A band assembled around new instruments
In a Silent Way came from a single session at Columbia’s Studio B in February 1969, and marked the point where Miles Davis committed fully to electric instruments after edging toward them on his previous couple of records. His working band of Wayne Shorter, Dave Holland, Chick Corea and Tony Williams was joined for the date by keyboardist Herbie Hancock, Austrian keyboardist Joe Zawinul and guitarist John McLaughlin, who had arrived in the United States only weeks earlier and was nervous enough about playing alongside Davis that he later described feeling out of his depth. Zawinul brought in the composition that gives the album its title, a piece he had originally intended for Cannonball Adderley’s band before deciding to offer it to Davis instead.
One afternoon, two side-long pieces
The entire album was drawn from roughly three hours of recording on a single day, with producer Teo Macero doing much of the real shaping afterward in the editing room. Both side-long tracks follow the same basic form, an opening section, a middle passage, and a return to the opening material, a structure closer to classical sonata form than to typical jazz arrangement. For the title piece, Davis stripped down Zawinul’s original chord changes to a simpler, more static harmony built around a held note, and reportedly told McLaughlin to play his guitar part as though he barely knew the instrument, aiming for a plainer, less busy sound than the guitarist’s natural instinct.
Editing as composition
What lands is the record’s patience: long stretches pass with barely any rhythmic pulse, three electric keyboards layering soft, shifting chords under Shorter’s soprano saxophone and Davis’s trumpet, both playing sparingly rather than filling the space. The editing holds the whole thing together without drawing attention to itself, smoothing session fragments into what sounds like continuous performance. McLaughlin’s guitar, deliberately simplified, gives the record a spare, almost folk-like texture that sits oddly and effectively against the more conventionally jazz voicings of the horns. The hush the whole band maintains throughout is the point, not a lack of ideas.
A guitarist told to sound like a beginner
The record’s stillness, its main asset, is also what makes it hard going for some listeners: there is very little in the way of a driving beat or a clear melodic hook to hold onto, and both tracks unfold slowly enough that a distracted listen can leave the impression that not much is happening. Zawinul reportedly felt Davis’s rearrangement of his composition removed chords he considered essential, and some listeners share that sense that the material’s original shape has been flattened in service of mood. Coming in at under forty minutes across only two tracks, the album offers little variety within itself, asking a listener to accept its narrow emotional range rather than expecting the record to shift gears.
Neither jazz nor rock, on purpose
The record treats editing itself as a compositional act: Macero’s arrangement of the session’s takes into two continuous pieces did as much to define the finished album as anything played in the room, a working method Davis would push much further on his next record. It also treats electric instrumentation not as a novelty but as a way to get a softer, more ambient texture than acoustic jazz instruments typically produce, three electric pianos layered together to create a wash rather than a rhythm. The idea of asking a guitarist to play more simply than his technique allowed, in order to get a plainer sound, runs through the whole record’s approach to its musicians.
Who should sit with its quiet
This suits listeners drawn to slow, textural music generally, including those coming from ambient or minimal composition rather than jazz specifically, and anyone interested in how a producer’s editing can shape a record as much as the musicians did in the room. It rewards patience and repeated listening over an immediate, hooky payoff, since much of what makes it distinctive only becomes clear after a few passes. Listeners who want the clearer melodic drive of Davis’s earlier acoustic records, or who need a steady beat to stay oriented, are likely to find the record’s sustained quiet difficult rather than absorbing.
Has the unease it caused aged into respect
Yes. The unease it caused among both jazz and rock critics on release, each side hearing the album as trespassing on the other’s territory, has settled into recognition that it was doing something neither genre had quite done before on record. Its influence on quieter, more textural jazz and on ambient music generally has outlasted the initial confusion by a wide margin, and heard today it plays less like a transitional record than a fully achieved one on its own terms, however briefly and quickly the whole thing was actually put together in the studio.