Released - July 1969
Genre - Jazz Fusion
Producer - Teo Macero
Selected Personnel - Miles Davis (Trumpet); Wayne Shorter (Saxophone); John McLaughlin (Guitar); Chick Corea (Keyboards); Herbie Hancock (Keyboards); Joe Zawinul (Organ); Dave Holland (Double Bass); Tony Williams (Drums)
Standout Track - In A Silent Way/It's About That Time
As I've vaguely intimated in a few other reviews on this blog, there are certain areas of music I feel I can write about with a certain degree of confidence in my opinions. Others less so. Jazz is, by and large, in the latter category. I'm certainly not totally ignorant about jazz music - a number of landmark jazz records stand as some of my favourites, and I'm basically familiar with the general evolution and development of jazz music, and its influence on rock music. But the general thrust and direction of my interests has already leaned more towards classic and art rock, and my awareness of the inner workings of jazz music are just less intricate. It means that writing a review of something like In A Silent Way poses a significant challenge - it's an album by one of the greatest ever jazz legends, but one that saw him deliberately turning away from the hallmarks and traditions of jazz music, yet neither wholly embracing the styles of psychedelic rock music either. What emerges is an album very difficult to categorise and even more difficult to actually talk about, but ultimately my approach to complicated, challenging albums like In A Silent Way comes down to the age-old defence of "I don't know much about art, but I know what I like." This is an album that might have emerged out of experimentation within a whole range of different genres and traditions, but regardless of how much you know about those traditions, it's undeniably beautiful, ambitious and hugely atmospheric.
Miles Davis is one of those artists who I've never become obsessive about, but who I enjoy and admire enough to keep track of their career milestones, from the early promise of Birth Of The Cool through the all-time classic Kind Of Blue, all the way up to the ambitious but messy jazz fusion landmark Bitches Brew in 1970. In A Silent Way is the most recent of his classic albums that I've listened to, and easily on a par with Kind Of Blue, albeit an entirely different kind of record. On that earlier album, Davis had taken a pioneering attitude to jazz music, stripping it of its reliance on rhythm, melody or virtuoso solos, creating a new style of jazz that was more atmospheric and more able to play with the space it occupied. On In A Silent Way, ten years later, he takes that same attitude to its logical extreme, but this time incoporating psychedelic rock elements and ultimately combining them to create what is almost a proto-ambient record. In the ten years since Kind Of Blue, Davis had gradually been incorporating more rock elements into his band, with the addition of the likes of Joe Zawinul on organ alongside the more long-standing members and traditional instrumentalists like Wayne Shorter on saxophone and Herbie Hancock on piano. The most recent addition to the lineup prior to the recording of In A Silent Way was guitarist John McLaughlin, who Davis invited to join the sessions literally the day before after meeting him and being hugely impressed by his playing.
The addition of electric guitar to Davis's pallette of instruments was of course sacrilegious to more traditionalist jazz enthusiasts, and the extent to which he would continue to radicalise his sound on Bitches Brew the following year would presumably only alienate them further. I've never been a huge fan of Bitches Brew - in its attempt to match some of the rhythmic structures of psychedelic rock to the improvisational traditions of cool jazz, I feel it ends up being a collection of over-long, meandering pieces that struggle to find much of a melody or a memorable hook, going more for assault-on-the-senses overload than for anything genuinely musically compelling. In A Silent Way, while it still has the same experimental spirit of trying to marry disparate styles and instruments together, is infinitely superior in its dedication to being something all its own, never relentlessly jamming in search of a tune but always content to just explore the space around it. It might be equally tuneless and formless, but the fact that it gives itself time and space rather than forcing itself into song-structures makes it infinitely more enjoyable.
Producer Teo Macero used the classical structural methods of piecing together sonatas, assembling lengthy, formless pieces into an ABA structure so that they achieve a kind of progression and resolution. In both of them, Davis's trumpet drifts in and out, never the strident, fiery blasts of Bitches Brew but always soft and contemplative, while the organ and electric keyboards played by the likes of Hancock and Chick Corea create a constant, shimmering soundscape throughout both the album's lengthy tracks. McLaughlin, Shorter and Zawinul, like Davis, drift in and out as the occasional guests, McLaughlin indulging in spidery, rapid-fire guitar work, or Shorter free-flowing through similarly low-key and thoughtful solos. Drummer Tony Williams is a hugely significant presence throughout as well - his urgent, frenetic cymbal work on "Shh/Peaceful" and metronomic, insistent drum beat in the middle section of "In A Silent Way/It's About That Time" anchor the entire album and keep it moving with an urgent rhythm that might otherwise abandon it in its more loose, atmospheric moments.
The only moments where Williams' drumming stops, thanks to its constant insistence elsewhere, feel truly breath-taking as a result. The free-form section that starts and ends "In A Silent Way/It's About That Time" is perhaps the closest thing anybody had recorded to genuine ambient music prior to Brian Eno actually codifying it as a genre in the 70s. The shimmering keyboards, McLaughlin's slow, languid guitar and the occasional drifts of saxophone and trumpet feel so detached and dreamlike as to be fragments of sound floating through space, and it's easily one of the most achingly beautiful things Davis ever recorded.
Further analysis of the album's scant two tracks would both require more technical knowledge than I have, and would also largely be unnecessary - in this album, Miles Davis succeeded in creating something totally unclassifiable that drew influence magpie-like from wherever he cast his eye and ultimately creates an incredible array of moods and atmospheres and sounds unlike anything any jazz musician had before created. Jazz fans, of course, hated it, feeling Davis had abandoned the genre in response to its declining popularity, and only over the coming years would they begin to see just how radically he was trying to revitalise the genre by incorporating new elements. Rock fans were cautiously positive about In A Silent Way, however, appreciating the way a jazz musician they would previously have ignored was taking steps to imitate what they considered good, and it was In A Silent Way that opened the door for such rock fans to follow Davis on an increasingly eclectic musical journey in the future. These days, it's regarded as one of his great masterpieces, and rightly so. Ultimately, it wasn't as big a seller as the following year's Bitches Brew, but for me it will always be more profoundly beautiful, more imaginative, more coherent and more enjoyable than that slightly messy follow-up.
Track Listing:
1. Shh/Peaceful (Miles Davis)
2. In A Silent Way/It's About That Time (Joe Zawinul & Miles Davis)
