How Miles Davis and Joe Zawinal live inside Bob Dylan’s 'Murder Most Foul'
Enter in a silent way and listen to a mashup of Bob Dylan and Miles Davis
The story of “In a Silent Way” is a story about authorship, transformation, and appropriation and inevitably Bob Dylan.
“In a Silent Way” itself was not simply “recorded” so much as constructed. The album emerged from various takes recorded during a three-hour session on February 18, 1969, at CBS 30th Street Studio’s Studio B in Manhattan. “Shhh/Peaceful” was credited solely to Davis, but the central framework of “In a Silent Way/It’s About That Time” originated in Zawinul’s composition “In a Silent Way,” later recorded in its original form on his own album Zawinul (1971).
Yet by the time Davis and producer Teo Macero had finished reshaping the material, the piece had become something quite different—stripped down, edited, rearranged, and re-authored through the Davis aesthetic.
What happened between Miles Davis, Teo Macero, and Joe Zawinul bears an uncanny resemblance to the way Dylan has often been accused of absorbing, reshaping, and ultimately re-signing the work of others into something ‘uniquely’ his.
The process for “In A Silent Way” itself reveals the tension between composition and possession. After Zawinul presented the tune to the group, it was rehearsed as it was originally written, but Davis wished for it to sound more rock-oriented and stripped the various chord changes to leave a more basic melody built around a pedal point (a sustained tone).
What Davis wanted was not fidelity to Zawinul’s harmonic sophistication but atmosphere, stasis, tension and mood. The complexity was reduced in favor of a suspended tonal center, a drifting, almost hypnotic openness. That transformation became central to the album’s revolutionary sound, but it also blurred the boundaries of ownership. Zawinul himself was reportedly dissatisfied with the changes.
Davis believed that Zawinul was never happy with his adaptation of “In a Silent Way,” but felt that the album would have been less successful had its original arrangement been kept.1
The most revealing accusation, however, concerns “It’s About That Time”:
“Zawinul claimed that he was responsible for the melodic bass line and descending melody of ‘It’s About That Time’ but was not credited; he blamed Macero for this, as he ‘always put things together so that it came out as if Miles had written it.’”2
This is where the comparison to Dylan becomes especially striking. Dylan’s work has long operated through a similar method of absorption and recombination. From traditional ballads, blues fragments, Civil War poetry, Beat cadences, folk melodies, Japanese novelists, Ovid, old interviews, and countless uncredited musical echoes. Critics call it theft; defenders call it collage.
Teo Macero’s editing of Davis parallels Dylan’s own curatorial authorship. In both cases, the “genius” is less a solitary creator than a gravitational force organizing preexisting materials into a new mythic structure. The final work bears the unmistakable signature of the artist.
This is why Dylan’s late composition “Murder Most Foul” feels almost like a brother to “In a Silent Way.” Both operate on alchemic proportions and both use ‘free time’. When Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul” opens with a bowed bass and harmonium, it could quite easily be the same song. It matches the suspended, hovering quality of Davis’s song with startling closeness: the bowed bass resonance, the distant splashes of keyboard and guitar-like textures which mirror Matt Chamberlain’s drums, the near-motionless harmonic field that nonetheless keeps subtly pivoting. The temporal suspension.
The sonic similarities are uncanny. “In a Silent Way” is defined by restraint, by instruments entering like fragments in a vast stillness. “Murder Most Foul” adopts the same approach. In fact the sessions for “Murder Most Foul” also seem to mirror those for “In A Silent Way,” one of editing and searching for the right sound, calling up various musicians and getting them to do their thing, finding the right combination of instruments to get the right sonic landscape. Dylan lays on his vocal and Miles his trumpet.
When pianist Alan Pasqua discussed “Murder Most Foul” in a 2021 interview with Flaggin’ Down The Double E’s Ray Padgett, he explicitly and astonishingly compared the piece to “A Love Supreme” by John Coltrane:
“I told Bob: ‘This is like [John Coltrane’s] A Love Supreme!’ He just kind of looked at me without saying anything, but it really is like A Love Supreme to me. ‘Murder Most Foul’ is so profound and I get a lot of enjoyment out of making music with him. He transcends any musical genre. It’s not rock, or folk, or pop. It’s just Bob, man.”
The comparison in this context is fascinating, Pasqua is not only identifying “Murder Most Foul” not merely as this huge set piece song, but as a kind of meditative jazz suite or spiritual invocation in the lineage of Coltrane’s late modal works. It reinforces the sonic parallels to “In a Silent Way,” the suspended harmony, ritual pacing, and atmosphere-over-progression structure that Dylan seems to absorb into the piece. But did he or did even Dylan already know that Coltrane’s collaborator (on Kind of Blue) and contemporary Miles Davis was an even closer match. And although we’ll never know, I do wonder if Dylan had “In A Silent Way” in mind and if he recognised how close Pasqua got to the bullseye.
By the conclusion of “Murder Most Foul,” Dylan has involked a sprawling archive of American music, including countless jazz songs and artists, turning the composition into a ghostly jukebox of collective cultural memory. The song itself is curation and assemblage, just like Macero’s tape edits for Davis. Davis might not be quoted explicitly in Dylan’s lyrics, but he’s there by association and maybe, just maybe, Miles is in the music itself, but in a silent way.
Here I put together the music from “In A Silent Way” with Dylan’s vocals to make explcit just how close they are to each other.
Sources:
P297, Davis, Miles; Troupe, Quincy (1990). Miles: The Autobiography. Simon & Schuster.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180223163106/http://www.miles-beyond.com/iaswbitchesbrew.htm
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Very interesting comparisons and I have long held the idea that Bob and Miles are very similar as bandleaders - show the band the material and let them go. I also hear the ancient traditions of incantation and chant over drones or repeated fragments of harmony that exist worldwide.
The (seemingly) improvisatory, stream of consciousness text of Murder Most Foul seems to sum up the America of the last 70 years.
Fascinating! I can never get enough of comparing and contrasting Dylan and Davis (playing in the hoodie invisible behind the piano last year - such a Miles move!) I know there's an anecdote about Dylan recording a 20 minute "handy dandy" that he intended to be stitched into a shorter song, explaining that he'd seen Miles Davis do it. Always assumed he meant this session, and when recently asked about Miles and Dylan referred to talking to him, I had to wonder if he'd swung by the Silent Way session! (There are enough verses of Handy Dandy in the archives to on for 20 minutes, but no outtake).