Happy 55th Anniversary to Miles Davis’ In A Silent Way, originally released July 30, 1969.
From around 1915 until the late 1960s, more than 6 million Black Americans made the move northwards from the Southern states to the Midwest and Northern states of the nation. The reasons were manifold.
Firstly, the South labored under despicable Jim Crow laws that legalized racial segregation and the despicable treatment of Black Americans. Treatment that was exemplified by the cursed epidemic of lynching that terrorized the South’s Black population. Secondly, economic conditions in much of the country were dire during the Great Depression, but the effects of that were felt especially by the poorest people in the rural South (no prizes for guessing who those people were). Thirdly, came the lure of jobs and increased wages in the rapidly industrializing urban centers of the North and Midwest.
Spurred on by those dire economic conditions, vicious Jim Crow laws and the prospect of jobs in a supposedly more enlightened North undergoing rapid industrialization, the move North brought families renewed hope and aspirations that positive changes might be within their grasp.
When the blues artists who’d entertained people in the South moved northwards, they took the culture with them. The crowded blocks that greeted them in places like Chicago necessitated a change in their approach though. The acoustic instruments they’d brought with them could no longer be heard above the hullabaloo of a crowded city with even more overcrowded apartment buildings—there was only one thing for it. Amplification.
And thus was the electric blues born. Armed with the need to be heard above the city, blues artists plugged in, tuned up and blasted out a new version of the blues. Necessity had become the mother of invention. Throughout musical history, though, the change to electric instrumentation has been met with fear. Fear of change and that the magic would become diluted or lessened by the electrification process.
When Bob Dylan “went electric,” his audience was split. Some liked it and accepted it, while others rejected it more than firmly. When he played the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965, sections of the audience booed him when he played with his rock-oriented band, but things went a step further at a concert in Manchester, England when a crowd member yelled “Judas” at the star. Overdramatic? Yes, but also a good indication that audiences are very often resistant to change.
Thus was it with Miles Davis on the release of In A Silent Way in 1969. Widely considered to be the start of his “electric” period, it was yet another example of Davis changing the course of not just jazz music, but music period. As Davis himself says in his autobiography, 1968 “was full of all kinds of changes” and amongst those changes were the changes to his listening habits.
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Partly inspired by his love affair with (and later marriage to) funk artist Betty Mabry, Davis had begun to listen to James Brown, Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone. The impact of these titans of Black music was transformative to Davis’ own music. In the aforementioned autobiography, Davis labelled Hendrix and Stone as “great natural musicians” and called Stone’s work “badder than a motherfucker.” High praise, if ever there was. But having soaked up these new directions in Black music, Davis needed a band able to carry his vision forward alongside him.
Ian Carr’s essential biography of Davis states that by November of 1968, Davis was tinkering with the instrumentation of his group. His standing collaborators were Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, Dave Holland and Tony Williams, but he added in previous members Ron Carter and Herbie Hancock as he, according to Carr, became concerned with “textural matters.” But one of the first casualties of Davis’ shift to electric instrumentation was the loss of Ron Carter, who refused to shift to the electric bass.
In truth, the band was constantly changing with some players drifting in and out for live shows and recordings. So, with his group in a state of mild flux, Davis arranged a session for February 18, 1969 and invited Shorter, Corea, Hancock, Holland, Williams, Joe Zawinul and British guitarist John McLaughlin. McLaughlin had come over to the States to join Tony Williams’ band, Lifetime, before Davis extended an impromptu invite to join the group at the session, despite never having heard the Brit play.
Carr detailed the benefits to both in his biography of Davis thus: “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 rhythm and blues traditions.”
Davis had heard Joe Zawinul play electric piano with Cannonball Adderley and admired his sound greatly so, in the manner of you or I putting together a fantasy football team, he summoned the keyboardist and before long Davis was ready to record this new direction. In the early hours of February 18th, Davis called Zawinul while he slept and told him to come and record once the day broke and to bring some compositions with him. Dutifully, Zawinul brought along what would turn out to be the title track, “In A Silent Way.”
But Davis, being the genius he was, took the composition and pulled it apart until he found what he was looking for. In his autobiography, Davis recounts taking the chords out and finding the melody that had been lost “because all the chords were cluttering it up.” Davis tore up the chords and told the band to just play in and around the melody. He tells of their surprise in working that way but, confident in his band’s abilities, they emerged with what he himself called “beautiful and fresh.”
Zawinul was not so impressed by the gutting of his efforts and subsequent notions of stolen credit for the groundbreaking track, but Davis addressed that in his autobiography, acknowledging not only Zawinul’s distaste but Davis’ role in arranging the tune. As always with Davis, a man of supreme confidence and talent, he seemed less than bothered by any furor, manufactured or not.
It was also the make-up of the band that proved revolutionary. The drums and bass were fairly constrained, but the dynamic interplay between the three keyboards and the guitar was the canvas for the solos to be painted onto. And, as ever, Davis’ work seems to occupy a separate time zone from the frenetic world outside the studio. No matter what, Davis always seems to be playing with so much time and space at his disposal.
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The recording method also proved to be barrier-breaking. With long-time collaborator Teo Macero, he simply let the tape run and pieced together coherent, genre-busting pieces afterwards. As Carr describes it, “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.”
So, having stripped Zawinul’s composition back to its bare bones, he allowed the players to explore from that base and then recorded everything, only to “stitch” it all together in the cutting room.
In A Silent Way is a huge step in a new direction, paving the way for further masterpieces like Bitches Brew (1970), but it is not quite as “out there” as he would become on those releases. This is, despite its many pioneering and revolutionary acts, a foothold between his previous acoustic work and his deeper fusion work but one which exhibits his genius playing, composition and arrangement.
Davis was always looking forward, pioneering new sounds and approaches to music. He never looked back; this is exemplified by a quote from James Mtume who spoke on the Questlove Supreme podcast. There, he recalls being the recipient of Davis’ towering advice and one thing in particular that stuck with him. “Miles said, when you cross a bridge, burn it down and that way you’ll never go back.”
With In A Silent Way, Davis certainly crossed a bridge and undoubtedly burnt that motherfucker down. No retreats, no regression just relentlessly forward—a genius in constant evolution.
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