Miles Davis - In A Silent Way

My guess is: he didn't bother.

And in the Bitches Sessions box they have a handy diagram that shows how Pharoah's dance was edited. I had no idea how meticulous the little tiny loops were.

I only wish that box had done what the others did: actually give you the unedited versions of those tunes (title track's got some fancy razor-work as well) -- instead we got 12 takes of "Little Blue Frog"...

recently saw a half-hour film of Miles at Isle of Wight, sans electric guitar but with Corea and Jarrett. 1970, parts were boring, parts were amazing. DeJohnette was superb.

seconded/thirded on the Dave Douglas stuff, too. he's great. anyone heard his recent couple-albums? isn't there one that's supposed to be like a soundtrack to silent films--Arbuckle or someone?

check out the smidge of Silent Way that Teo drops into the middle of Jack Johnson. I have no idea how he talked Miles into that one.

So this actually was a sample? I mentioned it once to a prof who was convinced that the band just played that bit live.

My ex-girlfriend has this, I remember it being quite good, though more conventional than IaSW. I liked the version of "In a Silent Way" in it too. It's sort of a director's cut: the song was originally composed by Zawinul in Vienna when he was watching snowflakes fall on the statue of Mozart. Anyway, apparently he didn't like the treatment Macero and Miles gave to the song, so he wanted to rerecord it in the form he intended it to be.

Not by me (see ILM passim et ad infinitium/nauseum)

Soon Over Babaluma being the sequel to Future Days is in some ways similar to how Bitches Brew is to In A Silent Way, as the sounds, techniques and tempos are both turned up a notch in the follow up.

There's the rub!

That would largely be b/c Miles took out all the chord changes, leaving only the melody...

It is a nice record. They use a Fender Rhodes and an acoustic bass in the band setup with some bass clarinet on some tracks, so the textures are very reminicient of late 60s turn of the 70s jazz.

(I also found the thread where Josh described Rush as a spiritual experience and was being hyperbolic not sarcastic. Ah, heady days.)

I don't like the self-titled Zawinul album -- better to get Weather Report's first self-titled, I think. (Don't get the second S/T!) Sextant is great, though.

The early '70s jazz-fusion band Nucleus has a disc, Elastic Rock, that might hit the spot too.

I was a little disappointed by the Isle of Wight performance.

listen a few more times to Kind of Blue

and check out A Love Supreme

Heh, you can't be a big fan of McLaughlin's own records!

Maybe this was already answered in this thread, but what's the general opinion of the three disc "sessions" sets for these albums? I know Macero did a lot of cutting and pasting for the finished albums. How do the sessions hold up?

Not that this should change your opinion of it (it either hits you or it doesn't), but Kind of Blue was actually very unique and tradition-breaking when it came out. It just also happens to be very easy to listen to and accessible, so much so that it's kind of become the definitive jazz album for many people. KOB was very much breaking with the bop tradition at the time, but most Charlie Parker probably sounds more radical to most people than KOB.

In a way maybe you could use the analogy of someone like Aaron Copland, who wrote very modern, innovative music that was also very pleasant to the ears, so that today a lot of his stuff is quintessential Americana, whereas Bartok and Stravinsky still sound avant garde.

I don't understand this reaction at all. I bought it when I was fifteen, and loved it for years, listening to it all the time. Now I don't listen to it much at all, but that's because I've got it all but memorized in my head, not because of some kind of inability to appreciate it on its own merits because it's been over-praised or some such I-read-too-many-magazines-and-believe-what-I-read-therein horseshit.

I would recommend the Silent Sessions, as it contains very little 'filler' - like 35 versions of a tossed-off vamp as in the Johnson Sessions - and it's the cheapest of the boxes.

It also does a really good job of showing how the album was edited, by including the full performances that were chopped up (something which as was mentioned above the Bitches Sessions box doesn't do).

Brakhage--thanks for the tip on the boxes.

I was actually going to post asking if anyone had some recommendations for something similar to that one, as i've still never heard anything else like it. "tauhid" by pharaoh sanders maybe comes close. doesn't need to be jazz, i just have a craving for that kind of dark, extended motif.

There's a track on Squarepusher's Budakhan Mindphone which, if it's not a straight sample, is an homage to "Circle". It's only a few minutes long, though.

-- pdf (newyorkisno...), November 9th, 2005.

Let me help you understand my reaction. I got into jazz around 1969 and the among the first jazz albums I had were IASW & BB and most of the Miles descendents mentioned upthread. But soon I got into the Chicago avant-garde: Roscoe Mitchell's Congliptious followed by the AEC material on BYG/Actuel (Reese & the Smooth Ones, A Jackson in Your House, A Message to Our Folks) and then the ESP avant material (Giuseppe Logan, New York Contemporary Five, Ayler, Heliocentric Worlds and so on). Whenever I heard KOB it was an anachronism, a bit of the past that seemed irrelavant in the light of Muhal's Things to Come from Those Now Gone, Levels and Degrees of Light and even things that had been recorded contemporaneously such as Ra's Angels & Demons at Play. For most of the twenty years from 1969 to 1989, I found it hard to listen to KOB even next to Miles's contemporaries--I loved Mingus no end, that shit swung, KOB was too down tempo for me.

I started going back though listening to the Coltrane Atlantic recordings and to Miles's classic quartets of the 60s. Sometime in the mid 80s KOB became available as a Columbia Legacy imprint and I put it on the player and played it over and over again. I think I had matured as a listener and began to appreciate the music that Miles and Evans composed as an alternative to bop.

Never was it a matter of my "inability to appreciate it on its own merits because it's been over-praised or some such I-read-too-many-magazines-and-believe-what-I-read-therein horseshit."

I have no idea where you got the idea that my not getting KOB was in any way innfluenced by such factors. It was simply a matter of slowing down and appreciating the music for what was there and not for what wasn't.

Working nearly contemporarily and forward (in jazz and jazz fusion--I'll leave the rock-fusion suggestions to those who hear those connections better than I):

John McLaughlin: Birds of Fire, and yes, Devotion
Hancock: the Mwandishi recordings up-thread and don't overlook Head Hunters
Jan Garbarek/Bobo Stenson Q-tet: Witchi-Tai-To
Soft Machine: 5
John Surman/Morning Glory: s.t.
Tony Williams Lifetime: Emergency
Khalid Yasin/larry Young: Lawrence of Newark

-- Tyler Wilcox (tywil...), November 8th, 2005.

Oh, ick! And let me assure you I am a Laswell fan. I hate what LAswell did on PPanthalassa. As in, let's imagine IASW without Tony Williams. Gack. I probably have forty or so disks by each of Miles and of Laswell and they ain't all gems, for sure, but Panthalassa is one I sold without regrets.

And he did do s sequel, sort of. It is called "Divine Light: Reconstructions and Mix Translations" in which Laswell remixes & recasts the Carlos Santana/Jonhn McLaughlin "Love Devotion & Surrender" and the Santana/Alice Coltrane "Illuminations." I have kept this one, but still prefer the original LDS. He may have improved "Illuminations" somewhat or at least offered a remix that is a little less pretentious than the original. (or am I thinking of Welcome?

someone else is sure to know better but for sure jarrett bitched about it and steered clear as soon as he could; i thought corea was playing electric in one of his own bands well enough past this?

Things to remember:

- Miles in the Sky didn't sell very well at the time; it was kind of a forgotten album for a lot of years
- In a Silent Way was a breakthrough because it was where rock critics started paying attention, and (then as now) very few of them journeyed backwards to contextualize what they were hearing

Generally speaking, I agree that there's a clear evolutionary process going on, with the big leap being the introduction of electric guitar all the time. Prior to IASW, Miles had only had guitar on Miles in the Sky, and even there it was George Benson. The other, weirder track with guitar - "Water on the Pond," IIRC - was left in the vault until the mid '70s. But when McLaughlin joined the band, everything changed. The rhythms, the compositions, everything.

Jarrett hated the electric keyboard and never played one again after leaving Davis's band.

There's a great documentary called Miles Electric: A Different Kind Of Blue where a number of Miles' sidemen from his electric period are interviewed. Jarrett, as noted, whines about how much he hates electric keyboards. Hancock initially scoffs when Miles directs him to play a Rhodes -- "You want me to play that toy?" -- but then grows to love it. Corea jumps immediately into stacking ring modulators and Echoplexes on top of his Rhodes, so he apparently had no aversion to it.

why did jazz dudes hate the fender rhodes initially, was Miles really the first to bring it in?

I think it was just the usual "that's, like, selloutsville, daddy-o" stuff. Cannonball Adderley had a hit with "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy" which featured Joe Zawinul on electric piano -- a Wurlitzer rather than a Rhodes -- and I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't some level of professional jealousy/resentment.

Miles Electric: A Different Kind Of Blue where a number of Miles' sidemen from his electric period are interviewed. Jarrett, as noted, whines about how much he hates electric keyboards

yeah thx this is what I was thinking of

Don't forget about all the Hammond organ-led jazz trios from the late '50s/early '60s on. Electric pianos were probably viewed by many as a combination of dinky/toylike and downmarket - not forward-looking music, but shit for drunks in bars to listen to.

It's the difference between an acoustic guitar and electric. Acoustic instruments are much more touch sensitive and there is much greater range in the sensitivity.

that is a very weird thing to argue about electric vs. acoustic guitar. I mean, electric guitars are more sensitive to touch by their very nature - they're amplified.

But it depends on the sound from the pickup and amp, not necessarily on the fingers on fretboard.

You do some big fast run on an electric guitar that has a real compressed signal, it's much easier to make all the notes run out clean. On an acoustic, that clarity is much more in players hands.

i have this on repeat in my car right now. the "in a silent way" section sounds like the calm beautiful morning after a massive riot. i.e. this morning. i'm so sad.

I was revisiting the Complete In A Silent Way Sessions when I came across this frustrating bit from Bob Belden's liner notes where he discusses four brief "interludes" recorded at the November 12, 1968 session for the tune "Splash":

The unissued "interludes" are something of a mystery. They are only a few "cue" length introductory phrases, having nothing to do whatsoever with any tracks that Miles had recorded up to this point. Herbie is on electric harpsichord and Chick is on organ, and these snippets do have a flavor of Sgt. Pepper's. These interludes are just fragments of something; perhaps they were just test recordings for Miles to hear. They are not included in this set.

Maybe I sound ungrateful/entitled, but I think it's bad form to tantalizingly describe these interludes as having "a flavor of Sgt. Pepper's" and then immediately follow that up with something to the effect of "too bad for you, you're never gonna hear them lol." Am I right that they still haven't been released?

Yeah, I don’t think those ever came out. It’s definitely somewhat dickish to mention those without any explanation as to why they’re not included. Miles supposedly didn’t want any of his unreleased material to come out anyway, according to Teo Macero, so it can’t be put down to “Miles wasn’t happy with these.” I know that the reissue/boxed set program played fast-and-loose with the terminology: the Complete Bitches Brew Sessions set is nothing of the sort. Unlike the IASW set, it doesn’t include the unedited takes of what would be assembled later. So Belden probably just excluded those “interludes” because they spoiled the flow of the box, and/or stuck out as jarringly different to the rest of the set.