Locating Tutu

Tutu (1986) was Miles Davis’ first Warner Bros. record and a significant collaboration with multi-instrumentalist and producer Marcus Miller. The recording has had a widely varied critical reception, the negative views rooted in the differences between this mid-1980s music and that associated with Davis’ recordings of earlier decades. This chapter seeks to understand the record as Davis may have done at the time: set within other popular music of the decade, constituting a synchronic mapping of meaning. The chapter establishes the dominant ways in which Tutu has been framed in relation to the music and those who created it, examines three intersecting areas of 1980s music practice which define Tutu –‘electric pop’, smooth jazz, and Marcus Miller’s own music – and it explores how Davis incorporated these musical and cultural resources into his identity as a progressive black American man and his sense of agency as a creative musician.