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Miles had a new girl.
Her name was Betty, and she told him all about what the
kids were listening to.
Being a singer herself, she had some connection to the
inside world of pop and soul, but mostly, she was just a lot younger than him,
and was probably instinctively more drawn to that music than Miles was.
not as if Miles was completely out of touch with popular trends, but on tour and
in the studio as frequently as he was, one could hardly blame him for receiving
information second-hand.
Betty told him all about Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, and the Fifth Dimension
(hopefully in that order), and he was keen to investigate the new sounds.
later he would brag about being able to put together a rock band that would blow
all the others away, but he approached the idiom cautiously and methodically at
Additionally, Miles was getting insider info from his drummer, Tony
Tony was younger even than Betty Mabry, and although he'd come of age
deep inside one of the most popular bands in jazz (even if jazz's popularity
wasn't what it had been ten years previous), he had his finger very much on the
pulse of hip new music.
Tony had especially enjoyed the new funk from James
Brown and the boogaloo grooves being played by Jimmy McGriff and Richard "Groove"
Holmes' bands.
Betty and Tony were playing a key role for Miles Davis in the
late 60s, even beyond their personal and performing ones.
The Complete In a Silent Way Sessions release details a six-month stretch
in 1968-69 when the various advisors in Miles' life would see their seeds sprout
into fauna so full of life and outrageous fertility that the face of his idiom
would be forever changed.
Of course, the final product of all this investigation
and experimentation has been the subject of countless essays on Miles' genius,
but it bears closer inspection to reveal that the trumpeter didn't just up and
create this music out of thin air.
He spent months in the studio rehearsing on
tape, midwifing his ideas.
In late '68, Miles was a painter using one canvas to
try and retry his masterpiece, continually repainting over areas where, though
the ideas were fresh and the colors vibrant, the concept was yet immature.
As a palette, Miles chose only the best primaries from two continents.
time, Wayne Shorter, Tony Williams, and Herbie Hancock were mainstays from his
second great quintet.
Bassist Ron Carter had become so busy with sessions in
New York that Miles had to find a replacement.
In between gigs in England, he
saw Dave Holland's band opening for Bill Evans.
Miles was immediately struck by
the young bassist, and sent word via Philly Jo Jones and his manager (Miles had
the best connections) that he wanted Dave.
Elsewhere, when it became apparent
Hancock was going to have trouble making a recording date, Williams recommended
the young Boston native Chick Corea as a replacement.
This quintet (Davis,
Shorter, Williams, Holland and Corea) produced the first tunes on this release
in September 1968.
"Mademoiselle Mabry" is a sprawling ode to both Miles' new girl and Hendrix's
"The Wind Cries Mary."
Miles had started using electric keyboards in the studio
almost exclusively by that time, and Corea's relatively conservative figures
(when they aren't directly quoting the Hendrix tune), are the dominant timbre
in this piece at first.
He hadn't picked up the Fender Rhodes piano that would
color almost every tune Miles performed thereafter, and the primitive sounds
produced here betray the band's uncertainty about where the tune (or their sound)
was going.
Davis takes the first solo, similar to his exploratory efforts on
Miles in the Sky earlier that year, over a non-groove from Williams' toms
and Holland's steady, if rather static, low-end line.
One of the reasons sets
like this are great is that you really get a feeling for the musicians' progress
during that time, and if this tune is any indication, things had only just begun
to get interesting.
"Frelon Brun" gives a much better idea of the revolutionary sounds ahead.
Williams wastes no time in hammering out a hard funk break from the kit, and
Corea had apparently already learned the importance of the repetitive chordal
vamp to this music.
Davis takes a short solo, as if testing the waters, which
is followed by Shorter's seemingly more confident strides in funky acid soul.
The music actually ends up closer to what the band played after Bitches Brew
than anything on In a Silent Way.
Two months later, Miles reconvened with the same musicians, adding Herbie Hancock
on Rhodes to form a sextet, to begin the next phase of the trip.
The band played
music closer to Miles' vision on "Two Faced": mystical, impressionistic
soundscapes courtesy of the two-keyboard attack, subtle, though insistent
drumming from Williams, and a by-then typically moaning, weary head covered by
Davis and Shorter.
The band was also not afraid of stretching the tunes out to
10, 15, or 20 minutes if it meant they'd find something useful along the way.
Miles (with the help of producer Teo Macero) had discovered tape edits from
progressive pop records of the time (Sgt. Pepper being a chief influence),
and this tune, similar to "Shhh/Peaceful" and "In a Silent Way/It's About That
Time," was constructed from several stop/start fragments.
Later the same month, Miles found yet another missing ingredient in keyboardist
(and &ber-influence on the sound of all resulting jazz-rock fusion) Joe Zawinul.
The two men had known each other for several years prior to these sessions, but
Miles could only admire the Austrian's playing from afar.
Zawinul had made great
strides in uniting jazz and soul with Julian "Cannonball" Adderley's band in the
mid-60s, even scoring a pop hit with "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy."
He also brought an
earthy sense of melody and classicism to the mix, and would ultimately become a
major architect for the sound of Miles' band.
"Splashdown," a previously unreleased piece of tense, Rhodes-led jazz-funk,
was recorded with the first three-keyboard version of the band.
Zawinul's influence wasn't really apparent until sessions from a couple of days
later, when the band played two of his compositions: "Ascent" and the subsequent
concert staple, "Directions."
The former seemingly caught the band in transition,
with its theretofore-unprecedented use of tonal clusters and rootless "comping"
from the keyboards, and an absence of any drum pattern at all, save an odd
tambourine pulse.
"Directions" was another story altogether, as the band busts
out of the peaceful into the wild.
This was the most "rock" Miles Davis had
sounded like up to that point, and the two versions of the tune on this set are
very similar to what Miles' concerts would sound like from '69 through the early
Also of note on this session is that drummer Jack DeJohnette made his first
appearance with a Miles Davis band in the studio, lending his distinct,
high-energy stomp to the proceedings.
The band went on the road for a few months after that, and returned to the studio
in February 1969.
More changes: John McLaughlin had been recruited on guitar
(another Tony Williams recommendation), and Williams had returned on drums.
This time around, Miles was looking for what he called a "groove album."
strategy was that the band would play a tune (on this session, "Shhh/Peaceful"
and "In a Silent Way"), based on charts, but were free to explore what regions
the performance yielded to them.
Afterwards, Miles and Teo would evaluate the
pieces, and form the "groove" in Miles' head from whatever was on tape.
The original, previously unreleased version of "Shhh/Peaceful" from that session
will shock most people accustomed to the legendary In a Silent Way version.
First of all, there's an exposition and melodic theme that was completely
discarded in the proper version.
Also, the famous robotic hi-hat pattern doesn't
even begin until almost five minutes in.
One of the surprises (some might even
say disappointments) of this set is the realization that this music wasn't just
the product of Miles' there were hours of sessions and rehearsals before
the band, Miles and Teo discovered what it was they were looking for.
The humble
beginnings of this tune still have much in common with straight jazz, though with
a markedly progressive bent.
The same session yielded two versions of "In a Silent Way."
The first is very
different to what ended up on the album, with a faux-bossanova beat and Holland's
light-footed bassline supporting the classic melody line.
The second version is
the version that was used on the album, with McLaughlin's heavenly solo statement
of the main theme, and Miles' delicate answer.
The band also performed "It's
About That Time" (definitely a fruitful afternoon) in what was essentially the
final version, complete with tape edits and loops compiled by Teo.
Two days later, Miles was back in the studio.
He had a couple of new pieces,
"The Ghetto Walk" and "Early Minor," neither of which ended up on In a Silent
The first tune is a hard funk almost-blues featuring Joe Chambers
laying down a slinky groove on drums, while McLaughlin, Shorter and Miles give
up equally subversive solos.
Most interesting is the middle section trip-down,
wherein the ghost of the session two days prior sneaks in with a little
atmospheric feather float.
"Early Minor" is another Zawinul original that's
indicative of the kind of hyper-impressionism he would play (with Shorter) with
Weather Report shortly after making Bitches Brew with Miles.
confusing as to just why this didn't make the cut for the original In a Silent
Way release, because it features similar cascading Rhodes figures, and very
nice, gentle pulse keeping by Chambers.
The set ends with the LP versions of "Shhh/Peaceful" and "In a Silent Way/It's
About That Time."
Miles fans didn't get to hear everything that came in between
this album and its predecessor, so the sessions documented on this collection
will make the leap from the cautious dabbling in rock textures of Miles in
the Sky and Filles de Kilimanjaro to the full-blown jazz-opera of
Bitches Brew.
These recordings seem a lot more logically arranged and
This is good and bad: while few people would doubt the genius of Miles
Davis as a player, composer and bandleader, it's evident that he was running on
blind faith more than once during that time, and that he was learning on the go
as much as his sidemen were.
Part of the mystique surrounding this album, for
me, has always been that it seemed to come out of nowhere, like a beacon of
uncanny originality and visionary foresight.
Apparently, it did have roots, and
while the music will always be some of my favorite from Miles, I can't honestly
say that seeing the blueprints for his magic translates to the same sheer joy as
did the end results.
But, it's still magic music, and it's still Miles.
worst thing you could ever say about a set like this is that it's almost too
educational, and of course, that's not really a criticism, is it?
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