In a Silent Way: two album sides that Teo Macero stretched with copies

In 1996, at a conference on Miles Davis, producer Teo Macero described a problem he faced on In a Silent Way. By his account he had 30 to 35 reels of quarter-inch master tape and needed two album sides. He told Davis to come down to the editing room, and they spent most of a day cutting the material down to two reels, each about eight and a half minutes long.

Then, Macero said, Davis began to leave. “That’s my record,” he recalled the trumpeter saying. Macero told him that a record that short would get them both attacked, and asked for a couple of days. His solution was to copy short excerpts and use them to fill the missing time. In his telling, eight and a half or nine minutes grew to eighteen and a half or twenty, and he did the same on the second side.

A careful listener, Macero said, would hear many repeats without recognising them as repeats; it sounds like one continuous song and one continuous performance. The official Miles Davis site confirms the splicing itself, naming “Shhh/Peaceful” in particular: it describes repeated spliced sections, the same performance looped in post-production, and says Davis was fine with it. It is less sure the repeats went unnoticed, calling them hard to miss and the idea controversial with some critics. The same text notes that even overdubbing was frowned upon in 1969 jazz.

Treat the numbers as recollection, not bookkeeping: Macero was speaking nearly three decades later, and the sources do not say which passages repeat or how often. The principle is still clear. A phrase that returns on the record may not have been played twice; it may have been played once and used again by someone who decided it belonged there.