THIS IS IT
SOME 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
