It was a whole decade between two of the multiple pinnacles of the late Miles Davis’ adventurous career in jazz, and they could not have sounded more dissimilar, at least on the surface. 1959’s Kind Of Blue featured what was basically the acoustic quintet the man with the horn led around that time. A notable addition is pianist Bill Evans, who actually returned to the fold specifically for this project.
Over the next ten years, Miles would release influential works such as Sketches of Spain (one of multiple collaborations with arranger Gil Evans) and Seven Steps to Heaven. During this period, too, Davis’ longtime road ensemble fractured, only to be replaced with what came to be known as his second great quintet, specifically saxophonist Wayne Shorter, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Tony Williams.
Those five appeared on over a half-dozen albums of Miles Davis during this era, including the collective finale of 1968’s Miles In The Sky, his first foray into what became known (and popular in the following decade) as fusion. In A Silent Way (released 7/30/69) was thus only a natural extension of the direction in which Davis was already headed, and he wisely enlisted like-minded additional musicians to contribute. About to join the aforementioned Williams’ Lifetime fusion endeavor, British emigre guitarist John McLaughlin subsequently became a figurehead in the field with his Mahavishnu Orchestra. It was an esteemed position alongside the groups headed by Hancock and keyboardist Chick Corea, who fronted Headhunters and Return To Forever, respectively.
The exploration of modal jazz on Kind of Blue was groundbreaking enough for its time, but, with over a half-century retrospect, hardly more so than Miles’ inclusion of novel instrumentation and a growing propensity to utilize the resources of the recording studio on In A Silent Way.
The single day’s work in February that ultimately provided the content for this mythic album was subsequently edited into a unified whole by producer Teo Macero. Equally importantly, Maceo’s collaboration with Miles on the 1969 LP also led to his use of editing and tape manipulation on Bitches Brew, a much more densely-arranged and played piece of work issued the very next year.
In A Silent Way might easily be seen as an outline for its successor. The deeply atmospheric effects of the album’s two (!) tracks–so otherworldly and entrancing as to suggest the musicians were themselves enchanted–somewhat camouflage the simplicity of their construction. “Shhh”/”Peaceful” alternates its two themes in much the same way as “It’s About That Time” with the title tune (the latter written by another significant contributor to the project, keyboardist/composer Josef Zawinul who had long played and written for Cannonball Adderley and would go on to form Weather Report with saxophonist /composer Wayne Shorter).
The result is a spacious sound rendered mesmerizing through the hypnotic repetition of melodic and rhythmic motifs. The bright, crisp notes from electric pianos played by the aforementioned keyboardists are pinpoint sources of light against a dark background similar to that on which Davis’ portrait is set on the album’s front cover.
In a graphic illustration of the premise of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts, the effect isn’t lessened much in the expansion of content that fills The Complete In a Silent Way Sessions: the three-disc box set of 2001 stands as a tangible demonstration of how a carefully condensed whole can become markedly greater than the sum of its (many) disparate parts.
As officially released, those thirty-eight-plus minutes befuddled and annoyed traditional jazz fans fifty-five years ago. But on the other hand, the music was wholeheartedly embraced by rock audiences who had come to favor such expansive musicianship in the years leading up to its issue. And this seventeenth Miles Davis album for Columbia Records eventually found greater favor as time went by; in its wake, the visceral attack of 1971’s Jack Johnson and a magnificent combination of syncopation and drone of the next year’s On The Corner also elicited similarly mixed but progressively more positive reaction over the next ten years.
Perhaps not coincidentally, that period overlapped the irascible trumpeter/composer’s hiatus from ’75 to ’80. A comparable groundswell arose during that interval around recordings of Miles’ live performances of the period, too: see and hear Black Beauty: Live At Fillmore West and Dark Magus (from a single March ’74 concert at Carnegie Hall), as well as the two Japanese performances from the next year, released as Agharta and Pangaea.
As with the members of his bands, so too with his audiences, friendly or not: Miles Davis shared the inspiration he found in his restless search for new sources of creativity. Looking back over a half-century plus and taking into account pivotal works of Miles’ such as Birth of the Cool in the late Forties and his hard bop initiatives for Prestige Records in the next decade, it’s safe to say Davis reformatted the jazz zeitgeist more often than any other jazz musician of his generation.
And considering In A Silent Way is part of Davis’ overall discography, it seems reasonable to remove the qualifiers from that statement.
