Over time, that changed some, but I wanted to do something myself for Miles. Me, being in France a lot, I saw how he was treated so much bigger over there. I thought, “I’m not sure I’m excited about that and I don’t think Miles would be excited about that.” But initially when Miles passed, I didn’t feel that the attention paid to his passing was great enough. And they asked me at the end of the exhibit run, if I would be interested in performing Tutu in its entirety. They were having this huge Miles Davis exhibit in Paris in a museum. So it’s nice that somebody maybe subconsciously picked up on that.ĭid you have any hesitation in doing a tribute or a revisited project? You know more than anyone that Miles wasn’t much for that sort of thing, looking backward. To me, it was about Miles carrying his history forward to the ’80s and to the streets of New York in that environment. It was me and Miles and all his history, how was he functioning in the modern world, which was the ’80s at that time. I really like that it was in a story about intergenerational relationships because for me that’s what Tutu was. Several years ago, I heard it in a play in San Francisco, where it was used as a motif to introduce a dramatic confrontation between Asian-American actors from two different generations. The record certainly has had legs and gets used for all sorts of things. That’s what I’m trying to do when I’m producing or writing for somebody-to find where their spirit is at and do something appropriate for them. I definitely hear the things I discovered harmonically that seemed to work well for Miles, for his vibe and spirit. I remember Miles telling me, “Hey, you’re in that period, recognize it and write as much as you can, because they come and go.” He said the same thing to Wayne way back. I can actually hear my thing because I really had started to come into my own, composition-wise especially. Can you separate out what you did or is that impossible? On Tutu, I hear your sound as much as I hear Miles, but the record was a collaboration and it involved lots of other people. All summer, Marcus Miller will perform “Tutu Revisited,” a concert of Miles Davis material, with a band drawn largely from a new generation, including Christian Scott on trumpet, Alex Han on saxophone, Louis Cato on drums, Frederico Pena on keyboards, and of course Miller on bass (and occasionally bass clarinet). And likewise that the man behind the rebirth is the man who was behind the record in the first place. In this age of tributes and revisiting of older albums, perhaps it’s no surprise that Tutu is being given a second life. Produced by bassist Marcus Miller, who had been a member of Miles’ band when he came out of retirement back in 1980, Tutu is widely recognized as one of the great contemporary jazz records of the ’80s with a powerful sound and feel that defy categorization. The richly arranged material from that album and its followup Amandla served to define Davis’ sound for the final act in a long career of growth and transformation. Miles Davis’ album Tutu, released in 1986 and named for Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, was a landmark recording for the trumpeter.
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