Recorded in a single February 1969 session and sculpted into two side-long suites by producer Teo Macero, Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way opened the electric era: three keyboards, John McLaughlin’s understated guitar, Tony Williams’s hushed pulse, and a new idea of what a jazz record could be.  This project hands that watershed to a cast of Brooklyn’s most fearless improvisers, led by guitarist Vernon Reid.  Founder of Living Colour and co-founder of the Black Rock Coalition, Reid came up in Ronald Shannon Jackson’s Decoding Society and has spent four decades moving between rock, jazz, and the avant-garde without apology; his Spectrum Road project with Jack Bruce, Cindy Blackman Santana, and John Medeski already reanimated the Tony Williams Lifetime repertoire that shares DNA with these sessions.  In a Silent Way rewards exactly this kind of treatment.  Its long modal grooves and open textures were built for musicians who listen hard and commit fully, and its themes remain startlingly current: electronics as instrument, the studio as compositional tool, quiet as a radical act. Expect reverence for the source and none for its glass case.