Send "Miles Davis " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Dvdactive |
 Often misunderstood and poorly executed tunes give Jazz a bad name. Miles Davis was a Jazz veteran of forty plus years who has created many great contemporary works and has a wide audience and varied following. When his quartet was formed in 1959 Davis implemented a new way for him and his band to play jazz. Improvising a more melodious rather than harmonic sound, and staying away from rapid chord changes helped create the dreamy atmosphere and sound that made Kind of Blue become an instant hit. This new style while changing slightly, has become the way Davis carried out his performances over the past years creating a almost trademark sound. Originally released in 1986, Tutu has been remixed and re-released, as a DVD-Audio disc.The Album Jazz gets a lot of bad press. Thoughts of clichéd image of a smoky room while some over enthusiastic musicians perform “experimental jazz” on stage a la The Fast Show (BBC comic sketch show) spring to mind (nice!) which is a stereotype I should really try to forget. The album is a melodious meander through rhythmic beats and perky trumpet solos. There are a few tracks with sprightly note changes making some of the tracks a lot faster than the smooth elevator music I was expecting when I popped this disc in my player but generally it is a relaxing affair. Miles Davis takes centre stage as expected on the trumpet and the multi talented Marcus Miller plays all other instruments except a few mentioned in the insert of the DVD. He also wrote all the tracks which seems to me that this album should be a Marcus Miller album rather than a Miles Davis album, but that must be something to do with Davis’ sheer prowess and domination of this trumpet that makes it all his own. The title track Tutu opens with drums and bass. At first it is like sitting in the middle of the drum kit which is a new DVD-Audio experience to me as a lot of the time, drums are not pronounced so forcefully from each speaker. It is not until the trumpet sashays in that you get the true perspective of the audio mix. Again as with all the discs I have listened to, the sheer quality and authenticity of the audio in general is still astounding me. This is not a new recording; it was originally done in 1986 so it has been up mixed from the original recording to 5.1 and to the high resolution format of DVD-Audio. There is no doubt that the music here is several times better than the CD would be – it is very easy to hear this, however occasionally the sound is a little muted or overly bassy in places. I cannot compare it to the original mix so I cannot say if it is as this originally, or perhaps if the higher sampling rate has made this more noticeable. It could even be a slight problem with the master recording but it is not something I want to dwell on as it really is a minor imperfection....full text |
| Progarchives |
| Ok, it is 1986, what can you expect from Miles? The unexpected, of course. I used to think that Frank Zappa was the most versatile musician that ever existed, but damn, Miles Davis is up there too, having played be-bop, hard bop, cool jazz, modal jazz, classical, jazz fusion, funk, "pop jazz", avant-garde and even hip-hop! Yeah, that's the definition of versatile, and in case you've wondered, those sub-genres of jazz are different from each other. Where does Tutu stand? Well, knowing that it's the 80's and the overall bad rating that this album has, you thought "pop jazz", didn't you? Yes, it is "pop jazz", but not because of that it's bad. This album was planned to be worked with Prince, unfortunately that didn't go well. So, what we have here are some easy-listening 80's jazzy instrumental tunes that are pleasant as most easy- listening music (easy-listening in the truest sense). There's really no highlight or special feature in this kind of music. The whole album is driven by drum-machines, yeah those that Collins & Co. also used in the 80's and were also flacked because of that. I can handle them, especially for this kind of music which fits, so it's really no big issue for me. So what is the issue? It's just that it sounds uninspired and the tracks don't seem to differentiate much from each other, and that's something serious, there's not something that you can say: "Yeah, that's Miles alright". Still, it doesn't sound like crap; Miles offers nice melodies, the keyboards are mellow and give the 80's vibe that I like and there's even some cool slap bass going on that me reminds of the music featured in Seinfeld, but all these elements were surely the norm back in the 80's for this type of smooth jazz, so it's not something new....full text |
| Guardian. |
| Marcus Miller's Tutu Revisited (reviewed last week) is an unmistakably funky, live-band tribute to 1986's Tutu album. This package contains the original, studio-concocted Miles Davis set that Miller mostly composed. There's also a previously unreleased gig from that year's Nice Jazz festival, delivered by a powerful octet including the late Bob Berg on tenor sax. As liner-note writer Ashley Kahn points out, I made an about-turn over this music in the 80s, from first doubting it as bland funk to reconsidering it as late-flowering Miles, creativity galvanised by Miller's input. But more importantly, Kahn's fine essay offers insights into Miller's assessment that producing finished studio tracks for Miles to blow on didn't work: you had to leave them as rougher sonic sketches and let his improvising bring them to life. The original Tutu is essential for admirers of the trumpeter's late work who don't already own it, but the live show includes some anonymous non-Tutu material and too much down-the-line rock-blues guitar from Robben Ford, and despite robust tenor-blowing from Berg and an affecting (and startlingly early-jazzy) trumpet solo on New Blues, this isn't the kind of live Miles show that makes you wish you'd been there – unlike much of the music on his 1973-91 Montreux festival box set....full text |
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