242: Sketches of Spain, by Miles Davis & Gil Evans

Miles Davis & Gil Evans (USA/Canada)
Sketches of Spain (1960)
5 tracks, 42 minutes
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Although Miles Davis had been defining and revolutionising jazz for a decade when he made this record (and he would continue to do so until his death in the 1990s), Sketches of Spain was his first large-scale experimental work. And large-scale it is – his stripped back quartet of Paul Chambers on bass, Jimmy Cobb on drums and Elvin Jones on percussion is joined by a 22 piece orchestra, arranged and conducted by Gil Evans.

With an orchestra comes orchestral music, and this album is one of the best examples of orchestral jazz to date. All the way through the album, the amount of actual ‘jazz’ – in terms of a definable musical style – is surprisingly small. Instead, the dominant sounds are of classical music and orchestrations based on Spanish folk music. Most notably, the pièce de résistance is a performance of the Rodrigo’s ‘Concierto de Aranjuez,’ second movement. While the piece is certainly an arrangement and does exhibit jazz vibes now and then (although only in a couple of short sections), it is also remarkably true to the original piece, and played with the utmost reverence by Miles, who takes the original’s solo guitar parts on his flugelhorn and trumpet.

The genius of Miles Davis is that whatever music he plays, he makes it Miles music. It’s a subtle manipulation of context that allows him to achieve this. In a way, when I listen to this album, I perceive it as the equal and opposite of the works of George Gershwin. Whereas Gershwin took jazz and contextualised it as classical music, on Sketches of Spain, Miles took classical music and contextualised it as jazz. It's not even that he necessarily played the classical music in a jazz way, but the whole fact that he was Miles Davis means that this music was always going to be considered as jazz, no matter what he came out with. Therefore, when he releases an album of folkloric-inspired classical music, we listen to it in a different way, our ears are already attuned to expect one thing and the record gives us, mostly, something else. That way, the classical exists in the jazz context regardless of its own style, and it causes us to think about the sounds in a different way. In his own way, Miles made this music jazz, just by telling us it was.