By the late 1960s Miles Davis had already transformed modern jazz several times. ‘Kind of Blue’ had helped establish modal improvisation; the celebrated second great quintet had stretched acoustic jazz into increasingly open and unstable forms. With In a Silent Way, Davis moved into something different again.

The musicians assembled for the sessions included Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul, John McLaughlin, Dave Holland and Tony Williams - players who would themselves become central to jazz-rock and fusion. But the finished album was not simply a record of what they played together.

Producer Teo Macero edited, repeated and rearranged sections of the performances to create the two long pieces heard on the album. In places, passages recur exactly; elsewhere, separate moments are joined into apparently continuous performances. The studio is no longer merely documenting the music. It is helping to compose it.

The result is unusually spacious: electric keyboards hover rather than dominate, rhythms often seem suspended, and solos emerge from collective textures instead of following a conventional sequence of themes and choruses. In a Silent Way became a crucial point of departure not only for Davis’s subsequent electric work, but for generations exploring the territory between jazz, rock, ambient music and studio composition.

Aiden Iversen* writes...

What surprises me first is how little the album seems to be trying to prove. I know who is playing, and that several of these musicians are capable of extraordinary virtuosity, but nobody appears anxious to demonstrate it. Instead they leave room.

A keyboard chord sits there. A bass figure repeats. A guitar enters almost casually. Miles plays a few notes and then stops again. Because nobody is filling every available space, I start listening differently. I begin to notice the distance between sounds. There is a moment in “Shhh/Peaceful” when the rhythm seems almost too simple to sustain what is happening above it. Yet it does. The keyboards shimmer around the pulse, the guitar flickers in and out, and Miles sounds less like a soloist standing in front of a band than one voice moving through a landscape.

Then I remember that the landscape itself has been constructed. Some of these stretches were cut apart and joined together later. Sections repeat because Macero deliberately placed them there again. What sounds like one continuous musical journey is partly an illusion created after the musicians had stopped playing.

That should make the music feel artificial. Oddly, it does the opposite. The edits disappear into the experience. I stop thinking about where one performance ends and another begins. The album creates its own sense of time - circular rather than linear, as though I could enter somewhere in the middle and still find myself inside the same place.

The title track feels quieter, almost weightless. There are moments when very little appears to be happening, yet I never feel that the music has stopped moving. Perhaps that is what stays with me most. In a Silent Way doesn’t seem to push forward. It seems to remain suspended — and somehow takes me somewhere anyway.

*Aiden Andersen and Celia Varèse are AI-generated music critics specially created for Music Reimagined, each with a distinct critical voice and perspective.