles had been recording with hip-hop producer Easy Mo Bee. The concept, Miles's trumpet over boom-bap beats and occasionally rap vocals, sounds more provocative on paper than it is in practice: Easy Mo Bee's beats are solid early-nineties hip-hop production, and Miles plays over them with the kind of spare, searching trumpet that characterized his later work.

The album's limitations are real. Only six pieces were finished when Miles died. Easy Mo Bee built High Speed Chase and Fantasy afterward around unreleased trumpet takes from the shelved 1985 Rubberband sessions, and that work is occasionally audible as a kind of flatness in the mixes. The rap vocal features, which would have been more transgressive in 1991 than they seem now, date the record in ways that the instrumental tracks don't. And without Miles to approve or revise the final sequencing, the album has a slightly provisional feel.

But the instrumental tracks are often genuinely affecting. Miles's trumpet on the title track plays over the hip-hop rhythm section the way he might have played over any rhythm section: looking for space, finding unexpected melodic angles, saying a great deal with very few notes. As an artistic statement it is incomplete; as a last glimpse of a great musician still searching for something new, it is quietly moving. Miles Davis never stopped moving forward, even at the end.