Miles Davis
The Complete In a Silent Way Sessions (Columbia Legacy) It’s 1968 and you’re Miles Davis, the intense, handsome dentist’s son who thrilled New York bebop audiences while still in his early 20s. You beat heroin and became a star, despite your refusal to play the game or suffer fools. The long list of those you brought to fame includes John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock … plus there’s your hit collaborations with Gil Evans, and Kind of Blue, the best-selling jazz album in history. It’s the kind of success you coast and play Vegas with. Instead, you chose to assemble a quintet of unknown musicians practically half your age and make the most adventurous music of your career. Yet the Hancock/Shorter/Ron Carter/Tony Williams unit is splintering, your health isn’t what it was, and the country is being torn apart by violence and hatred. What do you do? You listen. You start writing again, but not the three-minute Sly Stone covers your new record company president Clive Davis wants. It’s something else — modal, liquid, mysterious. Hungarian keyboardist/ composer Joe Zawinul, keyboardist Chick Corea, British bassist Dave Holland, and guitarist John MacLaughlin, as well as holdovers Williams, Shorter, and Hancock. You get them together and play. You tell them you’re rehearsing and you roll tape. Hours of it. Much of it your record company doesn’t see fit to release until decades later on a 3-CD set. In the meantime, you release In a Silent Way, with two side-long meditations, to a loud and angry world. Complex, relaxed, soulful, intense … beautiful. Soon you’ll embrace rock and funk completely, but right now you’re in this timeless netherworld, and it’s where you want to be. You’ve lost the suits, you plug in your instruments. The purists howl. Let ’em. You know exactly what you’re doing. You always have.
This article appears in December 7 • 2001.