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. It's 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. Years 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 first. Additionally, Miles was getting insider info from his drummer, Tony Williams. 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. At the 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 über-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. However, 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 70s. 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." The 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' muse; 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 Way. 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. It's also 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 planned. 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. The 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?
