Star People recorded August 11, 1982 ~ February 3, 1983 original issue: Columbia LP FC 38657 and Columbia CD CK 38657 in April 1983 Produced by Teo Macero Single: "Star On Cicely" (album length 4:23 | 7" single length 3:43) b/w "It Gets Better" (album length 9:47 | 7” single length 3:27) drawings by Miles Davis: From Miles' autobiography: "We Want Miles was released in late summer 1982, and in the fall of 1982 I took the group into the studio to record Star People (I think these two albums were the last ones I worked on with Teo Macero). That was the session when we recorded "Come and Get It (sic)," which was now the opening number at our live performances. I also put a song on that album called "Star On Cicely," which Gil Evans arranged. The title track "Star People" is a long blues and I really think I got into the solos I play on it. "On the last tunes we did on Star People around the end of 1982 and the beginning of 1983, we brought in John Scofield to play some guitar tracks, and I just kept him in the band. I liked the subtleties of John Scofield's playing. My sax player Bill Evans had recommended John, just like he had Mike Stern. I felt that two guitarists with different styles would create a tension that would be good for the music. I also felt that if Mike listened to John, he might learn something about understatement. "Throughout this period Cicely and I were living at 315 West 70th Street while my house on West 77th was being gutted; we lived there until we moved out to California, to Malibu, where she had her place on the beach. I spent a lot of money fixing up my place on 77th Street so that it could be like Cicely wanted. But really, I think that Cicely was behind having the house gutted so that she could make a fresh start there, without having to think about all the other women who had been there before her. Having my house gutted like that really f***ed me up for a while. "At least the music we were playing really turned me on. The guys in the band played so well and they were great to be around. The only problems I had with them was that they were reading the critics, who were saying the music we were playing wasn't happening. They were young musicians, trying to make their reputations and they thought they were playing with someone that everyone would love. They expected the critics to say everything we played was great. But the critics didn't, and that disturbed them. I had to hip them to how critics felt about me - at least some of them. I told them the so-called critics had done the same thing to Bird when he first started playing that great music he was playing, and that they had also criticized Trane and Philly Joe when they were in my band. I hadn't listened to them then and I wasn't about to listen to them now. After this, me and the guys in my band got closer than ever, and they stopped paying attention to the critics." Miles & Cicely, Schiphol airport, Amsterdam, April 27, 1982 From Miles’ own website: "Tom Barney temporarily replaced Marcus Miller, and John Scofield was called in to assist Mike Stern. A simple bass riff conveys the jam session spirit of “Come Get It.” But the two guitarists (and the discrete presence of Gil Evans in the recording booth) directed the music toward the angular and virtuoso melodic abstraction of chromatic funk. Gil Evans often took the melodic lines—developed but not reduced to the coupletrefrain schemas of pop—from the sessions’ solos, listening to them again in the evening, and choosing excerpts to transcribe for the guitar and saxophone. Thus, “Star On Cicely” was borrowed from Mike Stern, and “Speak” and “It Gets Better” from John Scofield. This last one is not far from Miles’ return to the blues in his repertoire, as his part in “It Gets Better” shows. This is the last time Teo Macero was producer, and the first time Miles’ drawings were used for the cover of the album." Miles in 1982 From The Last Miles by George Cole: "Star People set the musical direction Miles would take for almost the rest of the decade, mixing funk tunes with the blues. In fact, the opening two tracks of Star People were the template for most of Miles' concerts in the 1980's, which almost invariably began with a heavy funk workout before segueing into a blues number. The addition of John Scofield to the band also takes the music to a new level and clearly invigorated Miles. "There is much to enjoy on Star People. But the album suffers from two major problems. The first is Miles's and Macero's use of studio technology to "enhance" the sound, particularly on [Al] Foster's drumming. It would have been better to have let the instruments speak for themselves. But a bigger issue is the editing. Macero had time and time again shown himself to be a superb producer and editor whose post-production work was often an inherent part of the compositional process. On The Man With The Horn, Macero had managed to construct tunes out of what effectively were studio jams. On We Want Miles, his editing tightened up the music considerably. But on Star People, some of the edits are crude and the title track should have been trimmed back considerably. "The highly chromatic nature of the music and the high degree of abstraction can be off-putting on initial hearing. But it is an album that really does get better the more you play it. Many had hoped that Miles would build on the foundations laid by Star People, and while the album dictated much of his future musical direction, it also marked the end of a creative process that Miles had used for years." Miles in Dallas, Texas, February 1983 (PC David Breskin)
As I have done with every regular album in this thread I just listened to it on Spotify. I must say I quite like this era. Sometimes I’m in the mood for that polished 80’s sound with great separation. Great playing as well. I won’t rank it as high as the best from the 50’s and 60’s but I think I might listen to it more than some of those 70’s double albums.
I'd put Star People about on par with The Man With The Horn; Miles does sound a bit more confident and less tentative in his playing on Star People but for me these records still pale in comparison to his 70's work.
Star People I think would be at least a notch over The Man With The Horn because it has John Scofield. I haven't given either a close listen recently though.
I'm with you. Besides Scofield's blistering guitar (which is a large part of the attraction here, for me personally), Miles has his chops back, and both in terms of material and flow it's a more cohesive album than TMWTH.
For me Star People is a puzzle. Miles has his chops back & he's surrounded by great musicians. And yet .............. it just doesn't do anything for me. It's interesting that Sony have issued most of Miles's electric albums on SACD &/or Blu-Spec &/or Blu-Spec CD2. However Star People has been ignored by Sony so perhaps they think the same as I do?
Agree with the posters above who have positive things to say about John Scofield. Miles had some terrific guitarists in his studio and live bands, and for my money, the top three in terms fitting in so well with Miles's musical vision at the time are: John McLaughlin, Pete Cosey and Scofield. I love so many things about Star People: the playing of Scofield and Stern; the amazing bass lines Marcus Miller plays on "Come Get It"; the fact that it was the last time Miles worked with Gil Evans and Teo Macero (I know the credits on "That's Right" on Decoy, credit Evans, but that was Miles and the song's true arranger Robert Irving III acknowledging Evans' contribution over the years). It's also great to have Marcus Miller and Tom Barney on the same album. According to Mino Cinelu, they recorded tons of stuff for this album, and I have heard rumors of a slow blues number played by Stern, plus a duet featuring Miles on keyboards and trombonist J.J. Johnson, also being recorded during these sessions.
I found a NM cut out of Star People at my local shop recently. Good timing for this thread. To me, it sounds almost like On the Corner, the lite version. Not a bad thing, and in fact quite enjoyable. Perhaps the post-retirement album closest to his pre-retirement output, in my opinion, though we shall see as this thread progresses and I get more familiar with this period.
The last time I was in my local record shop other than a $70 copy of Live Evil, every other Miles LP they had was one of his 80s' records. And multiple copies of a few of 'em, at that.
You have to remember though that the 80s was Miles commercial if not artistic zenith. Especially starting with Arrest he was virtually a pop star in terms of visibility.
It's been a few months since you asked, but I just want to add that I think it's especially true of Miles that your appreciation of his music really deepens, the more you dig into the connective tissue between the canonical statements. So, Bitches Brew comes into sharper focus once you've also heard In a Silent Way, Jack Johnson, and Live-Evil (or, better yet, The Cellar Door Sessions). And then all of that makes better sense once you've checked out Filles de Kilimanjaro and the 1969 concerts in The Bootleg Series Vol. 2, as well as It's About That Time (3/7/70 Fillmore East), Black Beauty (April 1970 Fillmore West), Bitches Brew Live (Newport 1969 and The Isle of Wight 1970) and the complete June 1970 Fillmore East in the Bootleg Series Vol. 3. This works whether you want to continue forward through Agharta/Pangaea and beyond, or backwards with the Second Quintet through the '50s and beyond to his start with Bird. You certainly can't go wrong by starting with the famed classics like Milestones, Kind of Blue, Sketches of Spain, E.S.P., and Miles Smiles. (The "At Newport" Bootleg Series Vol. 4 is a handy primer on his development on stage from 1955-75, too.) But I promise that you'll be rewarded by investigating all of the so-called "transitional" stuff in between, as well. Sometimes he did something that doesn't make sense at first, but then you hear some of this or that from before and after, you come back to it, let it wash over you, and suddenly, maybe a few years later, it just hits you. "Eureka!" Listening to Miles can be a lifelong pursuit. Somehow, probably because he was always growing, it always stays fresh.
[QUOTE=" "Eureka!" Listening to Miles can be a lifelong pursuit. Somehow, probably because he was always growing, it always stays fresh.[/QUOTE] So agree with this. The lifelong pursuit. Stuff I didn't like when I was younger comes more into focus later.
So agree with this. The lifelong pursuit. Stuff I didn't like when I was younger comes more into focus later.[/QUOTE] Yep...for me it was a case of, "How the hell did I go fourty years without discovering this music?" I needed to expand my musical horizons much earlier on, methinks...as my wife put it, "What, it took you thirty years to finally get bored with Dinosaur Rock?"
What about the weird sound of the Star People album? It sounds like it was recorded in an echoey warehouse or something. Al Foster's thrashing cymbal technique is pretty wild also.
These last few pages led me to Man With The Horn, which I had been casually ignoring in the bargain bins for the last 20 years - good stuff if you skip the TT and "Shout". (Got the Master Sound CD.) Like a cleaner version of the mid-70s glory days. Looks like I'll be hunting now for Star People, which I don't think I've noticed so often in the racks. Is there a "best" CD version, or is there only the one? (Not interested in vinyl.)
The production of Star People always kind of bothered me. It was the last album Teo worked on, so maybe Miles wasn't too happy either. I dunno why they created that annoying trash can cymbal sound on It Gets Better, which is otherwise a fantastic tune. Maybe someone more versed in production and mixing techniques can theorize why the album sounds so odd overall.
There's a Mastersound version which is louder than the original. I prefer the original but even that doesn't do that much for me.
IIRC, the sleeve notes mention that Teo Macero used a new type of processing on Al Foster's drums (one critic said Foster's cymbals sounded like saucepan lids...). That said, if anyone is responsible for the sound quality of Star People it's Miles - he wouldn't have let it be released in that form if he wasn't happy with it. At the time, Miles was getting into studio technology, like click tracks, and he liked the new polyphonic synthesizers. I can only guess that he wanted to experiment with Foster's drum sound.
??? There was a US CD edition of this??? That's gotta be a mistake, no? The 35DP edition from Japan came out later in the year (I didn't see one in the import racks here before 1984) and then the British CBS edition (which was just the Japanese disc with a different label on it) came out even later (maybe even as late as 1985?) The original release was surely only offered on LP and cassette at the time.
In Gary Burton's reissue notes to Bob Brookmeyer & Friends, he recalls that Stan Getz had agreed to play as a favor to his old friend Bob. But, having the brightest star in jazz in the studio, Teo (probably at the urging of his bosses) had visions of making a record that would sell boatloads. So, the first day, he brought in Tony Bennett, who sang "Day Dream," and they recorded one Brookmeyer original, but that was it. Tensions were so high, Getz called his sideman Burton to join him the next day for support--and possibly to change the dynamic. Without Burton, Getz didn't want the gig, anymore. Burton came in to find a running argument between Teo and Brookmeyer about the material. Brookmeyer had a briefcase full of original compositions, Teo wanted some standards. After an afternoon break, Teo came back from a music store with a stack of sheet music, which set off Brookmeyer again. In Burton's eyes, that move was "like a glove across the cheek." In the end, they recorded four of Brookmeyer's tunes; three made the original LP. Five of six standards they recorded that day went on the album. The Tony Bennett track didn't come out until the CD release. The ongoing arguments gave Burton a chance to hang out with Elvin Jones in the studio, and the musicians bonded to make an album that Burton calls, "one of my favorites for many years. Unexpectedly, what struck me [at first hearing] was the loose, comfortable atmosphere of the music, it sounds like a bunch of friends just having a great time together." I like it, too. And in fairness to Teo, if you had Stan Getz in your studio for one shot in 1964, wouldn't you also like to hear him play "Misty," "Skylark," "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face," "Sometime Ago," and some Gershwin? The results bear him out.
The art department took that route for this early '70s compilation: It's a simple, sort of obvious idea, but the image has stayed with me since I saw it in the college radio station library, almost 30 years ago.
If I recall Burton's book correctly his comments there were a bit different, writing that he and Hancock would laugh about the "friends" title later because of the amount of tension at the session. Good record, though. With those players, how could it not be?
