In A Silent Way by Miles Davis

My usual routine with these albums is to start listening with my morning coffee as I potter round the house and continue as I go out for a walk before work. Sometimes I’ll listen again as I’m jotting down my thoughts. Once in a (kind of) blue moon an album will go on repeat for the whole day. This is one of those.

This album marks the transition from modal jazz to the fusion sound that was to be fully realised in Bitches Brew a year later. The electric piano sounds of Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock dance around the funky electric guitar of John McLaughlin in as radical a departure from trad jazz as Dylan going electric a few years earlier.

The two sides of the album comprise two works, each made up of an introduction, a development of the theme and a reprise that returns to the start. I genuinely listened all day, finding new things each time and never tiring of them, sometimes zoning out and sometimes focusing on one instrument for a while.

A genuinely seminal album.