“1968 was full of all kinds of changes, but for me, the changes that were happening in my music were very exciting and the music that was happening everywhere was incredible. These things were leading me into the future and into In a Silent Way.” —Miles Davis
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Miles Davis’s 1989 autobiography, from which the above quote is taken (291), is a generative account of sociopolitical change precisely because of what it leaves out: the normative historical events that conventionally sign-post change. In his account of the years 1968 and 1969, for instance, when he was finding his way to the “future” of fusion, the genre—or un-genre—that he first laid down on record with 1969’s In a Silent Way, Davis doesn’t mention those years’ hegemonic symbols of change, such as Martin Luther King Jr.’s and Robert F. Kennedy’s assassinations, the Tet Offensive and the U.S.’s ongoing role in the Vietnam War, or even Apollo 8’s mission to the moon. Nor does he reference the various resistance movements of the time, nor pop culture really either. Instead, he talks about his embrace of “electronic instruments to make up the sound that I wanted” (294), the receptions to this embrace and his other innovations on In a Silent Way, the record business (he had recently signed to Clive Davis’s Columbia Records), and, overall, the frames—the framing—he was at pains to avoid.
Lester Bangs would call the record “space music,” perhaps in a nod to the U.S.’s further entrance into the space age as signified by the Apollo 8 mission (a mission that occurred a few months after In a Silent Way’s release), but, as Davis wrote of critics in general, they “didn’t understand what I was doing” (311). Davis’s own aim in making the record was to “make the sound more like rock,” sound here being an unfixed, post-modal jazz that he was continually refining in changing formations of his band. In the case of the record’s eponymous track, making the sound more like rock meant excising “all the chords” from a tune written by Davis’s pianist, Joe Zawinul, and focusing only on the melody, which Davis instructed his band members “just to play off” of (296). The resulting music “came out beautiful and fresh,” Davis writes, adding, “Today many people consider Joe’s tune a classic and the beginning of fusion” (296). He provides little comment, in his autobiography at least, on In a Silent Way beyond this, perhaps because he was already headed to the composition and recording of Bitches Brew, which would occur half a year later, a record that would take his experiments in fusion much further and become a massive crossover breakout for him.
The music-critical apparatus, however, had and continues to have quite a lot to say about In a Silent Way, and the abundance of such commentary puts Davis’s comparatively minimalist account of the record into relief. Such a discrepancy in appraisal and accounting, of course, raises a critical question of its own, namely: What to do with the gap between Davis’s relative silence about In a Silent Way—a title which, moreover, emphasizes silence—and the relative abundance of critical thought induced by, or directed at, the record? Further—and here I am influenced by Kandice Chuh’s ongoing work on “the difference aesthetics makes”—what is this critical thought doing, and how might we undiscipline it or apprehend the sound of the record by a mode other than criticality (and the exclusionary genealogy underpinning it)? In other words, how does attending to the sound of the record disrupt critical practice, and the imbricated sociopolitical framing of black social life?
To Davis, it bears repeating, In a Silent Way sounded “beautiful and fresh.” To me, it also sounds like that: a beauty that a musicological analysis of the record’s soundscape would likely support, and a freshness, as it were, unaffected by the intervening years—a quality that might be called timeless. Taking both the beauty and the freshness, then, which are, of course, aesthetic characteristics, how does this aesthetic consideration of In a Silent Way, a consideration that is also sensorial and phenomenological, contradict, following Moten, the interdicted ontology of blackness?
Indeed, In a Silent Way, as I think jazz in general does, enacts the “terribly beautiful vitality” of black social life, as Moten avers, in musical form, and in a distinctly beautiful register, as opposed to the less beautiful, but no less vital, fusion of Davis’s next record, Bitches Brew (which also enacts a gendering that requires scrutiny). So while I haven’t quite assessed the object, per se, of In a Silent Way in detail in this brief writing, I hope I’ve at least set up a generative context for further comprehending the record in ways that refuse a critical practice that would frame, and thus delimit, the black social music the record instantiates.
Richard Cook, for instance, describes the record as “gentle, almost amiable,” with guitarist John McLaughlin playing “melodious, ringing lines” and Davis’s trumpet “open” and “warm”—a music, altogether, “as charming as it is inventive.” And yet, at the same time, Cook suggests this charming quality was meant to “softly convert a rock listener” to jazz, while also linking the drum part on the B-side track “Shhh/Peaceful” to that on the Shaft soundtrack composed by Isaac Hayes. In other words, Cook can’t account for the sound of In a Silent Way on its own terms: it has to be contextualized either by Davis’s perceived desire to cross over to (white) rock fans, or by a thoroughly flattening comparison to Shaft, a film that stages a kind of interdicted blackness for laughs, and which, critically, has been reduced to simply a copy of the putatively white classic Hollywood noir (a genre that irreducibly stages blackness as crime, threat, or danger). Either way, Cook is concerned with In a Silent Way’s interface with whiteness, which reproduces Columbia Records’ capitalist concern for whiteness (and MGM’s too, vis-à-vis Shaft, which the studio distributed).
Davis, meanwhile, was following his musical desires into the future, without an abundance of concern about who his future listeners would be—a future that was realized on In a Silent Way, even if music critics, and the music business, have yet to catch up.
