Miles Davis- Mystery (long version), originally from the 1991 Doo-Bop album

Alternative edit of the lead track from Miles' final Doo-Bop album

recorded spring 1991
Unique Recording Studio, New York City

Miles Davis- trumpet
Easy Mo Bee- samples, drum programming
Deron Johnson- keyboards

Mystery [long version] (Miles Davis-Easy Mo Bee)

Produced by Easy Mo Bee
Original version from the album Doo-Bop (Warner Bros, 1992)

Miles Davis could hear the future. He was in his New York apartment in the heat of summer, with the windows open, listening to the sound of the music coming from radios in the street outside. He was hearing the sampled loops, turntable scratching, and drum machine beats of hip hop and he decided that his next album would include these new sounds and rhythms.

The project was going to be ambitious- a double album, with a cast of collaborators. Miles' friend, Def Jam co-founder Russell Simmons, hooked him up with Easy Mo Bee, part of the group Rappin' Is Fundamental (R.I.F.), who fused vocal harmonies with hip hop in a style they called 'doo hop', and also a producer who was working with some of the biggest names in hip hop of the era: Notorious B.I.G., 2Pac, Big Daddy Kane, Heavy D., Slick Rick, D.J. Red Alert, and The Genius (aka GZA, from Wu Tang Clan). Other contributors to the project were to be Sid Reynolds (Queen Latifah, Naughty By Nature), regular collaborator Marcus Miller, ex-Fishbone guitarist John Bigham (who had contributed to Miles' 1988 album Amandla, and who toured with the band briefly, playing electronic percussion), and mutual admirer Prince. Other possible contributors included Public Enemy's production team, The Bomb Squad (who had worked with saxophonist Branford Marsalis on a remix of P.E.'s Fight The Power in 1989), and KRS-One told me that he had a conversation with Miles about a collaboration.

In the end, time was against him. Miles and Easy completed a half dozen tracks between February and July of 1991, before Miles was taken ill and died in September. A scaled back album was completed posthumously, using the unfinished 'Rubber Band' tapes from 1985.

Jazz critics almost universally slated Doo Bop, with its mixture of hip hop and new jack swing beats, sampling, and Miles' trumpet, but the record proved popular- it sold 300,000 copies in its first year of release and won a Grammy in 1993 for Best R&B Instrumental Performance. The Davis-praising raps that appear on a couple of tracks were especially singled out as cliched- shades of the title track of The Man With The Horn. But Miles plays some surprisingly strong horn on the record and sounds genuinely energised by these fresh settings. Easy Mo Bee remembered the collaboration proudly, stating "I love Biggie, I love (2)Pac, I love a lot of the things that I've done but I hold producing Miles Davis'... last album to be the greatest thing that I've ever done."

Mystery was the lead off track from Doo-Bop, a fine start to the record with its bouncing hip hop beat, speaker shaking bassline, and catchy electric piano loop. For all the gripes from the jazz critics, Miles plays beautifully here, crafting the sort of spontaneous melodies that he could always muster, whatever the setting, in a surprisingly strong tone. Easy Mo Bee named the track because of the sustained note that runs through the beat. "That tone just held there and hovered over the track... to me it created like a mysterious vibe."

The original LP version clocked in at 3'55, while the album ended on a Mystery (Reprise) version, which used a brief piece of audience applause, segueing into a duplication of the opening half minute of the full version, followed by a hard edit to the end. However, where the full version cuts off, the Reprise has the beat kick back in, over which Miles plays some more phrases and the track fades after 1'23. "[The reprise] was my idea," says Easy Mo Bee. "I really used to like that on an album. On an Earth, Wind & Fire album... there would be a song on one side of the album and later on there would be a short version that was slightly different. I was just trying to make the album sophisticated."

I stumbled across this version by accident; listening to the album recently on a streaming service I realised that the track listed as Mystery (Reprise) was actually a hybrid of the two LP versions- the full LP version, segued into the final section from the Reprise. Why this has replaced the actual Reprise version on streaming services is something of a... well, mystery.