10. Miles DavisIn A Silent Way
I like them all, but this is the only one of his that I really love. It’s just a moment in time, it’s a happening. The stars were aligned, and that combination of energies in a room, they were just happening. A lot of jazz I just straightforward don’t like – you can only like what you like, music can be very whimsical like that – but my friend had this record, and he played it one evening on the record player when we were staying up late. And I was sitting there, smoking a cigarette in the half-light, listening to this thinking, ‘Oh my god’. It was the perfect time: three o’clock in the morning, and the lamplight was coming in off the street. According to Wikipedia, the genre is ‘jazz fusion, space music’. It was produced by Teo Macero, and recorded in one session. It’s regarded as Davis’ first fusion recording, and was met with controversy upon its release from critics. It’s a collaboration with John McLaughlin, a British virtuoso guitarist who had only brought out his own debut album Extrapolation one month earlier. He was a member of The Tony Williams Lifetime, and Tony Williams brought McLaughlin to Miles Davis’ house the night before the session. So they’d just met. That’s mad. But he told him to turn up at the studio the next day. So it really was a happening. Williams sent Larry Young home because he was scared of Miles Davis stealing his entire band. Joe Zawinul ended up playing organ instead, and it sounds bloody great. What I love is an album that’s a moment in time, that’s captured and crystallised forever, where it’s hard to break up the songs.
