88 • UNCUT • OCTOBER 2019

THIS

IS IT

Magus mirabilis:

Miles Davis in

Ita ly, 1987

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Photo by LUCIANO VITI

S

OME time in early 1985, Miles Davis and his

wife Cicely Tyson hosted a dinner party at their

Malibu home. Among the exclusive group of

celebrity friends – Sammy Davis Jr, Bill Cosby,

Helen Reddy, Herb Alpert and Warner Bros boss

Tommy LiPuma – was Randy Hall, a relatively obscure R&B

producer, singer and multi-instrumentalist from Chicago.

“There we all were, having dinner,” recalls Hall, “when

Miles stands up and taps his wine glass – ding! ding! ding!

• and announces [adopts whispery growl] ‘Thank you,
  everybody. I wanna introduce you all to the producer of
  my new album.’ So I’m thinking, ‘Oh, this’ll be interesting,
  I wonder who he’s got lined up?’ Miles says: ‘This is my
  new producer, Randy Hall!’ I thought, ‘Oh my goodness,
  I’m producing a Miles Davis album!’”
  For around three months – from autumn 1985 to early 1986


• Hall worked closely with Miles Davis at Ray Parker’s Los
  Angeles studios, Ameraycan. He assembled a core band and
  collaborated on a series of new tracks with Miles. By January
  1986, accompanied by additional guest musicians and
  session vocalists, they completed work on an 11-track album,
  provisionally titled Rubberband. “Every day in that studio
  was a party,” Hall says. “It was an amazing atmosphere.”
  But the producer was shocked when, a year after starting
  work on the project, Warner Bros rejected the album. “I was

devastated,” he says. “I was also surprised. I could

understand it being canned if the music was substandard,

if Miles didn’t like it, if it didn’t have commercial appeal.

But Rubberband worked on every level.”

Other participants in the sessions were similarly baffled.

“Miles loved that album,” says Attala Zane Giles, Hall’s

co-producer on Rubberband. “His playing on it was smoking.

He’d ring us up nearly every night, while playing the tapes in

the background, saying how great it was. I simply didn’t

understand why they wanted to junk it.”

Thirty-three years on, the tapes have been exhumed from

the Warner Bros vaults, reworked and finally released. They

reveal Rubberband to be by far the most varied Miles Davis

album from this critically undervalued period; a time where

he was creating his own dense, dark, heavily synthesised

brand of jazz funk. The album includes funk, Latin and

Caribbean tracks, as well as – of all things –ballads. Davis

died in 1991, aged only 65; but Rubberband demonstrates

the manner in which he spent the last decade of his life,

forging relentlessly into the future.

“This is a musician who could have retreated into the past,

congratulating himself for his former glories, and plenty of

people would have been happy with that,” says Zane. “But

he chose to embrace the new, right to the end. Apart from

Miles and Bowie, how many guys have ever done that?”

LUCIANO VITI/GETTY IMAGES