146. Miles Davis - In A Silent Way (July 1969)

1. Shhh/Peaceful

2. In A Silent Way/ It's About That Time

****

I've never known what to make of this album. It rocks too much to be jazz. It's too ethereal to be rock. It's too nervy and dissonant to work as ambient music. Not only is this music something new and strange for 1969, it still stands outside of time almost sixty years later as one of the strangest, prettiest albums ever recorded.

I say "pretty", and that's important. Davis' career up to this point had been largely defined by prettiness, and his career from this album onwards represented a turn away from that aesthetic towards increasingly dissonant, rhythmically complex forms of music. In A Silent Way isn't so much a transitional album as a one off experiment, a sort of proof of concept that it was possible to make strange, jammy music that still held up. 

The best way to convey the oddness of this music is to deconstruct the title track. It starts with a pretty, ethereal intro, then launches into a descending electric piano melody that carries on for some time, continuing even as a funky and even danceable keyboard riff wanders up from the depths of the song and fades in an out of the mix, until rock drums kick in and the whole song starts to swing. Then there's a final, almost ambient section featuring some very tender trumpet from Davis. It's an odd track. If you go into it with any expectations about how a track should be structured, you'll probably be left baffled. There's really no other choice but to accept the music on its own terms and sit back and enjoy the ride.

I think Davis recorded several better albums before and after In A Silent Way, but this is an incredibly important and influential piece of work. I personally have always found it slightly too busy for my tastes, but I still like it a lot. It's something special. It's also worth hearing because it points to a different direction Davis might have chosen to follow, instead of the intense, loops-and-splices heavy fusion monsters he ultimately went with. Davis would return to pretty, borderline ambient music with his Duke Ellington tribute, "He Loved Him Madly", but in between shit got pretty damned weird. Of course I love a lot of Davis' 1970s output so I'm not really fussed. In the end In A Silent Way is a great cap to the first half of Davis' career, an album strange and beautiful in equal measures, the echoes of which you can still hear in music today.