Miles Davis was not the kind of guy who would stay in one place for very long. A book about his career could be titled “The Adventures of a Musical Traveler.” Beginning with his early years with Charlie Parker, Miles moved from bebop to cool jazz, then to hard bop, and finally to modal jazz and orchestral jazz. In the late 60s, Miles began experimenting with electric bass, piano, and guitar on the albums Miles in the Sky and Filles de Kilimanjaro, in what would later be tagged as jazz fusion. Those two albums turned out to be brief stops along the highway, as there was plenty of evidence that the explorer hadn’t quite landed where he wanted to land.

In So What: The Life of Miles Davis, author John Szwed wrote about a conversation (if you could call it that) Miles had with Leonard Feather of Down Beat Magazine sometime between the releases of Miles in the Sky and Filles de Kilimanjaro, before he had conceived what would become In A Silent Way. The purpose of Feather’s visit had to do with the magazine’s “Blindfold Test,” in which Feather played jazz records for jazz notables without revealing who they were listening to, then asked them to rate them from one to five stars. This was Miles’ fourth crack at the test, but this one was a humdinger:

When Leonard Feather visited Miles in his hotel in 1968 for the last of his tests, Feather seemed shocked to find records by the Byrds, James Brown, Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin, Tony Bennett and the Fifth Dimension scattered around his room . . . Miles seemed to have lost all interest in what was then considered jazz, for his remarks about the samples he was offered were withering. Of trumpeter Freddy Hubbard: “I wouldn’t put that shit on a record.” Of a live recording by the Thad Jones and Mel Lewis Band: “It makes me feel broke and wearing a slip that doesn’t belong to me and my hair’s combed the wrong way.” Don Ellis was “just another white trumpet player,” and Al Hirt “a white uncle Tom” (“For a guy to shake his unattractive body and think somebody thinks it’s funny—it ain’t funny, it’s disgusting.”) What did excite him that day was the Fifth Dimension’s recording of Jim Webb’s “Prologue to the Magic Garden,” and he admired records by Dionne Warwick, Mel Tormé and the Electric Flag.”

Szwed, John. So What: The Life of Miles Davis. New York. Simon and Schuster, 2002. p. 275

Miles had dissed jazz musicians in earlier sessions, but combined with the discovery of contraband in the form of pop and rock albums, these attacks might have given readers the feeling that Miles had had it with jazz and was (gasp!) ready to take a big leap into those more lucrative markets.

Not on your life. Miles was just doing what he always did: exploring. “Despite his interest in pop (“rock is a white man’s word,” he proclaimed), Miles’ movement toward exploring this music was slow and cautious, his efforts less on getting pop rhythms in place and more on how to get a certain sound he was beginning to hear in it.” (ibid) We’ll never know what exactly that certain sound was, but it was probably absorbed in his brain and mixed in with the massive amount of musical knowledge he already possessed. I’m not sure what motivated Miles to wake up one day and book a recording session when he had nothing to record, but that’s exactly what he did.

“Miles seems to have gone about the organization of the recording of A Silent Way in his usual casual manner. Once again, he seemed to be delaying all final decisions until the last possible moment. The session was arranged for 18 February 1969, and Miles’s current group plus Herbie Hancock were booked for it. At this time Tony Williams was getting ready to leave Miles Davis and start his own group, Lifetime. He had heard a tape of the British guitarist, John McLaughlin, and was so impressed that he asked McLaughlin to come over to the USA to join his group. The guitarist arrived in New York early in February 1969, and after some rehearsals with Williams they had an audition at Columbia Records—which, ironically, they failed. The day after, Tony Williams took him round to Miles’s house, and though Miles had never heard the guitarist, he said, ‘We’re doing a date tomorrow. Bring your guitar.’ It was a momentous occasion for them both; for McLaughlin, because the exposure with Miles made him world-famous; and for Miles, because the guitarist was exactly the right musician for him at this time. McLaughlin had a superb harmonic sense and melodic flair, and his playing was notable for both sensitivity and power; also, he was steeped in the jazz and the rhythm and blues traditions. If the addition of McLaughlin to the ensemble was an afterthought, the recruiting of Joe Zawinul was almost an oversight. Miles telephoned him early in the morning on the actual day of the recording, and said, ‘Hey, man, I have a record date today at one o’clock. Why don’t you come over?’ Zawinul said he would come to the session. A little while later, the phone rang again, and Miles added. ‘And bring some music.’”

Carr, Ian. Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography (pp. 292-293). (Function). Kindle Edition.

Zawinul complied with the request and brought charts for one of his compositions, “In A Silent Way.” He had no idea that his creation would wind up cut into pieces in accordance with a daring new approach to making records.

It took insight of real genius to conceive A Silent Way, and an examination of the way it differs from Miles’s previous recording methods will throw much light on the way his imagination works. Miles’s recording ideas now began to mirror the way his group functioned in concerts. The concept of continuous sets that were not tied down to Western ideas of form began to emerge. In his recordings from now on, Miles wouldn’t start with the idea of set pieces; instead he would simply explore some fragmentary elements and edit them into a cohesive piece of music afterwards.

Teo Macero, who collaborated closely with Miles, described the new procedure: “The earlier things were pretty much set . . . but now there’s no ‘take one’ etc. The recording machine doesn’t stop at the sessions, they never stop, except only to make the playback. As soon as he gets in there, we start the machines rolling. Everything that’s done in the studio is recorded, so you’ve got a fantastic collection of everything done in the studio. There isn’t one thing missed. Probably, he’s the only artist in this whole world, since I’ve handled him, where everything is intact. Normally we used to make master reels, but then I stopped with the advent of three-track and four-track and so forth. We don’t do that any more; I just pull out what I want and copy what I want, and then the original goes back into the vaults untouched. So whoever doesn’t like what I did, twenty years from now they can go back and redo it.” (Carr, ibid)

The rest of the album was filled with snippets of improvisation, with Miles providing little in the way of direction. “But this was part of Davis’ pattern, moving around the studio, whispering different instructions to each player or telling them nothing.” Chick Corea explained that “Miles has an interesting way of getting creations to happen . . . When we recorded ‘In a Silent Way,’ he passed around a chart with a certain number of bars and chord symbols, and that was all. He never said a word to me. He just gave us a taste of a direction and we played the tune. I thought it was just a run-through, and so did Herbie and Joe Zawinul. But it turned out to be the finished product. He’d allow the musicians to create what they heard or felt. He’d allow it to be, and there it was” (Szwed, ibid).

That approach was kind of okay with the guys who had been working with Miles for a while, but it took a while for newbies like McLaughlin and Zawinul to make sense of instructions like “Play like you don’t know how to play” or “Forget about the bar lines” or “Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.”

Luckily, McLaughlin proved to be a quick learner, and soon began to appreciate the value of Miles’ approach: “Miles always spoke very cryptically, but at the same time you knew what he was saying was really it . . . He plays, and you just know, and that’s what he likes. He makes you creative. He puts your creativity on the line. He’ll make you do something that’s you, but also in tune with what he wants. That’s hard, but it’s an incredible challenge that everyone should have because it makes you aware of areas you can go that you wouldn’t normally get into. (Carr, ibid) Dave Holland had been with Miles for years and likely served as translator for the newbies: “What he means is . . . he’s saying, ‘Don’t play what’s there. Play what’s not there,’. . . He’s saying, ‘Don’t play what your fingers fall into. Don’t play what you would play on an E minor 7th. Don’t play that. Play something else. Don’t play what you go for. Play the next thing.’ He was always trying to put you in a new space where you weren’t approaching the music from the same point of view all the time, or from a preconceived point of view. Usually, he would say those things just to put you in that space. It was almost like a haiku thing—or a Zen thing where the master says a couple of words and the student gets enlightened.” (Carr, ibid)

After a second session a couple of days later, Teo and Miles spent a whole lot of time in the studio cutting and splicing tape to create compositions that adhered to sonata form with exposition, development, and recapitulation. Teo was so excited about the work that he called critic Ralph J. Gleason and told him that they were onto “something totally new, something even the musicians couldn’t hear in the studio: the music was producing overtones that couldn’t be heard until it was on tape.” He went on to claim that “It was pure intuitive music (musique intuitive) that German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was using at the same time to describe the higher consciousness or channeling of ‘cosmic spirit’ he aimed for in music such as Aus Den sieben Tagen—music he was producing in Europe without a score” (Szwed, ibid).

If you’ve never listened to In a Silent Way, I suggest you follow John Lodge’s advice and approach it with “the eyes of a child” (or, in this case, the ears). Turn off the analytical part of the brain and forget about musical notation in the form of sheet music or full scores. While you’re at it, shut down the parts of your brain that handle classification and definition, especially when it comes to genres. Most of the pleasure (for me, anyway) is listening to how the musicians created something out of close to nothing—and that something is remarkably beautiful.

*****

You can’t tell the players without a scorecard, so here goes:

• Miles Davis – trumpet
• Wayne Shorter – soprano saxophone
• John McLaughlin – electric guitar
• Chick Corea – Fender Rhodes
• Herbie Hancock – Fender Rhodes
• Joe Zawinul – Fender Rhodes, organ
• Dave Holland – double bass
• Tony Williams – drums (John Szwed claims that Joe Chambers substituted for Tony Williams in the second session, but he is not listed in the credits.)
• Teo Macero – producer

Unfortunately, I was unable to find any reliable sources that could confirm who is playing the Fender Rhodes at any given moment. I find that enormously frustrating because the Rhodes is omnipresent in both compositions, supplying rhythmic support, counterpoints, and occasional solos while imbuing the sound with touches of magic and mystery. What I can say without a doubt is that Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock and Joe Zawinul were all masters of the instrument and superb collaborators.

In A Silent Way consists of two compositions, one per side, with each piece structured into three parts during the editing process . . . a Goldilocks experience indeed:

When the session was over, Miles and Teo had about two hours of music, which Macero cut down to eighty minutes, forty minutes per album side. At that point Miles joined him in the editing room and they cut each side down to about nine minutes. Then, Teo recalled Miles saying, ‘This is an album.” But Macero knew that this was only half or less of the normal playing time on an album side. They ultimately solved the problem of duration by repeating certain sections on each side of the album, and although this may have begun as a makeshift attempt to lengthen the music, it ended as an artistic triumph.

Carr, Ian. Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography (p. 294). (Function). Kindle Edition.

The “artistic triumph” Carr refers to is the application of the sonata form mentioned above. All very well and good, but as we go through each piece and its separate sections, we will learn that the challenges facing the editing team went far beyond too much, too little, and just right.

“Shhh”/”Peaceful” (Davis)

“Shhh” – 6:14: The piece opens with Zawinul replicating a chord on the organ that sounds like the introduction to a silent film featuring a damsel in distress. McLaughlin enters with a two-note arpeggio, then the music takes a sudden shift where Tony Williams establishes the rhythm with a seriously cool hi-hat shuffle, with McLaughlin playing a few bends in concert with a Fender Rhodes. As the music proceeds and the other musicians drop by, you might think, “Oh, this is a jam session.” Then you remember all that stuff about splicing and dicing and wonder if it’s really a jam session or just something concocted by the Macero-Davis team.

Congratulations! You have just defined the most important challenge associated with cut-and-paste compositions: creating a sense of authenticity.

This opening passage is obviously intended to come across as a warm-up, and the editors nailed it. When I lived in Nice, I frequented the jazz clubs, and sometimes I was invited to sit in with the band on the 88’s. Two things have to happen when a newbie enters the fray: the drummer and bassist have to establish a steady beat, and the other musicians have to feel each other out (not sexually) to create open lines of communication. My initial contributions were modest at best, as I focused on what the other musicians were laying down.

That is exactly what happens after the intro, a mini-segment where the musicians are trying to find their footing. The newbie in this case is McLaughlin, whose guitar licks are tentative and uncertain during this phase. The pianists who knew Miles express more confidence, tossing in a few ideas and waiting for the response. Tony Williams is the key to this mini-passage, with his confident, steady beat encouraging the instrumentalists to keep on exploring. Teo and Miles had plenty of McLaughlin patches to choose from, and selecting one of his weaker efforts lent authenticity to the “jam session” milieu.

After a brief pause in the action, Tony kicks back into high gear, Dave Holland enters on double bass, and a cascade of beautiful notes from the Rhodes leads to an extended solo by the main man. Miles’ approach is quite diverse, ranging from cool to hot with hints of the mournful sounds of “Saeta” from Sketches of Spain, all over a background of electric piano, organ and Tony’s relentless hi-hats. After Miles departs, the organ and pianos lower the volume, with McLaughlin softly plucking away in the lower left channel. After a few haunting shots by Zawinul on the organ, the segment ends with Rhodes, bass, and guitar playing a transitional passage where McLaughlin reveals growing confidence.

“Peaceful” – 5:42: In another display of brilliant editing, Teo and Miles latch onto McClaughlin’s stronger performance at the end of the previous passage and give him a shot at solo. With support from the Rhodes, the guitarist shows his stuff with a series of creative arpeggios and clipped riffs that reveal his complete command of the fretboard. Tony Williams responds to McLaughlin’s performance by pulling out of the shuffle and into a more assertive beat. McLaughlin eventually steps back to allow Wayne Shorter to take over with a marvelous soprano sax solo, in turn giving way to a piano solo backed by the now fully engaged guitarist. There are more than a few hints of the blues in this segment, contradicting Miles’ comment to Herbie Hancock: “We’re not going to play the blues anymore. Let the white folks have the blues.” (Szwed, ibid)

“Shhh” – 6:20: After a brief moment of silence, we hear the silent movie organ once again, recapitulating the opening theme. The basic structure is identical to the first passage, but played with greater intensity and a fully confident McClaughlin. Miles also sounds a bit more spirited, digging the groove and savoring every note of his solo.

“In a Silent Way”/”It’s About That Time” (Zawinul-Davis)

Some time during the first session, Joe Zawinul handed out his charts for “In a Silent Way” to the assembled musicians, and the group gave it a run-through.

Uh oh.

I’ll let John McLaughlin explain:

“It was really fancy with a lot of chords – you know, a really heavy tune. We played it and Miles didn’t like it. He wanted me to play it solo . . . Finally he said the first of his many cryptic statements to me, and that was, ‘Play it like you don’t know how to play the guitar.’ I didn’t know what he was talking about, I was nervous, anyway, shaking . . . here was this guy I’d idolized for I don’t know how many years – a lot of years . . . Anyway, so I started playing the melody and I looked at him and he was like . . . yeah, right . . . so I carried on doing it. I didn’t know they actually recorded it. That was the take. I played the melody twice, then Wayne played it, then Miles and Wayne together . . . I couldn’t believe Miles’s version . . . We played it on one chord, which is how I started it – E chord, the tune is in E – one simple, really simple chord, open strings, and he really dug it . . . He transformed it into something that was really special.”

Carr, Ian. Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography (p. 295). (Function). Kindle Edition.

Now, hold on there, pardner! I listened to Joe’s version, and I think it’s pretty special, too! Watch your language, kid!

I will admit that Zawinul’s composition is loaded with chord variations galore involving oscillation between major and minor sevenths that leads to an ambiguous resolution—far too complex for Miles’ minimalist bent. Miles didn’t want pre-fab chords to carry the burden—he wanted the musicians to follow their instincts and create new chords and tonalities. E major served as the baseline; the musicians were free to explore that domain and beyond.

“In a Silent Way” – 4:11: Soothing, tender, gorgeous, awe-inspiring, surprising, masterful . . . shit, I could run through a hundred adjectives to describe the sheer beauty of this segment. Backed by a low drone from one of the Rhodes, McLaughlin plays gentle arpeggios in and around the melody, sticking firmly to the root chord of E major. He is soon joined by two Rhodes supplying minimalist counterpoints, also adhering to E major. Around the 1:40 mark, one of the Rhodes breaks away from the root chord to F# and continues to play notes outside the limits of E major for a bit, creating mini-chords along the way while avoiding excessive dissonance. Wayne Shorter enters at the 2:08 mark, welcomed by a lovely flurry of notes from the Rhodes. Shorter maintains the dreamy mood while restating the melody as the two Rhodes repeat the shift to F# and then continue their explorations. Shorter also drifts away from E major a few seconds before Miles enters the scene as the two Rhodes veer into unknown territory with their beautiful arpeggios. The segment ends with the sound of the drone, allowing listeners a few seconds to savor the beauty of the opening passage.

“It’s About That Time” – 11:27: At the 4:11 mark, the piece shifts to an entirely different composition, beginning with a surprising shift to cool jazz. At this point in his narrative, Ian Carr falls into the trap that most jazz critics fall into sooner or later, showing off his knowledge of technical musical terms that most of the people on the planet will classify as pure gibberish:

The drums are confined to a steady eight quavers per bar on closed hi-hat cymbal and four crotchets per bar on snare-drum rim. This creates a clear, short, percussive beat. Over this, three sections are repeated for each soloist: the first section builds up tension with broken bass and keyboard figures (cf. ‘Tout de Suite’). The bass plays three consecutive semi-quavers per bar, the third one falling on any one of the crotchets in the bar, and the keyboards play either with this figure or against it. In the next section the tension is slightly eased by the keyboards playing repeated legato descending chords in a three-bar cycle. The third section provides further release of tension with a flowing, unbroken, two-bar bass riff.

Carr, Ian. Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography (pp. 297-298). (Function). Kindle Edition.

Got all that? I get it because of my training in classical music and jazz, but I also find it off-putting, snobbish, and completely irrelevant to the interpretation. Music is meant to evoke emotion, and you could read that paragraph a hundred times without feeling a fucking thing. I try very hard to minimize the use of technical terms, and one of my proudest moments in interpreting jazz compositions can be found in my review of John Coltrane’s Giant Steps:

And then there’s “Naima.” Oh my fucking God, “Naima.” You don’t need to know dick about music theory to appreciate “Naima.”

The title of this piece tells us that it was about that time to let the musicians enter their comfort zone by letting them play honest-to-goodness jazz. Feeling that the listening audience might need a little pick-me-up, Teo and Miles decided to splice the piece in between the two renditions of “In a Silent Way,” with Miles taking solos in the opening and closing passages. They were careful not to stray too far away from the mood established in the first segment, toning things down after Miles’ first solo with an extended passage featuring a restrained performance from the Rhodes with a few light solos from McLaughlin and Shorter. During that segment, we hear two renditions of a solid bass riff from Dave Holland that hints at a breakout, but the first is a tease, and they really don’t light the fire until halfway through Miles’ second solo, when Tony Williams kicks in with cymbals and snare and Miles lets it rip. Tony eventually tones it down while Miles continues to supply the heat for another minute or so before the piece fades to Holland’s bass riff.

“In a Silent Way” – 4:14: Sticking to sonata form, the performance ends with a repetition of the first segment in all its beautiful glory: a perfect ending to a unique and compelling listening experience.

Critical reactions to In A Silent Way were both predictable and surprising. “When the record was issued, Martin Williams declined to review it in the New York Times and warned readers that ‘the editing, annotating and packaging are horrendous. Through faulty tape splicing, a portion of the music gets inadvertently repeated at one point!” The surprising review came from rock critic Lester Bangs of Rolling Stone, “Who saw it as ‘neither jazz nor rock . . . I believe there is a new music in the air, a total art that knows no boundaries or categories, a new school run by geniuses indifferent to fashion.” (Szwed). I stand in full agreement with Lester and would describe Williams’ comments as coming from a man afraid of losing his job if jazz became more daring.

Szwed also noted that William’s response “was only the first of many Luddite complaints to be leveled at Davis and Macero over the next five years,” and found himself puzzled over the accusations that Miles was trying to become a pop star. “With the pop charts then favoring Sly and the Family Stone’s ‘Everyday People,’ the Beatles’ ‘Come Together,’ the Archies’ ‘Sugar, Sugar,’ and Peter, Paul and Mary’s ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane,’ it seems bizarre that Davis was accused of attempting to cross over to pop for producing a record whose two sides each contained eighteen-plus unbroken minutes (that alone guaranteed no radio airplay) of relatively somber material, with no vocals, no guitar rave-ups, and drums that were modest by both jazz and rock standards. Yet that was the charge hung around Davis’ neck, and for the next few years, he would be rebuked for ‘selling out.'”

That is a classic response by critics afraid of a paradigm shift. It happened to Elvis, to the Beatles, to any other musical act that dared to be different and defy existing norms. Today, In a Silent Way is considered one of Miles Davis’ finest moments, and all I can say about that advance in human intelligence is “it’s about fucking time.”

Next week, we’ll celebrate Canadian ingenuity, particularly their ability to turn frozen animal poop into hockey pucks. See ya then!