Coventry University

Faculty of Arts & Humanities

School of Media and Performing Arts

What were the motivations, inspirations and external

influences that led to the creation of the album

‘In a Silent Way’?

Matthew Parker: 6519463

306CPA Dissertation

2016

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Abstract

Recorded by jazz trumpeter Miles Davis on the 18th of February 1969 in one three-and-a-half

hour session, the album In a Silent Way was for its time a unique piece of work, not only in

jazz but in all musical genres. It was an album constructed almost entirely in post-production.

So vague were the instructions at the recording session that the musicians themselves were

unsure as to what they were working on, or even what had or had not been recorded.

The revolution in music it produced was arguably much greater than its noisier and more

famous sibling Bitches Brew, which was recorded only six months later. In a Silent Way

introduced the world to ambient music, and ushered in a new way of producing music

through cut and paste techniques which would eventually become the studio standard. Many

jazz critics hated it, accusing Miles of deliberately selling out. But what were the real

motivations, inspirations and external influences that led to the creation of In a Silent Way?

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ContentsIntroduction 1

Chapter 1: The Critics 4

Chapter 2: Teo Macero 8

Chapter 3: The Unreleased Recordings 1965-68 16

Chapter 4: Miles Davis 21

Conclusion: 33

Reference List: 35

List of FiguresFigure 1: Miles Davis – In a Silent Way album cover (Friedlander 1969)

Figure 2: Lester Bangs (Bayley 1976)

Figure 3: Stanley Crouch (Anon. 1995)

Figure 4: Miles Davis and Teo Macero (Hassell 1969)

Figure 5: Edgard Varese listens to his Poème Electronique (The Bettmann Archive 1958)

Figure 6: Teo Macero and Miles Davis (Anon. 1972)

Figure 7: Shhh/Peaceful – composite version (Miles Ahead and Belden 2001)

Figure 8: Shhh/Peaceful - LP version (Miles Ahead and Belden 2001)

Figure 9: Circle in the Round - Stan Tonkel 1979 edit (Miles Ahead and Belden 2004)

Figure 10: Circle in the Round - Teo Macero 1968 edit (Miles Ahead and Belden 2004)

Figure 11: Miles Davis and Betty Mabry (Wolman 1969)

Figure 12: Jimi Hendrix (Persson 1970)

Figure 13: Joe Zawinul (Copi 1976)

Figure 14: Miles Davis and John McLaughlin (Persson 1980)

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Introduction

Figure 1: Miles Davis - In a Silent Way (Friedlander 1969)

In a Silent Way

Columbia - CS 9875 - Released 30th July, 1969

Track list

A Shhh/Peaceful (17:58)

M. Davis

B1 In A Silent Way (4:11)

J. Zawinul

B2 It's About That Time (15:41)

M. Davis

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Credits

Trumpet - Miles Davis

Tenor Saxophone - Wayne Shorter

Organ, Electric Piano - Josef Zawinul

Electric Piano - Chick Corea & Herbie Hancock

Guitar - John McLaughlin

Bass - Dave Holland

Drums - Tony Williams

Producer – Teo Macero

They say that jazz has become menopausal, and there is much truth in the statement.

Rock too seems to have suffered under a numbing plethora of standardized Sounds.

But I believe there is a new music in the air, a total art which knows no boundaries or

categories, a new school run by geniuses indifferent to fashion. And I also believe

that the ineluctable power and honesty of their music shall prevail. Miles Davis is one

of those geniuses. (Bangs. 1969)

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Despite its status alongside the likes of The Beatles Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club

Band and The Beach Boys Pet Sounds as one of the most important late 20th century

recordings, researching the album was less straightforward than one might initially expect.

There is no single unified piece on it in either journal or book form. The closest thing to this

is the excellent book Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967-1991 by

Paul Tingen, which dedicates a chapter to the making of In a Silent Way. As a result, much of

the research for this dissertation came from biographies and websites of the various

protagonists, including the beautifully detailed website Miles Ahead

(http://www.plosin.com/milesahead), which contains the studio notes from almost all of

Davis’ recording sessions from 1945 to 1991. This site proved invaluable in piecing together

the methods developed by Davis and producer Teo Macero to create In a Silent Way.

Another priceless piece of research material was the Columbia Records box set The Complete

In a Silent Way Sessions, released in 2001. Despite the misleading title (most of the music

culled for the set was recorded in 1968, indeed only the tracks that appeared on the final

album were recorded at that session), it contains some revealing material including the

previously unreleased original Teo Macero composite edits of In a Silent Way. It also

includes some insightful comments and tables from jazz musician and writer Bob Belden in

the extensive liner notes.

Without these resources, this dissertation would have been infinitely harder to research and

compile, clearly demonstrating a need for a unified piece on such a landmark recording.

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Chapter 1The Critics

Read any review of In a Silent Way written in the 21st century and one would be forgiven for

thinking that it had always enjoyed unchallenged reverence as one of the most important

albums of all time. In fact, upon first release critics were greatly divided on the merits of the

album. As a general rule, rock critics loved it and jazz critics hated it, mostly for the same

reasons. The repetitive nature of the chord progressions, straight rock-like rhythms, electric

guitar, piano and bass were all elements that critics were either enthralled or repulsed by.

Lester Bangs for instance, writing for rock magazine Rolling Stone in 1969 showered Davis

with lavish praise:

The songs are long jams with a minimum of pre-planned

structure. That they are so cohesive and sustained is a

testament to the experience and sensitivity of the musicians

involved. Miles' lines are like shots of distilled passion, the

kind of evocative, liberating riffs that decades of strivers

build their styles on. Aside from Charles Mingus, there is

no other musician alive today who communicates such a

yearning, controlled intensity, the transformation of life's inchoate passions and

tensions into aural adventures that find a permanent place in your consciousness and

influence your basic definitions of music. (1969)

If Davis could incite an almost religious zeal amongst rock journalists like Bangs, he could

generate equal amounts of vitriol from the jazz community, most notably from infamous jazz

Figure 2: Lester Bangs (Bayley 1976)

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critic Stanley Crouch, who recognised none of the ‘controlled intensity’ or ‘distilled passion’

that so excited Bangs. Instead, Crouch wrote, ‘Beginning with the 1969 In a Silent Way,

Davis's sound was mostly lost among electronic instruments, inside a long, maudlin piece of

droning wallpaper music.’ (1997: 909)

Crouch’s views on Davis’ shift towards electronic instrumentation and modern rock

sensibilities were laid bare in a no-holds-barred article entitled ‘On The Corner: The Sellout

Of Miles Davis’ in which Crouch savaged Davis for betraying his loyal, long-standing fans.

Crouch appears to have taken Davis’ volte-face personally, as though he himself had been

stabbed in the back by Davis.

The contemporary Miles Davis, when one hears his

music or watches him perform, deserves the

description that Nietzsche gave of Wagner, "the

greatest example of self-violation in the history of

art." Davis made much fine music for the first half of

his professional life, and represented for many the

uncompromising Afro-American artist contemptuous

of uncle Tom but he has fallen from grace- and been celebrated for it. As usual, the

fall from grace has been a form of success. Desperate to maintain his position at the

forefront of modern music, to sustain his financial position, to be admired for the

hipness of his purported innovations, Davis turned butt to the beautiful in order to

genuflect before the commercial...Beyond the terrible performances and the terrible

recordings, Davis has also become the most remarkable licker of monied boots in the

music business, willing now to pimp himself as he once pimped women when he was

drug addict. (1997: 898)

Figure 3: Stanley Crouch (Anon. 1995)

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Miles was also alienating his peers with his new sound. Respected jazz tenor saxophonist

Jimmy Heath, born in the same year as Miles, was highly critical of what he perceived to be

Davis’ motivations for making the album, and for shirking his responsibility as a man who

enjoyed almost unequalled cultural and artistic status among black Americans.

Miles led the way for a lot of people because he was one of the ones who got through.

He had the fine clothes, the expensive cars, the big house, all the magazine articles

and the pretty girls chasing him. He seemed like he was on top of everything. Then

you had all of this rock getting all of the press and it was like Elvis Presley all over

again. Miles stepped out here and decided he was going to get himself some of that

money and a lot of musicians followed his lead. It was like if Miles had led the pack

for so long they didn't know how to stop following him, even if the music wasn't any

good. (Crouch 1997: 909)

Davis though, was seemingly unconcerned by the critical reception to his work. Here was a

man who liked to take risks, who was moving in unchartered territory. He clearly did not

expect everyone to understand, or want to understand, where his new direction was taking

him.

In a Silent Way began a great creative period for me from 1969. That record opened

up a lot of music in my head that just kept coming out for the next four years... But all

the music was different and this was causing a lot of critics a lot of problems. Critics

always like to pigeonhole everybody, put you in a certain place in their heads so they

can get to you. They don't like a lot of changing because that makes them have to

work to understand what you're doing. When I started changing so fast like that, a lot

of critics started putting me down because they didn't understand what I was doing.

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But critics never did mean much to me, so I just kept on doing what I had been doing,

trying to grow as a musician. (Davis and Troupe 1990: 301)

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Chapter 2Teo Macero

Figure 4: Miles Davis and Teo Macero (Hassell 1969)

Producer Teo Macero played a pivotal role in the creation of In a Silent Way, and is perhaps

one of the most underrated musicians in 20th century music. As a student he majored in

classical conducting at Juilliard, and following an unsuccessful request to change his major to

composition, he took private composition lessons. In order to finance the lessons Macero

worked at the Juilliard sound labs, where he learnt to cut records and edit tape under the

supervision of musical pioneer Edgard Varèse, a leading exponent of Musique Concrète. In a

1996 interview with journalist Lara Lee, Macero spoke of their friendship, and of the

influence that Varèse had on him.

I started at Juilliard, studying and working in the engineering department for 50

cents an hour to try to pay my way through. But then I got interested in it because of

Edgard Varèse. He was like my second father…I mean, I was there when he was

doing the "Poème Electronique" in Paris. He would show me all the pieces, all of the

elements. But he was creating sounds from other sources other than electronic

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sounds. He was making his own, which to me is very creative. Much more so than just

putting it through a filter. He created all kinds of things for that "Poème

Electronique" and I was fascinated by it. We used to see each other for lunch. We'd

talk on Saturdays and Sundays on the phone and he'd come to all the concerts that I

gave. He was like a second father, with a tremendous amount of knowledge. (1996)

Poème Electronique was composed and

recorded by Varèse in 1958 and was

commissioned by the Philips Corporation as

the soundtrack to the Brussels World fair of

the same year. At 8 minutes long, it was

constructed by Varèse at Philips sound

laboratory in Eindhoven, using three tracks

of tape (one stereo and one mono track).

Varèse combined recordings of multiple natural sound sources including human voices,

pianos, bells and organs with synthetically produced sounds such as oscillators and machine

noises. These recordings were then manipulated by a variety of methods including altering

the speed of the recording, reversing and/or looping the tape, filtering the sound through

electronic reverb units etc. Finally, the individual recordings were edited together into a

single piece, which Varèse mapped out prior to the recordings (Stephenson 2006: 58). This

was pioneering work, as Stephenson observed in his 2006 article, the recordings were

‘...combined electronically to create sounds that had never before been heard’. (2006: 58)

These techniques would become the cornerstone of Macero’s production style from the late

1960s onwards.

Figure 5: Edgard Varèse (The Bettmann Archive 1958)

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In 1953, shortly after graduating from Juilliard with a Master’s degree, Macero received a

Guggenheim award for one of his compositions, following sponsorship from amongst others,

Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland. He was considered an extremely prodigious up-and-

coming talent by his peers, as celebrated music critic Harvey Pekar observed:

Teo was a great jazz musician - way ahead of his time, like on his first recordings …

he was doing startling things: using atonality, 12 and 9 tone rows, poly-tonality, poly-

metric effects, and more than one tempo at a time (he allowed improvisers to play

simultaneously, choosing their own tempos); employing collective improvisation, in

which each improviser plays a different chord sequence; and overdubbing and

altering tape speeds. The pieces Teo wrote weren’t just academic exercises; they were

alive, vibrant. (Mpls Underground Film Fest 2015)

Macero and Bernstein formed a lifelong friendship, working on a number of large

productions together. They shared an ethos of progressing serious music by utilising popular

culture, as expressed by Bernstein in an interview with the BBC during his 50th birthday

party in August 1968.

The only real avant-garde, serious music now is full of pop influences and vice-

versa...There are times, and this is one of them, when I find pop music more vital and

more nourishing, perhaps not so durable, but more interesting to follow, more

adventurous, fresher, more fun! Good lord, why should that word be excluded from

august musical circles? I mean, music should be fun.

(BBC 2015)

In 1957 Macero was hired as a music editor by Columbia records, becoming a producer two

years later. He worked on such legendary albums as Charles Mingus’ Mingus Ah-Um and

Dave Brubeck’s Take Five. Teo recognised that the recording process had distorted the

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listener’s perception of jazz music. Performances that were essentially improvised, in a time

before recording technology could capture them, would have existed only in the moment they

were being produced. Now though, the listener could experience the same performance over

and over. With increased familiarity of the recording the performance gives the false

impression of being through composed rather than improvised. Teo exploited this aural

illusion in two main ways during his career. Firstly, in a double-bluff sense, some solo

instrumental parts (mostly lead-ins) would be pre-composed (or at the very least, sketched

out), and deliberately intended to sound improvised. For instance, Miles' opening solo on the

seminal So What from his 1959 album Kind of Blue bears more than a passing resemblance to

a solo he performed on his previous album Porgy and Bess. Given Teo's already extensive

experience in arranging and music editing, this solo was probably singled out by him for

future development and may have been the catalyst for the whole piece.

Miles would record his stuff, and then he’d just leave. He would sometimes say, ‘I like

this or that,’ and then I’d say: ‘I’ll listen to it and I’ll put it together. If you like it,

fine, if not, we’ll change it.’ So I was the one with the vision. Miles also had a vision,

but he wasn’t really a composer, he didn’t compose in an organized way. It was

happenstance. He played with these great musicians, and when they had played

enough, I was able to cut out the stuff that wasn’t good, and piece something together

from the rest. (Tingen 2001)

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Figure 6: Teo Macero and Miles Davis (Anon. 1972)

By 1969 with the advancement of recording technology, Macero reversed this process to

create In a Silent Way, replicating the false 'through-composed' sensation of repeated

listening to improvised music by arranging a piece deliberately intended to sound composed,

when it was actually improvised. He repeated this technique on all of Miles' subsequent

albums until 1975. Below we can see two tables which are taken from Bob Belden’s liner

notes for The Complete In a Silent Way Sessions. The first table shows how Macero created

composite tracks, tracks that were already pre-edited together from (in this case) five distinct

sections, which he then used as a reference to compile the final edited track. It is not known

from which takes these five parts were originally gleaned (or how many takes there were in

total). However, the composite versions of the tracks which would eventually become In a

Silent Way still yield valuable information.

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Figure 7: Shhh/Peaceful – composite version (Miles Ahead and Belden 2001)

The composites were probably necessary due to, like Circle in the Round before it (see

Chapter 3), the performances being conducted section by section. The composites would have

helped Macero hear the final arrangements in his head more clearly, and as he later remarked,

act like a literary editor, moving and removing sections as he saw fit to achieve the best

effect:

His stuff was mostly written down. I mean it was worked on in the studio. But I would

record from the time he got there, which was usually on time, until he left. I'd record

everything. And then when I'd go back to the editing room, I would edit everything. I

listened to everything back. Miles would say, "You remember that thing in the second

take?" I said "yeah." And I would maybe make a loop and create it. That's why those

records were so good. Maybe people will say it didn't sound authentic. It is authentic

because you're acting like a writer for a book, like an editor... I'm just there to make

sure that everything is in order. (Lee 1996)

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Figure 8: Shhh/Peaceful - LP version (Miles Ahead and Belden 2001)

The original composite of Shhh/Peaceful (figure 6) gives a good demonstration of Macero’s

finely honed editing skills. Comparing the tables above it can be clearly seen that the theme

(also labelled ‘Part 1’) in the Shhh/Peaceful composite version, which accounts for nearly

four minutes of audio and is the harmonic structure around which the piece is based, was

completely sacrificed by Macero and Davis in the final edit (figure 7). The chordal

movements of the theme are deemed to be less interesting than the static pedal played in the

other sections. This is perhaps the most ground-breaking element of the whole process, that in

the final analysis of the piece which was probably originally structured like a more traditional

jazz arrangement with a theme at the beginning and end, they decided the main feature should

be the improvisation rather than the theme, and jettisoned the theme altogether.

During the 1996 interview with Lara Lee, Macero described in more detail the technical

processes employed to produce In a Silent Way. Both sides of the LP were arranged in

classical sonata form (exposition, development, recapitulation), using material at the end of

each track which was an exact audio duplicate of the beginning, to create the recapitulation.

Q. Talk about cutting and splicing in In a Silent Way.

Teo: That was one of the rare times that Miles came to the studio. I called Miles up

and I said, "Look, I mixed two stacks of tapes, about 15 or 20 reels each, I can make

the cuts, I can do the edit..." [As Miles] "I'll come down. I'll be there." So he came

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down and we cut each side down to 8 1/2 minutes and I think the other side was 9

1/2 and he said he was leaving… and that would be his album. I said, "Look you

really can't do that. I mean CBS will fire you, suspend you, fire me. But give me a

couple of days, I'll think about it." And then a couple of days later I sent him up a

tape and that was it. What I did, I copied a lot of it. You wouldn't know where the

splices are.

(1996)

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Chapter 3 The Unreleased Recordings 1965-68

"Circle in the Round" marks a pivotal moment in Miles's musical development

because it introduced many of the ingredients that would inform Miles's music until

1975, in particular the musical influences of the '60s counterculture, his search for a

dense and complex bottom end, and the application of postproduction technology.

Examining these elements, one detects that - in addition to the electric guitar, played

by the then up-and-coming jazz guitarist Joe Beck - Miles also introduced other

textures new to his music on "Circle in the Round", such as celeste and chimes. Like

that of "Masqualero", the melody has a Spanish/Arabic quality. The feel is fairly

loose, and the folklike melody, the new acoustic textures, and Joe Beck's clean sound

and polite approach all indicate that the main musical influence of the music of the

60s counterculture on "Circle in the Round" came from folk, not rock.

(Tingen 2001: 41)

The harmonic and rhythmic qualities of Circle in the Round were not the only experimental

aspects of the piece. Crucially it marked the first known attempt by Davis and Macero to

create a single unified piece from a number of different takes, and to assemble an

arrangement and structure for the piece in post, rather than pre-production using tape editing.

One important element in the creation of Circle in the Round was the recent innovation of the

studio as a creative tool in its own right, rather than simply as a device for capturing sound.

The advancement of technology throughout the 1960s enabled producers to use the studio as

though it were another instrument, permanently altering the nature of recorded music. Tape

editing was one such development which had been around since the first tape recorders were

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shipped to the US in 1946, technology developed by Germany during World War Two. As

Paul Tingen observed, up until the mid-sixties the studio had been:

...purely used as a means of creating an idealized performance through splicing

together the best sections of different recording takes. This approach was still based

on the paradigm of creating an approximation of reality. Around 1967 a shift

occurred in Western popular music culture towards looking at recordings as aural

fantasies that were only restrained by the imagination of the recording's creator and

the limitations of technology. (2001: 41)

In this sense Circle in the Round, rather than In a Silent Way is the more historically

important track. However, for a number of reasons it failed to be recognised as such. Circle

in the Round was withheld from release by Columbia until 1979 when it was issued as part of

a two disc retrospective of unreleased material. Perhaps in 1968 Columbia felt it was too

radical and too much of a stylistic jump from Davis’ back catalogue, perhaps Davis and

Macero themselves were dissatisfied with the results of the experiment. The piece itself is

long and repetitive, and lacks the clear structure of Shhh/Peaceful, for instance. Attempts to

re-edit the piece prior to its eventual release on the 1979 album of the same name, fared little

better in focussing the track, suggesting that the source material, rather than the editing, was

the main reason why this track was shelved for 11 years. According to Bob Belden’s liner

notes for the Columbia box set Miles Davis Quintet 1965-68,

That version (1979) was assembled by Stan Tonkel, who edited a 26:17 performance

together. While doing research for this box, a 33:32 version (assembled and edited by

Teo Macero in 1968) was found...This new version contains nearly all of the usable

material that was recorded during the session, including some that is clearly

rehearsal in nature (they recorded 35 sections or elements). (2004)

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Figure 9: Circle in the Round - Stan Tonkel 1979 edit (Miles Ahead and Belden 2004)

It is apparent from this statement that rather than chopping up long jams into smaller sections,

Macero was doing the opposite, recording 35 short performances (some wholly improvised,

some through composed) then organising them as a single complete track, the same process

Edgard Varèse employed to create Poème Electronique excepting that Varèse used sound

effects rather than melodic patterns.

However, the experience undoubtedly proved invaluable to Davis and Macero, and the pair

must have felt there was enough merit in the process to attempt it again nine months later,

this time with the Joe Zawinul composition Ascent, which would also remain in the Columbia

vaults until 1981. According to the Columbia recording session notes, Ascent was recorded in

11 takes ranging from two to five minutes each. Four of these takes were incorporated into

the final 14 minute composite recording by Macero. Clearly Davis and Macero were waiting

for the right piece of music to fully exploit their new process. Three months later they

returned to this process for a third time, producing In a Silent Way.

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Figure 10: Circle in the Round - Teo Macero 1968 edit (Miles Ahead and Belden 2004)

That critics and fans alike were denied access to most of Miles’ developmental work between

1965 and 1968 undoubtedly exacerbated a sense of disconnection that some felt towards In a

Silent Way. Although Miles had been slowly and deliberately realigning his sound with

popular black music over a period of three years, his album releases only hinted at this.

Combined with Columbia’s new sales policy of targeting young rock fans, the alienation

some jazz critics and longstanding Miles fans experienced is quite understandable.

Since Davis had first signed with Columbia Records in 1955, the company had

consistently and aggressively marketed his music almost exclusively to jazz listeners.

Beginning in 1967, however, as internal Columbia memos demonstrate, Davis’s

recent stylistic evolution helped motivate the company to begin considering how to

“broaden” Davis’s audience beyond traditional jazz fans. A part of this discussion

included the idea of placing advertisements in non-jazz magazines in order to “aim

Miles at the Rock audience.” Columbia opted to pursue this approach, and one

resulting ad in Rolling Stone—for the 1969 album Filles de Kilimanjaro—begins with

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the headline, “You May Like Jazz, and Not Even Know It.” The copy then argues that

Filles shares much in common with the “psychedelic music” that the reader has

recently been “buying and digging.” (Smith 2010: 10)

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Chapter 4Miles Davis

Befitting his status as black aesthetic signifier in the flesh, Miles cannot merely be

read as a fascinating subject. He's also for many of us an objectified projection of our

blackest desires, a model for any black artist who wants to thoroughly interpenetrate

Western domains of power and knowledge with Africanizing authority. For those who

approach him as a generator of musical systems, metaphors, metaphysics, and

gossip, Miles was the premiere black romantic artist of this century. (Carner 1996:

234)

Betty Mabry

Davis’s second wife Betty Davis (nee Mabry) is widely regarded as the main catalyst in

Miles’ move towards electronic instrumentation and new recording ideas. She was a

singer/songwriter, a feminist, and had her finger on the pulse of 60s counterculture. Mabry

introduced Miles to the music of Jimi Hendrix and Sly and the Family Stone, and encouraged

him to dress in a much more flamboyant style. Mademoiselle Mabry from In a Silent Way’s

predecessor, Nefertiti (featuring a picture of Mabry on the front cover) was an homage to

Betty, acknowledging her significant role in Miles new direction, as it was constructed

around a chordal reharmonisation of the Jimi Hendrix track The Wind Cries Mary.

As 1969 dawned, Miles Davis’ young wife Betty was determined to hip him to the

counterculture and what was going on in soul and rock. Not that she had to try hard

—Miles was sick of jazz with its neat suits, empty clubs, dismal record sales, and

aging audience. He wanted to go where the action was. (Rollins and Wolff 2012: 143)

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As jazz split into various sub-genres in the 1960s, much of it developed in an avant-garde

direction, moving away from rhythmically centred pieces to more abstract concepts, and in

the process lost a great deal of its black audience. As jazz singer Betty Carter commented in

an interview for Ebony magazine in 1990,

Some of the music turned off Black listeners, because it had no beat or pulse. But this

is what Black people love: to pat their feet and move their heads. I can't blame this

[the black movement away from jazz] on the audience. I blame it on the music, which

didn't have any Black rhythms. We had people thinking they had to be intellectuals to

understand the music.... (Baskerville 2003: 137)

It had not escaped Miles attention that Hendrix and Stone were now superstars selling

millions of records, playing to huge sold-out audiences and connecting with a young black

audience. Miles conversely, was playing to predominantly white, middle-class, middle-aged,

dwindling audiences in small, smoky clubs. His move away from the traditional aesthetic of

Figure 11: Miles Davis and Betty Mabry (Wolman 1969)

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jazz can be at least partly attributed to this. The life of a jazz musician in the late 60s could

hardly be more starkly contrasting with that of Hendrix et al, as described by journalist Leo

Kofsky, in his 1970 piece entitled 'The Jazz Club’: An Adventure in Cockroach Capitalism.

The first thing that struck me was there was simply no place for the artist to go when

they weren't playing.... What this means in more precise terms is that the musician

has his choice of spending his between-set breaks in a variety of unsatisfactory ways:

(1) he can take a table and drink - if he doesn't mind having the drinks, at regular

prices, deducted from his wages; (2) he can amble about in back, either rubbing up

against a greasy stove in the kitchen or lounging on an equally dirty staircase while

watching the traffic in and out of the men's room; or finally, he can go sit in his car

or, weather permitting, wander outside. (1998: 146)

Davis was concerned with becoming an irrelevant museum piece like Louis Armstrong. He

also openly disliked white people, and racial issues were unarguably at the forefront of Miles’

thinking in 1968/69, something that also spurred him on to change direction and attempt to

attract a larger black audience. Contrary to Stanley Crouch’s assertion that Davis had ‘sold

out’ by moving away from jazz, in Miles’ opinion playing jazz, not rock, meant selling out to

the white man, and for little reward too. ‘Jazz is an Uncle Tom word. It's a white folks word.’

(DeMichael 1969)

His decision, in 1969, to court a younger audience by playing rock venues, adding

amplified instruments to his ensemble, and cranking up both the volume and the beat,

also amounted to a critique of modern jazz, which he felt had become tired and

inbred. (Carner 1996: 204 – 205)

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Jimi Hendrix

The music I was really listening to in 1968 was James Brown, the great guitar player

Jimi Hendrix, and a new group who had just come out with the hit record, "Dance to

the Music," Sly and the Family Stone, led by Sly Stewart, from San Francisco… But it

was Jimi Hendrix that I first got into when Betty Mabry turned me on to it. (Davis and

Troupe 1990: 282)

Hendrix was arguably the musician exerting the greatest influence on Miles between 1967

and 1975. Miles talked often about his love of Hendrix’s music, and of the man himself with

whom Davis became a friend. Davis’ authorised biography is littered with references to

Hendrix, and he is quite open regarding the scope that Hendrix’s influence had on him, even

down to the clothes he was wearing and the hairdresser he was using:

I was changing my attitude about a lot of things, like the look of my wardrobe…

everyone was starting to dress a little looser at concerts, at least the rock musicians

were and that might have affected me. Everybody was into blackness, you know, the

black consciousness movement, and so a lot of African and Indian fabrics were being

worn. I started wearing African dashikis and robes and looser clothes plus a lot of

Indian tops by this guy named Hernando, who was from Argentina and who had a

place in Greenwich Village. That's where Jimi Hendrix bought most of his clothes. So

I started buying wraparound Indian shirts from him... I had moved away from the

cool Brooks Brothers look and into this other thing, which for me was more what was

happening with the times. (1990: 300)

25

Figure 12: Jimi Hendrix (Persson 1970)

It was at the hairdresser where Jimi first met legendary jazz musician Miles Davis.

Jimi had his hair done by James Finney and became one of his first showcase clients.

“Finney introduced the ‘Blowout’ through Jimi,” Taharqa Aleem recalled. “Prior to

that, it had been ‘the Afro,’ and before that ‘the Conk.” Miles liked Jimi’s hair and

also began to go to Finney. The two musicians would also occasionally double-date

with their girlfriends. (Cross 2005: 285 – 287)

Rumours of a Hendrix/Davis collaboration were rife in 1969, continuing until the guitarist’s

death in 1970. 25 years later the rumours were confirmed, when as reported by Rolling Stone

magazine, a telegram was unearthed in 1995 sent by Davis, Hendrix and Davis’ drummer

Tony Williams on the 21st October 1969 to Apple Records asking Paul McCartney to join

their supergroup.

"We are recording and LP together this weekend in NewYork [sic]," reads the note,

according to The Associated Press. "How about coming in to play bass stop call Alan

Douglas 212-5812212. Peace Jimi Hendrix Miles Davis Tony Williams."

(Cubarrubia 2013)

26

It is not known whether McCartney received, or indeed replied to the request. However, in

the Hendrix biography Room Full of Mirrors, author Christopher R. Cross suggests why a

collaboration between the artists failed to get off the ground.

Jimi had expressed a desire to record with Miles, and a session was planned pairing

them. Jimi’s usual approach was to jam first and worry about contracts, record

labels, and payments later. Davis, however, was frustrated by how little money he

was making in jazz and jealous of how much Jimi was earning. The day before the

session, he called Jimi’s manager and demanded payment in advance. Miles told

Mike Jeffrey he wanted fifty thousand dollars up front… Jeffrey refused the

outrageous demands and the session never occurred. (2005: 285 – 287)

From this statement it can clearly be observed that Davis felt bitterness about his financial

and social status compared with that of his younger, rock-playing contemporaries, and

although Hendrix was greatly admired by Davis, the same could not be said for Hendrix’s

backing musicians The Experience. Mitch Mitchell (drums) and Noel Redding (bass) were

both white and English, and this failed to impress Davis.

But Jimi was also close to hillbilly, country music played by them mountain white

people. That's why he had those two English guys in his band, because a lot of white

English musicians liked that American hillbilly music. The best he sounded to me was

when he had Buddy Miles on drums and Billy Cox on bass. Jimi was playing that

Indian kind of shit, or he'd play those funny little melodies he doubled up on his

guitar… He used to play 6/8 all the time when he was with them white English guys

and that's what made him sound like a hillbilly to me… But the record companies and

white people liked him better when he had the white guys in his band. Just like a lot of

white people like to talk about me when I was doing the ‘nonet thing’ - the Birth of

27

the Cool thing, or when I did those other albums with Gil Evans or Bill Evans

because they always like to see white people up in black shit, so that they can say they

had something to do with it. But Jimi Hendrix came from the blues, like me we

understood each other right away because of that. (Davis and Troupe 1990: 283)

This quote probably dispels Paul Tingen’s assertion that ‘the main musical influence of the

music of the 60s counterculture on "Circle in the Round" came from folk, not rock’ (2001:

41). Miles listening habits have been examined in many articles, books and journals over the

years, including an interview with jazz writer Leonard Feather for Down Beat magazine

which took place in June 1968, only eight months before the recording of In a Silent Way:

Recently, visiting Miles in his Hollywood hotel suite, I found strewn around the room

records or tape cartridges by James Brown, Dionne Warwick, Tony Bennett, the

Byrds, Aretha Franklin, and the Fifth Dimension. Not a single jazz instrumental.

(2001)

The lack of instrumental jazz in Davis’ music collection at that time clearly aggravated

Feather, who went on to write:

Miles Davis's hotel room was cluttered with pop vocal records. Why? There are

several explanations, but the simplest and most logical, it seems to me, is that when

you have reached the aesthetic mountaintop, there is no place to look but down.

(2001)

This article is interesting for two reasons. Firstly it demonstrates that many people found it

difficult to comprehend a jazz legend like Davis having little or no jazz in their collection,

and secondly it gives a window into his listening tastes just prior to recording In a Silent Way.

There is little evidence to suggest that Davis listened to folk music in any quantity. It seems

more probable that the ‘folklike’ (or ‘hillbilly’ as Davis refers to it) quality that Tingen

28

observed in Circle in the Round probably originated from Davis listening to the recordings of

the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Davis’s remark that Hendrix would often play in 6/8 also adds

weight to the notion that Circle in the Round was directly influenced by Hendrix, it too being

in 6/8. In fact, it seems that Hendrix in some way inspired almost everything Davis was

doing. Bob Belden observed in a 2001 interview with Bill Milkowski for Jazz Times that:

Jimi’s music—particularly the bass lines—directly influenced Miles Davis. If you

listen to “Inamorata” from Live/Evil, that’s the bass line to “Fire.” “Mademoiselle

Mabry” from Filles de Kilimanjaro is derived from Jimi’s “The Wind Cries Mary”;

“What I Say” from Live/Evil is basically “Message to Love” from Band of Gypsys,

and so on. (2001)

Joe Zawinul

Zawinul’s contribution to In a Silent Way is, like Teo Macero’s, often overlooked. This may

seem curious, given that he wrote the title track and had a major hand in the composition of

Shhh/Peaceful and It’s About That Time, however, there are a number of factors that have

caused this, not least Davis’ fervent self-promotion. In an interview with Paul Tingen,

Zawinul recalled how he came to work with Miles:

I met Miles for the first time in 1959, when I was playing with Dinah Washington. We

became good friends, and during the late 1960s I didn’t live far away, and we often

spent 2-3 hours fooling with music... he liked my music a lot at that time and he used

some of it. I had played him “In a Silent Way,” and he told me he wanted it on his

record… There was some conflict going on, because Cannonball wanted to record

the tune, but I said, ‘No, I gave my word to Miles that he could use it.’ One morning

Miles called me and asked me to come to the studio, and a few minutes later he called

me back and said, ‘Bring some music, and bring that nice tune.’ (2001)

29

Miles was first alerted to the notion of working with Zawinul after hearing Cannonball

Adderley’s hit single Mercy, Mercy, which was composed by Zawinul and played on the

electric piano. Adderley was a close friend of Davis, and a former bandmate. Like Hendrix,

Adderley and Davis shared a love of the blues, and an ethos of trying to propel the genre

forwards. Miles was not only impressed by the exciting new take on blues music that Zawinul

had created, he was equally impressed by the sales figures generated by the record. Here was

a sound that he felt had both authenticity and commercial potential. ‘Cannonball Adderley’s

funky soul-jazz hit the R&B charts and won a young black fan-base. This was a fan-base that

Miles constantly felt frustrated at his failure to reach.’ (Rollins and Wolff 2012: 143)

However, despite Zawinul’s sizeable input on the album, Miles was not about to let anyone

take the credit for what he saw ultimately as his own creative decisions, and particularly if it

happened to be a white man.

Figure 13: Joe Zawinul (Copi 1976)

30

Q: What about the influences your musicians have on you. Joe Zawinul, for

instance, is credited with being responsible for some of your recent directions,

beginning with In a Silent Way.

A (Miles): Let them [the critics] say it. I don't care what they say. As long as I been

playing they never say I done anything. They always say that some white guy did it.

I just let 'em say it. Shit, whenever Joe or somebody would bring in something that

they wrote, I'd have to cut it all up because these guys get so hung up on what they

write. They think it’s complete the way they write it. Like the way he wanted that In

a Silent Way was completely different. I put it in a mode, no chords or anything. I

don't know what he was looking for when he wrote that tune, but it wasn't gonna be

on my record. So now they all play the tune the way I had it. Even Joe's own group

[Weather Report]. Shit, a little melody like that, why make it so important? It's just

a little sound - let it go. (Carner 1996)

31

Miles’ studio directions

Figure 14: Miles Davis and John McLaughlin (Persson 1980)

Miles’ instructions to his musicians in the studio were the final essential ingredient in the

making of the album. His zen-like statements, which produced more questions than answers,

were deliberately aimed at unnerving the musician and forcing them to think outside of the

box rather than simply turning up and playing whatever they were practising that week. Miles

hated practice, insisting that it stymied creativity (Tingen 2001). One example of this

involved British guitarist John McLaughlin, who had flown into New York from London the

previous day, only meeting Miles for the first time at the session. In 1969 McLaughlin was

considered by many to be the best jazz guitarist in the world, so he was somewhat taken

aback when upon meeting Miles, he was instructed to ‘Play like you don’t know how to play

the guitar’ (Tingen 2001: 58), and as Paul Tingen expands,

The other surprise was Miles direction to McLaughlin to play Zawinul's In a Silent

Way theme on electric guitar over a pedal E. McLaughlin played through the score

32

searchingly and hesitantly, thinking it was a try-out. To his astonishment, and

probably the amazement of the other musicians as well, it ended up being the master

take. McLaughlin's searching playing had exactly the unhurried, fragile, and timeless

feel Miles was looking for. (2001: 58)

In hindsight, McLaughlin understood the reasoning behind Miles’ oblique system,

recognising that it was an effective tool in the creative process. He later recalled that,

Miles in the studio directed very closely, but with very obscure statements. He was

like a Zen master. He would give you very strange directions that were very difficult

to understand…. But I think that was his intention, as it is with a Zen master. They

will say something to you and your mind will not be able to deal with it on a rational

level. And so he made you act in a subconscious way, which was the best way.

(Tingen 2001: 17)

33

ConclusionNo art is made in a vacuum

In attempting to answer the question What were the motivations, inspirations and external

influences that led to the creation of In a Silent Way? it has become clear that the album was

born from the melding of a number of different strands of the arts, including rock music, jazz,

soul and 20th century avant-garde classical music, combined with 1960s socio-political

movements such as Black Consciousness and the advancement of studio technology. It can

truly be said to be a zeitgeist work.

But as to which of the reviewers in Chapter 1 was closer to the truth is harder to say. It can be

argued that both Lester Bangs and Stanley Crouch had valid points to make. In Crouch’s

defence, Davis undoubtedly wanted to generate more money. He felt an injustice that young,

white (and in Miles’ opinion, inferior) musicians should be earning more than him and this

was a major factor in his change of direction. But as discussed in Chapter 4, Davis considered

playing ‘jazz’ to be selling out, working as a slave for white people like his forefathers had.

He also (justifiably) felt that rock’n’roll was black music, so why should he not play it? In

Miles’ view making money did not equate to selling out, a point missed by Crouch.

Lester Bang’s article, on the other hand, whilst succeeding in vividly describing the sonic

qualities of the record, failed to recognise the socio-political statement that Davis was

making. He also failed to spot the duplication of audio at the end of both sides of the record,

or for that matter, any of the editing by Macero. Bang’s description of the album as ‘…long

jams with a minimum of pre-planned structure’ (1969) could not have been further from the

truth, being as they were actually short recordings deliberately ordered to create a sonata

34

form. This demonstrates that even those who enjoyed the record did not fully comprehend the

scale of the work that Davis and Macero had produced.

Finally, a story of Miles which perfectly encapsulates In a Silent Way, as recounted by his

manager of 12 years, Mark Rothbaum:

There was this musician once who came up to Miles and said: "Miles, you're my man!

But that new shit you´re into, I just can´t get with it." And Miles answered:

"Should I wait for you?" (Tingen 2001)

35

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