Miles Davis’ final collaboration with Marcus Miller (begun on 1986’s Tutu and continued on the soundtrack to the justly forgotten 1987 movie Siesta) is the most organic and live band-oriented of the three. It’s also the least interesting, precisely for that reason. Tutu and Music from Siesta are electronic albums with a trumpeter up front, and they sound like nothing else in the Davis catalog — ice cold, almost inhuman. Amandla is culled from actual studio sessions, with a broad range of guests. Some of the supporting cast (alto saxophonist Kenny Garrett, guitarist Jean-Paul Bourelly, bassist Foley McCreary) do interesting work, and Davis engages with them energetically, but the tunes aren’t there, and the album never manages to set and sustain a cohesive mood the way his other releases always did.

The most rewarding parts of Amandla are the rhythms; Davis experiments with zouk, funk, and go-go beats. The music is very much like what his band sounded like live at the time — popping bass, wire-thin guitar licks almost in the background, Davis and Garrett weaving lines around each other, keyboards doing their best to overwhelm every other sound. On the other hand, the last track on the album, “Mr. Pastorius,” is this close to being a return to old-school jazz — it’s a slow, swinging ballad, featuring Al Foster on drums, and one of the synths is set to sound as much like a heavily reverbed piano as possible. It’s a soft, heartfelt way to end an album that’s otherwise preoccupied with ’80s pop-funk.