Miles Davis – In a Silent Way

In a Silent Way is my favorite Miles Davis album, possibly my favorite jazz album, and one of my favorite works of music generally. Most of Miles’ music of this era is ornery and angular, but In a Silent Way is like slipping into a warm bath. The music hardly sounds like “jazz” at all. It has elements of rock and funk, but it doesn’t really sound like those either. With its three keyboard players, ultra-minimal drums and static harmonies, the album sounds more like ambient electronic music than anything else. Two of the three “songs” were built from tape editing in postproduction, effectively making them remixes of themselves. And while the music as performed was largely improvised, the album has clear large-scale organization.

How great is this album cover? Like the music itself, it’s deceptively simple and minimal, but bottomless in its implications.

Side A

The album’s entire A side is taken up by “Shhh/Peaceful.” It started out as a tune by Joe Zawinul, but all of its composed elements were edited out, leaving only solos on an endless D7 groove.

The track is an unbroken expanse of D Mixolydian mode, at a moderately fast tempo but without any drums aside from a noisy wash on Tony Williams’ hi-hat. The hypnotically repetitive bass and soft timbres suggest quiet and restfulness, but there’s also enough dissonance (harmonic and rhythmic) to keep you alert.

The three keyboard players give the album its dense and futuristic timbre. On “Shhh/Peaceful,” Chick Corea plays the Wurlitzer in the left channel, Herbie Hancock plays the Fender Rhodes in the right channel, and Joe Zawinul plays the organ in the center. Chick plays more aggressively and uses more dissonance, while Herbie sticks closely to the groove. Joe splashes around restlessly in between them. The guitarist John McLaughlin gets most of the solo time, and he deserves it. His tone is clean and twangy, almost country-like. He plays a lot of F-sharp on the D string against the open G string, which should be extremely dissonant, but in the context of such a sustained single-chord groove, “wrong” notes are just another color. McLaughlin does lots of bluesy string bends too, and these microtonal shadings stand out clearly against the static harmony.

The most remarkable aspect of “Shhh/Peaceful” is that its opening six minutes are duplicated and appended to the end of the track. While the musical content is open-ended and unstructured, the duplication gives the track a distinct form, resembling the head-solos-head structure that’s typical in jazz. However, in this case, the “head” is edited-together soloing, and the head out is the copied-and-pasted audio of the head. This is very untypical!

Here’s a transcription of Miles’ magnificent trumpet solo, one of the best he ever recorded:

My favorite moment here is at 2:40, when Miles ends a riff with a sustained E-flat. This is the wrongest possible note to play in D Mixolydian. But not only does Miles sustain this note, he then plays it again, to make sure you really heard it. The beauty of endless modal drones is that weird ideas like this can still make sense. Listeners are firmly anchored in the overall harmonic context, and they have plenty of attentional space to make sense out of strange note choices. If Miles played such a “wrong” note over complex, fast-moving harmony, it wouldn’t have a tenth of the impact.

Update: hear Donald Byrd quote this passage at length at 13:36 on his great album Kofi.

Paul Tingen’s book Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967-1991 includes an editing chart of In a Silent Way on pages 313 and 314. His chart helped me to assemble this timeline of “Shhh/Peaceful.”

• 0:00 – The track begins with D in octaves on the organ and a broken Dsus4 chord on the guitar.
• 0:06 – tape edit – John McLaughlin’s first guitar solo begins over a crunchy dissonant chord in the keyboards, a D major triad with an added B-flat.
• 1:33 – tape edit – The groove restarts with the drums, then the bass, then the keyboards.
• 1:43 – Miles Davis’ trumpet solo begins.
• 5:15 – Miles’ solo ends. The rhythm section continues to groove.
• 5:55 – tape edit – John McLaughlin’s second solo, from a different take, with no drums.
• 6:14 – tape edit – John McLaughlin’s third solo, from yet another take.
• 9:13 – McLaughlin’s solo ends and Wayne Shorter’s soprano sax solo begins.
• 10:43 – Wayne’s solo ends and the rhythm section continues to groove until they come to a gentle stop.
• 11:56 – tape edit – A duplicate of the entire first 5:55 of the track is appended here. The final rhythm section groove continues for an extra 22 seconds past the original edit point before fading out.

So, like I said, there are three big sections here. The “head” is McLaughlin’s first solo, Miles’ solo, and the subsequent rhythm section groove. The “solos” are McLaughlin’s second and third solos, Wayne’s solo, and its subsequent rhythm section groove. The “head out” is the duplicated head, plus a little extra groove on the end. That is wild! But nowhere near as wild as the second track.

Side B

The album’s B side is labeled “In a Silent Way/It’s About That Time.” This is inaccurate; it should say “In a Silent Way/It’s About That Time/In a Silent Way,” but I guess that would look too cumbersome. “In a Silent Way” is another Joe Zawinul tune, an ambient and abstract ballad. Miles took its already-minimal harmony and stripped it down to a steady E pedal. (You can hear how Zawinul intended the tune to sound here.) All this serene abstraction ends at 4:10 with an abrupt transition into “It’s About That Time.” The key change from E to F is an attention-grabber!

Here’s a live version of “It’s About That Time” that Miles performed a year later, with a very different feel to it.

The live version is exciting, but nothing compares to the effortless groove of the studio recording. I think it’s the best part of In a Silent Way. How does it manage to be so tranquil and yet so funky, so mysterious and yet so accessible?

“It’s About That Time” consists of three grooves that repeat for unspecified lengths of time. I assume Miles was signaling for the band to switch between sections as he felt like it. My transcription draws on these excellent charts from the Free Jazz Institute. However, I hear some of the chords in groove 2 differently than they do.

Notice that the bassline in grooves 1 and 2 is a quick oscillation between scale degrees 6^ and b7^. It never touches the root like a normal funk pattern would. It sounds like a small fragment of a more conventional bassline, which might be how it originated. I put an F7#9 on top of Groove 1 just so you can hear how the bassline relates to the key.

Jazz Transcript Authority has a chart that Miles himself wrote for “Shhh/Peaceful,” and it may have been intended as a sketch of the entire album. Few of the ideas on this chart made the final cut, but check out measures 28, 29 and 30: they show a simplified version of groove 2. Joe Zawinul says he wrote all the music on the album, but in this case, maybe he means that he took Miles’ sketch and fleshed out the chords? Or maybe Miles wrote down an approximation of some chords that Joe had come up with? Miles’ trumpet solo on “Directions 1” begins with a phrase that sounds just like the top notes of groove 2, so maybe it was an idea he had already been working on? We’ll probably never know. I do believe that Joe wrote groove 3, though; it sounds like something he’d come up with.

Let’s think about what key this tune is in. The tonic is clearly F, but is it F Dorian or F Mixolydian or what? Both the “written” parts of the groove and the solos freely mix A-flat and A natural. To me, this is a clear-cut example of blues tonality, neither major nor minor, but combining elements of both.

The drums on “It’s About That Time” are exceptionally weird. Tony Williams is one of the wildest and most unpredictable drummers in jazz history, but Miles treats him like a human beat machine. On “Shhh/Peaceful,” Tony is limited to a single hi-hat playing continual sixteenth notes. He expresses himself as much as he can, but you can hear how tightly constrained he is. On “It’s About That Time,” Tony has even less freedom; Miles has him play a simple cross-stick pattern with no variation at all. There’s only one brief exception, which I describe below.

Here’s a timeline of the B side, once again drawing on Paul Tingen’s editing chart.

• 0:00 – Complete take of “In a Silent Way.”
• 4:10 – tape edit – “It’s About That Time” begins suddenly with Miles soloing on groove 1. If it feels like you’ve stumbled into the middle of something, it’s because you have. This is an excerpt of a long take from later on in the released master. At the edit point, the rhythm section is coming down off a climax and settling back into a more laid-back groove. You hear the tail end of the one passage where Tony Williams is playing freely, before he resumes the simple cross-sticking pattern that he plays everywhere else.
• 4:57 – tape edit – One of the keyboardists (I assume Joe Zawinul) plays the enigmatic chords to groove 2 unaccompanied. Tony Williams sounds uncertain as to where to come in at first, but after a few bars he settles into the cross-stick pattern.
• 5:31 – tape edit – A different take of the rhythm section playing groove 2.
• 5:42 – John McLaughlin’s guitar solo begins.
• 8:18 – McLaughlin’s solo continues as the rhythm section switches to groove 3.
• 9:09 – tape edit – Yet another take of the rhythm section playing groove 2.
• 9:30 – Wayne Shorter begins his soprano sax solo.
• 10:28 – Wayne’s solo continues as the rhythm section switches to groove 3.
• 11:37 – Wayne’s solo ends as the rhythm section transitions back to groove 1.
• 11:51 – Miles begins his trumpet solo with a brief quote of groove 2, after which he plays over groove 1.
• 12:41 – Miles’ solo continues as the rhythm section switches to groove 3.
• 13:10 – Tony Williams explodes out of the cross-stick pattern into a free rock groove centered on the ride cymbal. Was there a cue from Miles or did he just decide he was tired of his assigned pattern?
• 13:49 – Miles’ solo continues as the rhythm section switches back to groove 1.
• 13:50 – Beginning of the segment that you hear duplicated at 4:10.
• 13:53 – Tony Williams settles back into the cross-sticking pattern.
• 14:37 – End of the duplicated segment.
• 14:39 – Miles’ solo continues as the rhythm section switches back to groove 3.
• 15:14 – Miles’ solo ends. The rhythm section continues to gently decrescendo on groove 3. It sounds like they’re waiting for Miles to give them the cutoff signal, and he keeps not giving it, so they just ride out longer and longer.
• 15:38 – tape edit – Transition from the final note of groove 3 into a duplicate of the entirety of “In a Silent Way.”

Like side A, the structure of side B resembles head/solos/head form. In this case, though, the “head” is one tune, and the “solos” are a completely different tune. Like side A, the “head out” is an exact duplicate of the head. Within the “solos,” the structure is exceptionally odd. It starts with a short excerpt of a long solo from toward the end of a take, with a totally different mood from the actual beginning of any of the takes. Then there are a few more short and enigmatic spliced-together segments before the solos begin in earnest.

From Miles Beyond’s oral history of the album, producer Teo Macero talks about the editing process:

Miles would record his stuff, and then he’d just leave. He would sometimes say, ‘I like this or that,’ and then I’d say: ‘I’ll listen to it and I’ll put it together. If you like it, fine, if not, we’ll change it.’ So I was the one with the vision. Miles also had a vision, but he wasn’t really a composer, he didn’t compose in an organized way. It was happenstance. He played with these great musicians, and when they had played enough, I was able to cut out the stuff that wasn’t good, and piece something together from the rest. When we began editing In A Silent Way we had two huge stacks of 2” tape, 40-something reels in total. They were recorded over a longer period. It was one of the rare times Miles came to an editing session, because I’d told him, ‘This is a big job, you want to get your ass down here.’ So Miles said, ‘We’ll do it together.’ And we did. We cut things down to 8 ½ minutes on one LP side, and 9 ½ on the other, and then he said to me, “That’s my record.’ I said, ‘Go to hell!’ because it wasn’t enough music for an album. So I ended up creating repeats to make it longer. A lot of the stuff we cut was bullshit, and some of it is put out on this new boxed set. I raised hell at Columbia the other day and told them it was ridiculous they’re putting this bullshit out.

I like some of the material that they left out, but none of it compares to the parts they kept.

Aside from its hypnotic vibe, the main thing that In a Silent Way has going for it is its structural organization. Miles’ albums from Bitches Brew onwards are full of dazzling musicianship, but they are also mostly shapeless. When Teo Macero was forced to duplicate all those stretches of tape to fill In a Silent Way out to album length, he introduced large-scale repetition, and that gives the album a fascinatingly specific form. It’s an idea that I wish he had used with more of Miles’ albums.

If we think of In a Silent Way as a single large-scale work, it has a pretty fascinating harmonic scheme. Here’s an abstracted version of it:

That’s quite a satisfying progression in and of itself. It would be worth writing a tune around it.

The jazz world doesn’t really know what to do with In a Silent Way. Purists of the Wynton Marsalis school write off everything Miles did after he made Herbie Hancock start playing electric piano. Jazz fusion fans tend to prefer Bitches Brew, as did the record-buying public back at the end of the 1960s. Many jazz histories (including Paul Tingen) treat In a Silent Way as a warmup or sketchpad for Bitches Brew. The people who love In a Silent Way the most aren’t necessarily jazz lovers at all; they are fans of ambient music, or electronic music, or experimental music, or all of the above.

Rap and techno producers appreciate In a Silent Way too, and it’s been sampled numerous times. The most commonly used sample is groove 2. Bill Laswell did a pretty delightful remix of the whole album too.

For whatever reason, In a Silent Way has not had much impact on subsequent mainstream jazz, or even on fusion. There are a few jazz artists who have explored the possibilities of the recording studio, but for the most part, jazz albums are still documents of live performances. People do splice takes together, but they are careful to disguise the edits to create the illusion of a “real” performance. And there are some purists who refuse to do any audio editing at all. The idea of duplicating improvisation to create structure is still mostly foreign to jazz. Meanwhile, electronic dance music and hip-hop producers have picked up the idea of editing improvisation and run with it. However, they usually duplicate short cells of a few bars at most. I don’t know of anyone who’s copying and pasting five-minute segments of audio.

If I controlled the universe, “It’s About That Time” would be a jazz standard, core repertoire for students, and a constant in jam sessions. I’ve had a hard time getting my jazz friends to play it, though. It’s not enough of a “tune,” I guess. Maybe I like it because I’m more interested in the groove aspect of jazz than the song aspect. Or maybe I’m hearing Miles point to a future beyond jazz, a future that the rest of the world is still catching up with.

Update: a Twitter commenter has this poetic bit of insight.

It took me repeated listens to "get" that the numbers follow one another, but they're really like panels in a tapestry. Their simultaneity hypnotizes. You're glimpsing an individual panel as you hear each cut. But they're all also playing ALONGSIDE one another.

— Ivan Webster (@IvanWebster16) April 21, 2022