No other Miles Davis album lingers in the memory quite like his 1969 masterpiece, In a Silent Way. It haunts you like a failed romance. Miles himself actually plays very little on the album, but his every note hits home. Every aching or bluesy or just plain beautiful phrase that he plays lodges in your mind like a Marvin Gaye ballad or a James Brown riff.

After 32 years, In a Silent Way still packs an emotional wallop, but the outrage and the controversy that greeted John McLaughlin with his electric guitar, Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock on Fender Rhodes pianos, and the insistent funky beat of Tony Williams on a Miles Davis album is long gone. Today, most jazz listeners accept the presence of electric instruments and rock/funk rhythms as part of jazz, but these elements perplexed and alarmed critics and fans alike when Miles dropped the album without warning on his unsuspecting audience.

As Columbia/Legacy’s new three-CD set The Complete "In a Silent Way" Sessions shows, Davis had been developing his new ideas in the studio over an intensive six-month period between September 1968 and February 1969, beginning with the arrival of Corea and bassist Dave Holland for the quintet’s Filles de Kilimanjaro album. Most of the material heard in the set has been issued before on various compilations, but there are a few previously unissued tracks, including a half-hour "The Ghetto Walk," with drummer Joe Chambers, and a brilliant version of Joe Zawinul’s "Early Minor." For real Miles fanatics, the raw material for the final, edited version of In a Silent Way offers a fascinating glimpse into the process producer Teo Macero used to create one of Miles Davis’s classic albums.

Even before these sessions, the young Davis rhythm section, especially drummer Tony Williams, was pushing Miles toward rock and funk. Throughout the set, Williams implies rock and funk grooves but holds onto the rhythmic elasticity and interactivity of jazz, manipulating dynamics and accenting the beat with vicious cymbal slashes and thundering fills and rolls. Betty Mabry, a soul singer whom Davis would soon marry, was also hipping him to new developments in pop music, especially black pop music by James Brown and Sly and the Family Stone. And the psychedelic blues of Jimi Hendrix is a clear inspiration — reissue producer Bob Belden notes similarities between Davis’s "Mademoiselle Mabry" and Hendrix’s "The Wind Cries Mary."

The Fender Rhodes electric piano, anathema to acoustic-jazz fans at the time, also helped form a sonic bridge across which Davis could carry funk-rock elements into jazz. On a track like "Ascent," you can sense him searching for trumpet sounds to match Corea’s dark, dissonant accents and Hancock’s softer colors and more flowing approach. The sound of the Fenders somehow recalls Gil Evans orchestrations, and when Miles finds the right note, a sense of the past cushions the shock of the new. Shorter abandons his tenor completely after the November 27, 1968, session in favor of the soprano sax. His pinched intensity on the smaller horn also meshes well with the new electric sound. Everything was emerging from Williams’s rhythm and the textures of the electric keyboards.

Davis stole one other move from pop music — post-production editing to shape the final work. Prior to this album, a jazz record was simply the documentation of what happened in the studio. In a Silent Way changed that. Tape rolled continuously while the band were in the studio, then Macero compiled a highlights tape from which he extracted the final album. These rough drafts are included in the set for comparison with the final versions. By today’s standards, many of Macero’s splices are crude; the transition from "It’s About That Time" back to "In a Silent Way" is jarring, to say the least. But his reshaping of "Shhh/Peaceful" is masterful, and it’s all quite fascinating to follow the changes.

The music on In a Silent Way and the even more ambitious Bitches Brew was both revolutionary and accessible, with enough references to popular music to give listeners something to hold onto while the band pushed the formal limits of jazz. The impact rippled out in countless directions. Jazz would never be the same — jazz-rock fusion was here to stay. But in the years immediately following these albums, you can also hear the Davis influence as far afield as Celtic rocker Van Morrison’s Common One and salsa innovator Eddie Palmieri’s Live at the University of Puerto Rico. Today, it’s hard to imagine Medeski Martin & Wood or any number of jam bands without the example of these late-’60s Miles albums. Not bad for a musical revolution that started not with an explosion but, well, in a silent way.