Miles Davis - The Complete In a Silent Way Sessions
There’s only two Miles box sets I’m not behind 120%, the early Prestige recordings (because I haven’t really heard them all yet) and the Gil Evans box (because Sketches of Spain is the only collab I really liked). I guess I’m not behind the Plugged Nickel box, but I blame that less on my aesthetics and more on my stubbornness. Most of the boxes I’ve played quite a bit, so it was something of a surprise to have the In a Silent Way box come up the top of the listening pile, as I only seem to remember playing it when I bought it and *maybe* only once since. You do begin to question your motivations when listening to mediocre music, if something this monumental is taking up shelf space.
This is generally considered a transitional period for Miles and the box set puts a frame around this theme, picking up half way through Filles de Kiliminanjaro and ending before the “Lost Quintet” tours. You gradually see electricity start to whip around, at first it’s just a crackle in Herbie’s Rhodes, later it begins to transform the music. Not only were we transitioning from jazz to rock and from acoustics to electricity, but also from live recordings to studio manipulations. It’s almost as if what you don’t feel is the bee in Miles’ bonnet, that never ending itch that made it impossible for the man to cycle in place, the itch that would lead to lineup turnover after turnover and to becoming a jazz pariah.
It’s even more amazing a change when you think of just how bloody good Miles’ late 60s quintet was, the same quintet that released ESP, Miles Smiles, Sorcerer and the like. Miles must have never heard the hoary cliche “if it ain’t broke, it don’t need fixing,” after all, there was nothing he didn’t tinker with, even on stage and in the moment. The directions of Filles got tinkered with and it wasn’t until albums like Water Babies and Circle in the Round that you got to hear some of the results, in fact there’s something of a large gap between the second Filles sessions and the recordings that ended up as In a Silent Way.
In fact in some ways, the electric era begins here. Any album like Bitches Brew or Get Up With It is something of an immersive experience - not only is one immersing oneself into the music of Miles Davis, but also into the rules of Miles Davis. Here I feel like I’m taking a long draught at the cool well that is Miles’ acoustic quintet, but that same draught is less a pale ale and more like electric kool-aid. I may recognize Tony Williams pushing the band on with his cymbalwork or hearing Herbie skronk some weird chord down, but what I experience is more like being yanked from the individual to the macrocosm. It’s something of a cliche to say you’re actually part of the music rather than a spectator, but it could be true that Miles was creating some of the earliest ambient music here, even if it’s hard to think of ambient music without the synthesizers they imply. Here the ambience exists within the spaces, it floats both within and without until sax and piano, drums and bass, trumpet and keys all become one archetype, very much like the figures in the Mati Klarwein paintings that adorned the later albums.
But that’s what timeless music does, it shifts the panorama beyond the talk of the individual musicians, the songs, the line ups into something that speaks of the paradigm and beyond it.