The extra Miles
A false start from the Dark Magus’s final decade, examined
Miles Davis ★★★ Rubberband RHINO. CD/DL/LP
THE FINE print first appeared on the cover of 1968’s Filles de Kilimanjaro: “Directions in Music by Miles Davis”. The point was clear. The music pressed onto Davis’s records was bigger than jazz – and the trumpeter was the sole author of the changes.
Ironically, by the fall of 1985, Davis – then 59 and five years into a comeback from illness and seclusion – was overwhelmed by choice. Newly signed to Warner Bros, he was keen to extend the fusion of commercial soul and electronic pop on 1984’s Decoy and ’85’s You’re Under Arrest. A plan to collaborate with Prince came to nothing, so Davis tried a twopronged approach for his next album: recording in New York with his road band; then in Los Angeles, cutting synthdominated, heavily overdubbed tracks with the pop-R&B producers Randy Hall and Attala Zane Giles. But that work – provisionally titled Rubberband after one of the LA tunes – was abandoned as Davis turned to bassist Marcus Miller for the sharper, techno-funk contours on 1986’s Tutu.
Drawn from the original 1985-86 sessions with substantial renovations, including newly recorded vocals by Ledisi and Lalah Hathaway (the late Donny’s daughter), this Rubberband is not quite buried treasure and falls short of revelation. Some tracks have crept out on previous archival-Davis packages, in different edits, while Maze, the touring-band jam from New York, and The Wrinkle, a grooving vehicle for Davis’s attacks of gun-burst trumpet, were live staples in his final touring years. One odd choice made here: Maze, issued as a nine-minute workout on a 2011 box set, is shaved to less than half that. There was plenty of room for the rest.
But even with the date-stamp effect of the drum programming and over-bright soft-punch electronics, Rubberband has much of the best reason to revisit this false start in the Dark Magus’s last decade: his soloing. Too often, Hall – who first worked with Davis on 1981’s The Man With The Horn – and Giles, a veteran of records for Con Funk Shun and The Emotions, seem to use their star as mere decor, lining the tropical confection Paradise and embedded behind Hall’s own vocal turn in I Love What We Make Together. But when Davis finds the air, he owns it: the high, sustained peals in the former song’s bridge; his concentrated reverie across the abstract, instrumental melancholy of See I See.
Davis wisely shelved this music at the time. On Tutu, Miller brought focus and tension to the trumpeter’s swing to the mainstream, while Rubberband sounds too much like jazz’s great disrupter chasing black-radio approval via The Human League. But Davis’s fiercely articulated bleating over the high-speed funk of Give It Up and the long spaces in The Wrinkle prove that he was still, even at this crossroads, certain in his voice. Rubberband is not a Great Lost Miles Davis Album. But it has a lot of great Miles Davis on it.