Tuesday, August 28, 2012

#568 Miles Davis - In a Silent Way

Nineteen sixty motherfucking nine. So many albums out of that year. Goddamn.

It's a pair of sidelong epics from Miles Davis, the breadth of whose innovations I'm still getting my head around. Minimal, repetitive, everything slinks and creeps around, with some obscure purpose that prevents the tempting "meandering" from being the right word for it. Trumpet and organ licks drift in and out of cool empty halls like noisy ghosts and are blown out by unseen breezes. On side B's In a Silent Way / It's About that Time, jazzy guitar walks through memories of discordant organ turns, and by the end things have gotten downright post-rock, as the house itself blows away and organs sketch reeds blowing over misty predawn marshes.

A jazz-not-jazz outing that is downright listenable for being so strange, soothing and agitating in all the right balances 4/5

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