![]() ![]() ![]() The people who worked on the art work just went right to it, right to the heart of the music.” And the album cover was so sweet man it had so much mood to it. My first reactions are usually the best, so that became Tutu. I was trying to find a way to combine what I knew to be Miles’ personality and musical identity with what was happening in music at that time. “I felt like, this is new and actually sounds like Miles at the same time,” Marcus Miller comments. I hadn’t heard Miles play like that in a long time. When I got up in the morning, I immediately played it again. I remember when I left the studio in the early hours of the morning, I must have played the track 10 times on the way to the hotel. Overdubbing the nonsolo parts to the track probably cost Miles a couple of hours, and Marcus, Eric and myself spent an evening picking the best sections and putting it all together. I kept looking around to the tape machine, making sure it was recording, because it was so good. “I’ll never forget when Miles put his solo on ‘Tutu,'” LiPuma adds. It was a very exciting and charged time.” “There was that creative, magical buzz going on that you get when you know you’re really onto something, something that’s unique, and that has a really special, new sound. “It was probably the hippest time to be there,” Holzman explains. Holzman, LiPuma, and Miller all retain vivid memories of the palpable sense of magic that accompanied Tutu’s first sessions at Capitol Recordings Studios in Los Angeles in February 1986. In addition to Miles and Miller, the album featured the legendary producer Tommy LiPuma, engineer Eric Calvi, and the synthesizer programming skills of Adam Holzman and Jason Miles (the latter was not present but had programmed sounds for Miller’s demos that were used on the final version). Pioneering in 1986, much of the music retains a timeless quality today, especially the title track, which came together during the first serendipitous sessions for the album. The foil he created for Miles to cast his trumpet spell over consists of complex orchestral-sounding arrangements performed largely on synthesizers and drum machines. The cover fit the music like a glove-Marcus Miller, the main player and writer of the music on the album, had also hit the target. It exemplified many of the qualities that we have come to associate with Miles Davis, whether his personality or his music: severe, imposing, cool, mysterious, larger than life, and utterly vulnerable and beautiful, all at the same time. Many people will remember their first encounter with Irving Penn’s extraordinary cover photograph of Miles’ face when the album first appeared in 1986. This magic is a clearly recognizable part of Miles Davis’ first album for Warner Bros., Tutu. Suddenly and quite unexpectedly, without any apparent difficulty, a creation comes into being that’s so bang on target that it takes our breath away. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |