E.S.P.

The piece opens in a kind of suspended animation — a floating quality, harmonically ambiguous, the melody arriving as if transmitted from somewhere beyond ordinary musical logic. Wayne Shorter wrote this for the Miles Davis Quintet at the moment when that group was reinventing what a jazz ensemble could do, and the music wears the experiment lightly, as if this way of playing had always been the obvious approach. What strikes the ear first is how much the rhythm section contributes to the compositional texture: Tony Williams plays in, around, and against the beat simultaneously; Ron Carter's bass seems to be negotiating with the time rather than stating it; Herbie Hancock's piano voicings appear in unexpected places. The result is a music that feels telepathic — five musicians responding to each other faster than conscious thought, navigating a piece that leaves enormous space for collective invention. The emotional quality is difficult to name: it's not quite mysterious, not quite melancholy, not quite joyful — it occupies some interstice between these states where the air is thinner and the view is wider. Miles Davis plays the melody with his characteristic economy and authority, each note placed as if it were the only possible choice, which makes the daring of the whole enterprise feel inevitable rather than risky. This is music for sustained, private listening — for headphones in the dark, for the kind of attention that eventually dissolves the boundary between listener and sound.