Album of the week: Week 2, 2018
On February 18, 1969 Miles Davis and producer Teo Macero gathered a stellar group of musicians at the CBS 30th Street Studio in New York City. The results were released as In a Silent Way on July 30, 1969. The first of Miles' 'electric' albums, the birth of fusion if you will, the album was met with quite a controversy around its release. A new direction in Miles' career and a new direction in jazz in general. The electric piano, played by Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock, are central in the sound of the album and would be essential to the further development of the whole fusion scene. Each and every player on this album would go on to become the leading stars of the jazz-fusion-genre.
The album title comes from the Joe Zawinul song of the same name that fills most of side two of the record. That said, it is a very fitting title. Miles Davis changes the direction of his sound in a most silent way. What you hear on the record wasn't necessarily played in the same order on that February-session. The record is very much the mind-child of Teo Macero and Miles Davis and is the first album where they rely heavily on editing the recorded tapes. An example being that the first six minutes of Shhh/Peaceful is looped and returns at the end of the song. The steady timekeeping of Tony Williams cymbals doesn't really turn up in the original tapes before five minutes or more. The edited pieces has become how this songs are meant to be heard. And they should be. Heard.
"This is the kind of album that gives you faith in the future of music. It is not rock and roll, but it's nothing stereotyped as jazz either. All at once, it owes almost as much to the techniques developed by rock improvisors in the last four years as to Davis' jazz background. It is part of a transcendental new music which flushes categories away and, while using musical devices from all styles and cultures, is defined mainly by its deep emotion and unaffected originality." - Lester Bangs, Rolling Stone (Nov. 15h, 1969)
One of my favourite moments in the opening track Shhh/Peaceful is when John McLaughlin finds is stride almost halfway through the song. That slow burnin' and very melodic jam sends me to that same perfect place as the cosmic plane I find in the middle of a very good Grateful Dead Dark Star-jam.
Another favourite moment is when Dave Holland comes in with that extremely funky riff in the middle of It's About That Time on side two. (A riff I've been humming and singing all week long. A riff that I'm certain that my favourites in Motorpsycho must have been inspired by when they wrote the song Funk'99 / Star Star Star). The way he just repeats it again and again until finally Tony Williams gives us something more than that steady timekeeping. Under all this Zawinul, Hancock and Corea gives the soloists Davis and McLaughlin an almost ambient soundscape to work with. We are talking some seriously cosmic music here. Get me on that flight to outer space.
Have spacesuit, will travel.
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