‘When I’m playing, I’m never through. It’s unfinished,” Miles Davis said in a revealing interview with the NME in 1985. “I like to find a place to leave for someone else to finish it. That’s where the high comes in.” As it undoubtedly would have when John Coltrane was reacting to the teasing daydreams curling from Davis’s trumpet-bell. But he never got to find that place with 1985’s pop-oriented Rubberband sessions, ditched after three months’ work by his new record label, Warner Bros. The tapes have finally been reinvented – 28 years after his death – by Davis’s drummer nephew Vince Wilburn Jr, and original producers Randy Hall and Attala Zane Giles. Vocal celebs Lalah Hathaway and Ledisi take the parts originally intended for Chaka Khan and Al Jarreau.
As so often in this late period, Davis’s playing is beguiling in bursts. Rubberband of Life is a remake of the original title track – also present, with its scalding Mike Stern guitar break – and though the new mix’s promisingly D’Angelo-like vibe could valuably have been extended on the album, its polyphonic soul-vocal choruses are ethereally compelling as the delicate muted trumpet line picks its way through. Davis is quick and fluent on the Prince/James Brownish Give It Up, Lalah Hathaway is powerful and precise on the neo-soulful So Emotional, and the ballad See I See – the standout, with its zigzagging runs and suspenseful pacing – glows with the pure-Miles light that this cut-and-paste job needs about twice as much of to really justify his name as its author. Rubberband is better than 1991’s Doo-Bop, the star’s final attempt at pop glamour (not least because it doesn’t include any clunky adulatory raps), but as a career-twilight curio it’s nothing like as interesting as its fusion-powered 1985 predecessor You’re Under Arrest, nor a memorable successor such as Marcus Miller’s thoughtful, compositionally integrated production of Amandla at the end of that decade.
Also out this month
Game-changing German label ECM celebrates its 50th anniversary with live recordings from two fine Miles Davis-inspired trumpeters – Enrico Rava’s classy collaboration with American saxophonist Joe Lovano, titled Roma, and the ever-surprising Tom Harrell with former Bad Plus pianist Ethan Iverson on Common Practice. Imaginative Canadian saxist/flautist Jane Bunnett’s Maqueque collective unwrap their impishly vivacious and fast-moving variations on Afro-Cuban postbop, jazzy soul vocals, and percussion uproar with On Firm Ground/Tierra Firme (Linus Entertainment).
