In a Silent Way

In a Silent Way is Joe Zawinul's tune. On the album the side-two suite is titled In a Silent Way/It's About That Time, with Zawinul credited for the first part and Davis for the second. Nat Adderley suggested the title while Zawinul was in Cannonball Adderley's band; Zawinul turned him down because he had promised it to Davis. The album was recorded on February 18, 1969 in a single three-hour session at the CBS 30th Street Studio, Studio B, in Manhattan, with Teo Macero producing and Stan Tonkel and Russ Payne engineering, and released by Columbia as CS 9875 on July 30, 1969.

The group first rehearsed the piece as written. Davis wanted a more rock-oriented sound and stripped the chord changes to a basic melody over a pedal point, reportedly telling John McLaughlin to play as if he were a novice. Zawinul disliked the arrangement, in which two chords were removed, and said that he had written parts of It's About That Time uncredited, blaming Macero. He recorded the original form on his own 1971 album Zawinul.

The suite and the players

Side two runs In a Silent Way 4:11, It's About That Time 11:27 and a reprise of In a Silent Way at 4:14, 19:52 in all. The players were Davis on trumpet, Wayne Shorter on soprano saxophone, John McLaughlin on electric guitar, Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock on electric piano, Zawinul on electric piano and organ, Dave Holland on bass and Tony Williams on drums; the sources do not say who plays on which track. The album reached number 134 on the Billboard 200, number 3 on the jazz album chart and number 40 on the R&B album chart, and was nominated for a Grammy in 1970.

Lester Bangs in Rolling Stone called it the kind of album that gives you faith in the future of music, and K. Leander Williams called it a proto-ambient masterpiece. Setlist.fm counts 67 plays by Miles Davis. The upload is a distributor-supplied track from the auto-generated Miles Davis - Topic channel; it is either the whole 19:52 side or a short edit of the title section, and its length was not checked.