I am 15 years old, my parents are in bed, hacking away at the TV and spout this trumpeter playing something incredible. With him is my beloved Chick Corea ... catch a concert somewhere and finished in the arms of mother Rai somehow. I'm in a trance.
The next morning I rush in the record shop opposite the school and tell the clerk of this trumpeter with Chick Corea. She smiles with a knowing air and pulls me out "In a Silent Way." "It's new trinca!" He says, "just come out." Not true! The disc is out for a few years, but I do not know, I buy with my hard-earned 3500 pounds and taking it home with me.
And as the needle slides into the first groove, I start to walk down the quiet street of Miles. And maybe I have not stopped.
Then it was so amazing for music magic by ... seem impossible, then I realized it was not just a matter of easy listening, but of a deep abyss. So impressed me the "names" (come on, on this record are all there: from Wayne Shorter to Chick, by Herbie Hancock John McLaughlin, Dave Holland from Zawinul: to come up with a jazzrock heaven), then I realized that was not only a question of names, but the fingers of breath, heart and brain. We'd arrived after a thousand plays, but we'd arrived.
"In a Silent Way" is made very few notes (compared to the furious, blinding kaleidoscope of "Bitches Brew", so to speak) but what gives depth and emotion it is the silences, the expectations between a note and another. Davis, immense, did not need to prove anything: it gives us no virtuosity for virtuosity if you want some scale to the speed of light, but its intensity and expressiveness that is only great. And his fellow travelers are at play: we are talking about the characters of the show "look how good I am" wins the first prize and instead understand perfectly well that on a quiet street you walk quietly. It's an album of whispered phrases, this, that force the ear to stretch to include: no screaming, on this record. Wiliams caress dishes with chopsticks, you almost never rests on drums, McLaughlin, Corea and Hancock glide on their keyboards, and you must listen carefully to understand their arpeggios just mentioned, Shorter and closes his eyes when breathing, serene in its content ... Davis is one who has often shouted, before and after, but here it chooses to express himself softly. Who knows why. Perhaps that day (February 18, 1969) did so. Maybe it was bitterly cold in New York, maybe it was snowing, who knows ...
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