Music from Siesta
In 1986, Miles Davis shocked the music industry twice — first by leaving his label of 30 years, Columbia, for Warner Bros., and then with Tutu, a cybernetic, digitally flash-frozen album of collaborations with bassist/producer Marcus Miller that earned him a Grammy. One year later, the pair went back into the studio to score the arty drama Siesta, and once again the results were modern and brilliant, but this time they also looked back decades, to the trumpeter’s greatest orchestral album, 1960’s Sketches of Spain. The movie takes place in Madrid, but also in the injured mind of its protagonist, whose memories are sketchy and incomplete, and Miller composed tracks that mirror the film, incorporating elements of flamenco (with guitar by John Scofield and Earl Klugh), but also using synth textures to create a haunted, inhuman feel. Davis’s playing is tender and heartfelt, some of his best of the ’80s. Miller plays bass clarinet, duetting with the trumpet as church bells and apocalyptic percussion rumbles echo behind them. At times, the music rises to almost industrial levels of crunch and Gothic power, but there’s a solitude at its heart that marks it as unmistakably Miles.