The Complete In a Silent Way Sessions

Miles Davis

album cover

The Milestone Before Bitches Brew . . .

In a Silent Way is among the most significant transitional works in the history of jazz, and one of the least appreciated. It is the step Miles Davis took before Bitches Brew, the album that became the urtext of jazz-rock fusion. It is the first work to pull the maverick trumpeter fully into the world beyond jazz, while drawing on all the vibe-cultivating tricks he'd developed earlier in the 1960s. By this time, Davis was well-known for anticipating sea changes in jazz. After learning his craft in bebop, he took the music in new directions with astounding frequency—first pioneering cool jazz (Birth of the Cool, 1949), then hard bop (Workin', 1956), then the modal inventions of Kind of Blue (1959), then the radical harmonies and free-jazz adventuring that defined his '60s quintet (ESP, 1965). As he moved away from strict jazz context with this project, Davis sought a fundamentally new sound—there's no old-school "swing" in its two extended tracks, but no explicit "rock," either. It is freedom and openness, the pursuit of an idea not fully hammered out and quite possibly too spacey to pin down. It sits apart from any genre classification, except for the one marked "Astoundingly creative music."

In the early 1990s, when Columbia Records began cataloging Davis's master tapes for reissue, its discoveries included the original session tapes from which Silent Way was drawn, as well as several pieces recorded at the time that were rejected. (Like Bitches Brew, it was spliced together by Davis and producer Teo Macero; one section is actually used twice.) These were released on the three-CD The Complete In a Silent Way Sessions, and they're eye-opening whether or not you know the original work. The extended jams show how ideas coalesced around short electric piano phrases or rhythmic motifs, and how Davis drew perfectly formed pearls of melody out of thin air. Of particular note is the stark "Splash" and its doppelgänger, "Splashdown," two haunting seafaring explorations kept on track by the dual electric pianos of Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock. For any other artist, these would have been key pieces; in the scheme of Silent Way, they were just more invention than one album could hold.

Genre: Jazz
Released: 2004, Sony
Key Tracks: "Shhh/ Peaceful," "It's About That Time"
Catalog Choice: Bitches Brew; Jack Johnson
Next Stop: Mahavishnu Orchestra: Birds of Fire
After That: Weather Report: I Sing the Body Electric
Book Pages: 210–211

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Comments:

#1 from Chris Del Plato, Long Valley, NJ USA - 11/15/2008 11:34

Kind of Blue being the accepted pinnacle of jazz recordings, I have a hard time not putting In A Silent Way ahead of it on my personal list. I often listen to the two back-to-back. Both have the same mood and feel to me, despite having completely different approaches (IASW being ‘electric Miles’). Shhhh…....

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