Miles Davis
In A Silent Way

I'm 15, my parents are already in bed, I'm fiddling with the TV, and I catch this trumpet player playing something incredible. With him is my beloved Chick Corea... A concert fished out from who knows where and ended up in the arms of mamma Rai somehow. I am in a trance.

The next morning I rush to the record store across from my high school and tell the clerk about this trumpet player with Chick Corea. She smiles knowingly and pulls out “In a Silent Way”.
“It's brand new!” she tells me, “just released”.
Not true at all! The record had been out for a few years, but I didn't know that, so I bought it with my hard-earned 3500 lira and took it home.

And as the needle slides into the first groove, I begin to walk along Miles's silent road. And perhaps I haven't stopped yet.
Back then it was amazement for music so magical it seemed... impossible, later I understood it wasn't just about the ease of listening, but its abysmal depth.
Back then, the "names" impressed me (come on, this album has ALL of them: from Wayne Shorter to Chick, from Herbie Hancock to John McLaughlin, from Zawinul to Dave Holland: for someone raised on jazzrock, paradise), later I understood it wasn't just about names, but fingers, breath, hearts, and brains. I would get there after a thousand listens, but I would get there.

“In a Silent Way” is made of very few notes (compared to the furious, blinding kaleidoscope of “Bitches Brew”, for example) but what gives depth and emotion are precisely the silences, the pauses between one note and the next. Davis, immense, does not need to prove anything: he gives us no virtuosity, if by virtuosity we mean some lightning-speed scale, but an intensity and expressiveness that belongs only to the great. And his fellow travelers play along: we're talking about characters who at the “look how good I am” fair would all win first prize, yet they perfectly understand that on a silent road, you walk without making noise. This album is made of whispered phrases, forcing the ear to strain to understand: no one shouts on this record. Williams caresses the cymbals with sticks, rarely leaning on the drums, McLaughlin, Corea, and Hancock glide over strings and keys, and you have to listen closely to catch their barely suggested arpeggios, Shorter closes his eyes and breathes, calmly, through his tenor…

Davis is someone who has often shouted, before and after, but here he chooses to express himself softly. Who knows why. Maybe that day (February 18, 1969) he just felt like it. Maybe it was freezing cold in New York, perhaps it was snowing. Who knows…