Miles hispanisant!

The fruitful collaboration between Miles Davis and Gil Evans does not date from this album: earlier already, the two creators had achieved Miles Ahead and Porgy And Bess, let alone The Birth Of The Cool. Sketches Of Spain released in 1960. It has five beaches that pay tribute to the Spanish traditional music, including flamenco, with Manuel De Falla and Joaquin Rodrigo. The Aranjuez concerto, composed by him, opens the album. A long musical meditation over sixteen minutes, the theme will serve as a pretext to Miles Davis to improvise.
His way of playing completely restores a clean atmosphere to the sounds of Spanish music: his phrasing and timbre of his trumpet are new to that previously listened to Miles Davis. In the preparation of studio sessions, he absorbed the musical styles found in Spain. The idea to resume the Aranjuez concerto came to him while listening to a guitar for a friend's release. The theme was so obsessed that he could not resist the offer to Gil Evans and he makes a specific arrangement. Gil Evans will indeed rewrite the concerto for him, adding an additional center section. And castanets. This is the first instrument you hear; then a trio of trumpets, trombones and flutes sharing musical space, interspersed with a tambourine, eventually line the agreements on which Miles Davis will resonate the main theme.
Gradually trumpet improvisations support them; these are punctuated by skilful orchestrations that sometimes show fragments of the theme. A rhythmic jazz climate emerges; then a lull allows Miles Davis to play again the theme and interact with different instruments. A ternary rhythmic punctuation serves break to start a new sound board. The bass ostinato sounds a loop he improvises modally. Then calm returns. The Gil Evans arrangements provide multiple combinations conducive to evoke images and colors from which Miles Davis can find inspiration, as when the main subject is re-exposed crescendo, to settle down again and move towards the end.
"Will O'The Wisp" is a relatively slow piece and brief, three times, a composition adapted for a ballet of Manuel De Falla: "El Amor Brujo". The song is haunting, hypnotic. "The Pan Piper" has the same characteristics. It starts without tempo set to install insidiously repetitive and obsessive listening, a kind of gravity against which the listener can do nothing. This sense of lethargy that music suggests an abandonment grows at a slow descent to caeur sound and its side effects. The introduction of "Saeta" resonates drum and military music. A call to come out of a coma to see clearly. But soon all blurs again. The tempo is always slow, dragging, unperturbed. Then, military music reappears. Change of pace and end of the song. "Solea," as the beginning of the album, the album closes with a long piece. The harp, previously shy, is heard in the introduction that stops quickly. This time the tempo is faster than previous parts. Miles Davis improvised amid the Gil Evans orchestrations. The soleá is a basic form of flamenco approaching the spirit of the blues.
Sketches Of Spain is actually a typical example of an appropriate use of the principles of arrangements from symphonic classical music and modal jazz. The Phrygian mode that is found in most Spanish music is extensively distilled throughout the disc. The time lent itself to that kind of aesthetic research. Indeed, the jazz of the fifties was the field of experiments trying to cross jazz and Western classical music. This desire was already there at the time of The Birth Of The Cool by the entry of instruments classical orchestras in the size of a jazz band. The specter of Gershwin has regularly tapped minds in the jazz community. Whether the Modern Jazz Quartet, training of George Russell or musical complicity of Miles Davis with Gil Evans, all of these attempts - often cataloged as the Third Stream - could not fail to interest a Miles Davis always anxious and eager for innovations sights. Its sound paste, working in the economy and the care given to the tone and nuances, is one of the major features of his playing style on the trumpet.
As he said himself during the recording sessions, "the melody is so pregnant that there is nothing to add. If you try to play bebop above, you do not understand. What I need to do here is to connect things together, make them significant in the notes that I play around them. " The Kind Of Blue album, recorded the same year as Sketches Of Spain, ended with a composition of Miles Davis that spoke volumes about his desires to Spain: "Flamenco Sketches". A harbinger of the album part that concerns us here. The Miles Davis strength is having been able to capture and reproduce a seemingly unusual music for an African-American musician. The jazz musician Charles Mingus was one of the first to have integrated this musical genre in his compositions (see the disk Tijuana Moods, released three years earlier, in 1957). Miles Davis, accompanied by Gil Evans, expanded exploration in its own way. That of a jazz without borders. A hispanic jazz that inspires some jazz musicians, including Chick Corea and his famous composition "Spain" which also includes the introduction of Aranjuez concerto. Indispensable!