Music / In a Silent Way

"Tony Williams and Miles Davis [...] play good music that's very much like jazz and something like rock. That's their privilege, and my pleasure."
— Robert Christgau, 1970

In a Silent Way is an album by legendary jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, recorded in a single session date at CBS 30th Street Studio in New York City on February 18, 1969, and released on July 30 of the same year through Columbia Records. Although Miles had employed electric bass, electric guitar, and electric piano on his two previous albums, 1968's Miles in the Sky and Filles de Kilimanjaro, In a Silent Way is generally regarded as the proper start of his Jazz Fusion period (or, if not the start, then its Growing the Beard moment).

While now universally recognised as a classic, In a Silent Way alienated jazz purists at the time, and not merely because it featured electric instrumentation (Record Producer Teo Macero also edited both tracks in the studio after the fact). Each of the album's two lengthy tracks actually consists of at least two performances spliced together: "Shhh" bookends "Peaceful" for the album's first track, while "In a Silent Way" (composed by pianist Joe Zawinul) bookends Davis' composition "It's About That Time" for the second. (Some of these segments were themselves constructed from multiple performances.) The album "seemed near heretical by jazz standards", as The Rolling Stone Album Guide retrospectively put it. In his book Running the Voodoo Down: The Electric Music of Miles Davis, Phil Freeman writes:

"Rock critics thought In a Silent Way sounded like rock, or at least thought Miles was nodding in their direction, and practically wet themselves with joy. Jazz critics, especially ones who didn't listen to much rock, thought it sounded like rock too, and they reacted less favorably.... It didn't swing, the solos weren't even a little bit heroic, and it had electric guitars.... But though In a Silent Way wasn't exactly jazz, it certainly wasn't rock. It was the sound of Miles Davis and Teo Macero feeling their way down an unlit hall at three in the morning. It was the soundtrack to all the whispered conversations every creative artist has, all the time, with that doubting, taunting voice that lives in the back of your head, the one asking all the unanswerable questions."

Nonetheless, it certainly received its share of rapturous acclaim at the time. Famed rock critic Lester Bangs called In a Silent Way "the kind of album that gives you faith in the future of music. It is not rock and roll, but it's nothing stereotyped as jazz either. All at once, it owes almost as much to the techniques developed by rock improvisors in the last four years as to Davis' jazz background. It is part of a transcendental new music which flushes categories away and, while using musical devices from all styles and cultures, is defined mainly by its deep emotion and unaffected originality."

In a Silent Way has also retrospectively attracted acclaim as one of Miles' finest musical accomplishments. PopMatters' Chip O'Brien writes, "It is neither jazz nor rock. It isn’t what will eventually become known as fusion, either. It is something altogether different, something universal. There is a beautiful resignation in the sounds of this album, as if Davis is willingly letting go of what has come before, of his early years with Charlie Parker, with John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley, of his early ’60s work, and is embracing the future, not only of jazz, but of music itself." Stylus Magazine's Nick Southall writes, "The fresh modes of constructing music that it presented revolutionised the jazz community, and the shifting, ethereal beauty of the actual music contained within has remained beautiful and wonderful, its echoes heard through the last 30 years, touching dance music, electronica, rock, pop, all music."

Davis' next album, the two-LP set Bitches Brew, was considerably weirder and far more dissonant — and sold considerably better. Like In a Silent Way, it was controversial at the time, but has since been Vindicated by History.

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Personnel:

• Miles Davis – trumpet
• Wayne Shorter – soprano saxophone
• John McLaughlin – electric guitar
• Chick Corea – electric piano
• Herbie Hancock – electric piano
• Joe Zawinul – electric piano, organ
• Dave Holland – double bass
• Tony Williams – drums

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Track listing:

1. "Shhh/Peaceful" (Davis) - 18:16
   1. "Shhh" (Davis) - 6:14
   2. "Peaceful" (Davis) - 5:42
   3. "Shhh" (Davis) - 6:20
2. "In a Silent Way/It's About That Time" (Zawinul/Davis) - 19:52
   1. "In a Silent Way" (Zawinul) - 4:11
   2. "It's About That Time" (Davis) - 11:27
   3. "In a Silent Way" (Zawinul) - 4:14

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Tropes:

• Bookends: Each track's opening section is repeated in its entirety at the end of the track.
• Darker and Edgier: Compared to his earlier work, it is arguably this due to its more prominent use of electric instruments. However, one of the tracks is still called "Peaceful" for a reason - overall, the album's atmosphere is quite serene, especially compared to his later fusion work.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Not for Miles' career overall, but his fusion material. This album lacks the dissonance and/or heavy guitar distortion found in much of his later fusion work (Get Up with It aside) - in fact, you could easily sleep to it. He would shed this on his very next album.
• Epic Rocking: Both tracks are at least eighteen minutes long and take up an entire album side, although each is also comprised of two compositions spliced together. "Shhh" and "It's About That Time" are respectively above six and eleven minutes in length, though.
• Face on the Cover: Miles has a rather disgruntled look on the cover - which oddly doesn't fit the album's mood at all.
• Gratuitous Panning: Well, it was The '60s, so this would be expected anyway, but it would've been pretty much mandatory regardless of the era, owing to the large number of performers - the panning is necessary to distinguish their parts. The left channel has John McLaughlin's guitar, Corea's Wurlitzer, and Shorter's soprano saxophone; the center channel has Davis' trumpet and Holland's bass; the right channel has Zawinul's Hammond, Hancock's Rhodes, and Williams' drums. The only thing that would probably be different if the album were mixed today is that the drums would be mixed in stereo.
• Lighter and Softer: Than his later fusion work, by far.
• Psychedelic Rock: In a Silent Way isn't itself an example, but the genre is a clear and acknowledged influence on it.
• Unbuilt Trope: Miles' work served as a bit of a Trope Codifier for jazz fusion, but as this was early in his fusion period (if not his first fusion work outright), it was a lot less distorted and nightmarish than much of his later work. Then again, this album is arguably more influential on the likes of Weather Report than something like Bitches Brew is (and since Weather Report's Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter both perform on this album and Bitches Brew, it really shouldn't be surprising).

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