Miles Davis: The Complete In A Silent Way Sessions

For a suggestion of just how radical Miles Davis' music sounded in the late '60s, consider a quote from guitarist John McLaughlin, made following the session that would become the 1969 album In A Silent Way, and recalled by Herbie Hancock in a recent issue of Mojo: "Herbie, I can't tell, was that any good what we did I mean, what did we do I can't tell what's going on!" Neither, for the most part, could anyone else. Though Davis usually received reflexive positive reviews, In A Silent Way baffled many upon its arrival. New York Times critic Martin Williams refused to review it, except to comment, "through a faulty tape splicing, a portion of the music even gets inadvertently repeated at one point." Of course, the luxury of hindsight, along with subsequent revelations about the recording methods used by Davis and producer Teo Macero, makes it easy to scoff at the dismissal. But Williams was among the few who noticed one of the album's defining features at the time, even if he got the "faulty" bit wrong. In A Silent Way does repeat itself, not once but several times. It places bits out of sequence, creating loops and generally treating the studio and the editing bay as extensions of the composing process, much like the rock albums Davis was devouring at the time. If the sessions confused McLaughlin, he must have been even more confused by the results, which bear a startlingly inexact resemblance to the sessions themselves. Silent Way is generally treated as a transitional effort between the groove-oriented late albums of Davis' remarkable '60s quintet and the groundbreaking fusion of Bitches Brew. But the three-disc Complete In A Silent Way Sessions helps reposition the album as a full-fledged moment, however brief, in Davis' career. The title is something of a misnomer: A lack of material, rather than an abundance, helped prompt Macero's radical reworking of the sessions into the album's released form. Alongside In A Silent Way itself and an informative essay by Bob Belden, Complete includes those sessions, plus tracks from the sessions surrounding them. The material, some of it remarkable, some of it raw and unfocused, and most of it previously unissued or consigned to odds-and-ends collections released during Davis' late-'70s recording hiatus, is interesting both in itself and in its relation to Silent Way. Recorded in late 1968 and early 1969 by a lineup that, at various moments, included quintet holdovers (Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and Tony Williams) and important newcomers like McLaughlin, Dave Holland, Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul, and Jack DeJohnette, the material is moody, rhythmically challenging, and dependent far more on atmosphere than melody. In its new context, Silent sounds less like a digression than a summation of Davis' instincts, and the instincts of his sidemen, at the time. Davis was open to (some would argue dependent on) the new ideas of his younger collaborators: Corea recalls Davis opening one post-Silent session with the suggestion to play "some of that crazy shit you like." A strange and unique offering, In A Silent Way finds Davis marshalling the musical forces that threatened to overwhelm him, and exploring the place where crazy meets beautiful.