Remember a Day

Tag: jazz

  • Miles Davis — Sketches of Spain

    Miles Davis — Sketches of Spain

    Studio Album  ·  Released July 18, 1960  ·  Columbia Records CL 1480

    Arranged and Conducted by Gil Evans  ·  Produced by Teo Macero and Irving Townsend

    Recorded: November 1959 and March 1960  ·  Columbia 30th Street Studio, New York City

    My copy: 1974 Columbia Reissue  ·  Purchased April 2025, Habitat for Humanity, Seaside CA

    The Object

    This one ranks among Miles Davis’s best works. Before the 1970s funk experiments, before the electric period, there was this — the third entry in the Gil Evans trilogy alongside Miles Ahead and Porgy and Bess, and in some ways the most personal of the three. It arrived right after Kind of Blue, which is to say it arrived at the apex of one of the most fertile periods any jazz musician has ever had. Miles was 34. He was at his peak.

    Sketches of Spain is an example of what gets called third stream music — an amalgamation of jazz improvisation and full orchestral arrangement. But that label doesn’t quite capture what happens when you actually sit with this record. The mood here is geographic, cinematic, emotional. It’s a sense of longing projected through trumpet into Spanish landscape. Miles made music for moods. On this one, the mood is an entire region of the world.

    I found this 1974 Columbia reissue at the Habitat for Humanity thrift shop in Seaside, California in April 2025. Whoever owned it before kept it well — the cover is clean, the wax still has its sheen. It’s a fine copy and it will stay in the collection. This is one of those records you know belongs in the collection as soon as you see it.

    I’ve played this album many times in headphones while working at the NSA building in Fort Gordon, Georgia. That context matters. This is music that transforms the space around you. Put it on and wherever you are — a government building, a small apartment, a car — becomes somewhere else. That kind of transportive quality is rare.

    On Sketches of Spain, Miles plays trumpet but you hear something other than trumpet. He mimics the human voice with an intimacy that is his particular genius, and on this record he also imitates — inhabits, really — the voice of a classical guitar. The way he rose to that challenge was through total immersion in his influences. He didn’t approach the Spanish material as an outsider. He lived inside it until it became personal.

    “That one is a motherfucker.”

    Don Cheadle, playing Miles Davis in Miles Ahead (2015), says that about this record. He’s not wrong. Hearing him say this in the film, I now operate on a half-confident belief that this may have been Davis’s own favorite of his albums.

    “After we finished working on Sketches of Spain I didn’t have nothing inside of me. I was drained of all emotion and I didn’t know what to hear that music after I go through playing all that hard shit.”

    This tells you everything about what it cost him.

    The Music

    The Miles and Gil Evans Relationship

    Miles Davis and Gil Evans first met in 1947. Gil was 35, Miles was 21. Evans brought a classical and contemporary orchestral sensibility into the world of bebop at a moment when that world didn’t know it needed one. His apartment near the St. Regis Hotel in New York was a gathering place for artists — a room where ideas crossed over and contaminated each other in the best possible way, and Miles was one of the regular presences there.

    For Miles, Evans was something of a mentor — a man fourteen years older who understood both the jazz tradition and the European orchestral one, and who could build a bridge between them with an arranger’s precision and a composer’s imagination. Their collaborative trilogy — Miles Ahead (1957), Porgy and Bess (1958), Sketches of Spain (1960) — represents one of the sustained high points in recorded music of any kind. Evans brought functional perfection to these sessions. Miles brought the fire.

    The African connection to the Spanish material was not incidental to either of them. The Moorish influence on Andalusian music — the trace of North Africa and the Arabic world running through flamenco — was something both Evans and Miles were thinking about. Miles dove into Spanish folklore, flamenco, and the historical connections between Africa and Spain with the same depth of research he applied to everything. The Africa-by-way-of-Spain line in Western music was in both their heads. Miles made it personal by immersing himself so fully that the material stopped being research and started being instinct.

    The Inspiration

    In 1958, Miles was taken reluctantly, by his wife Frances Davis to see a company of Spanish dancers performing under choreographer Roberto Iglesias. The experience changed him. Back in New York, he bought every Spanish flamenco record he could find. Then he went deeper into Spanish folklore, into the traditional music, into the field recordings Alan Lomax had made in Spain. What you hear on this record is the result of that immersion. This record months of listening and absorbing before a single note was played in the studio.

    Miles always did this. One of the things I’ve come to understand about him is that underneath the iconoclasm and the myth was a serious researcher. He dove into rabbit holes with discipline. He didn’t play a tradition he hadn’t studied. On Sketches of Spain, that commitment is audible.

    Production

    Irving Townsend and Teo Macero were assigned by Columbia to produce the album, but Macero did most of the work. Teo Macero was already legendary. He was a saxophonist with real chops and a producer with serious ears. His collaboration with Miles on this record became the foundation for a working partnership that would last fifteen years and extend through Miles’s most experimental electric work.

    Miles’s approach in the studio was demanding and specific. He wanted his musicians to know the material by heart. He wanted them to read it, learn it, internalize it, and then play it from a place of genuine competence rather than sight-reading. The idea was freedom through preparation. You have to know the music completely before you can let go of it.

    The sessions were difficult. There was stopping and starting. Miles reportedly drank and doubted himself, saying at one point: ‘I always manage to try something I can’t do.’ That sentence is either the most honest thing a creative person can say or the most characteristic thing Miles Davis ever said. Eventually the sessions completed, and what they produced was one of the most cohesive records of his career.

    Trombonist Frank Rehak appears on this record as he did on Miles Ahead and Porgy and Bess — a constant in the Evans sessions, and a player Miles fought hard to have on this date, working through scheduling complications to get him there. Rehak’s presence across all three Evans collaborations gives the trilogy a tonal consistency.

    The Tracks

    Listening notes — January 11, 2026

    Side One

    1. Concierto de Aranjuez

    Recorded November 15 and 20, 1959  ·  Adagio movement

    The Concierto de Aranjuez was written in 1939 by Joaquín Rodrigo, a Spanish composer who was blind from the age of three and who wrote the piece for guitar and orchestra. The origin story of it ending up on this record is straightforward and audacious in equal measure: Miles heard the adagio movement and decided he could play the guitar part with his horn. Only the adagio portion appears here — the slow, central movement — and it occupies most of Side One. We can all be grateful for that decision. It is a powerful work.

    Rodrigo, famously, did not appreciate Miles’s version when he first heard it. Miles’s response was essentially: wait until the royalty checks arrive.

    Listening to this is like being placed deep in the Spanish countryside. Not the tourist version — somewhere real and quiet and ancient. It transports you regardless of where you actually are. I’ve heard it in Georgia, in California, in various unremarkable rooms, and each time the room disappears. The middle section with the castanets and flutes is one of my favorite passages. The final build is dramatic in the best possible way — peak emotional impact from a jazz trumpet player playing a classical guitar concerto.

    2. Will o’ the Wisp

    Recorded March 10, 1960

    Written by Manuel de Falla, another Spanish composer, from his ballet El amor brujo — which translates as ‘Bewitching Love.’ De Falla wrote some of this material as processional music, and parts of it were associated with traditional Spanish ceremony. It’s a different texture entirely from the Concierto — bouncy, tinny, slightly playful, with a galloping quality that puts you somewhere different. If the Concierto puts you in the countryside at dusk, Will o’ the Wisp puts you on horseback in the morning. Short, vivid.

    Side Two

    1. The Pan Piper

    Recorded March 10, 1960

    Based on a Phrygian folk melody from the Lomax field recordings — a shepherd’s tune, stripped down and made strange by Miles’s trumpet. The source material here comes directly from the traditional Spanish folk music Miles had been studying. It’s the quietest thing on the record, and in that quiet there’s something genuinely haunting.

    2. Saeta

    Recorded March 10, 1960

    A saeta is a Spanish religious a cappella genre — a spontaneous, passionate vocal outpouring performed during Semana Santa processions at Easter, sung from balconies or from the crowd as the religious floats pass below. It is street music with the intensity of prayer. Miles plays the trumpet in the role of that voice. He is the lone cry rising above the procession while the orchestra surrounds him as the crowd and the street and the weight of the occasion.

    Saeta and Solea are the two original works on this record, both inspired by Spanish tradition rather than adapted from existing compositions. They are gifts from Miles Davis to his inspiration. That he could produce work of this quality while operating from outside the tradition he was honoring is one of the most impressive things about this record. He earned the right through the research and the immersion.

    3. Solea

    Recorded March 10, 1960

    The closer. Contains a ten-minute trumpet solo from Miles, and what a ten minutes it is. Solea is a foundational form of flamenco — serious, deep, traditionally associated with sorrow and dignity in equal measure. The drums sway underneath, the orchestra provides the weight of tradition, and Miles plays above it all with the assurance of someone who has made this music completely his own. Bullfighter music. Trips to Spain from the living room.

    Closing

    A key record in every serious collection, as far as I’m concerned. This is not background music. It’s not mood setting in the ambient sense. You don’t put on Miles Davis to fill a room. You can put him on with intention, and this record rewards that intention fully. You can feel the inspiration. What Miles said about being drained after the sessions is audible in the performances. He left everything in the studio.

    For some listeners this record sits right next to Kind of Blue in terms of greatness. I understand that argument. It’s a different kind of achievement. Where Kind of Blue opened a modal door for jazz to walk through, Sketches of Spain crossed a geographic and cultural boundary that shouldn’t have been crossable at all. It represents a peak of the Evans collaboration and a serious new direction simultaneously. Both things are true. It holds them without contradiction.

    Whoever left this copy at the Habitat for Humanity did me a favor.

    Thanks for reading.

    RTR

  • Miles Davis – Kind of Blue

    Studio Album  | August 17, 1959 | Columbia Records

    Recorded March and April 1959 | Produced by Irving Townsend

    My pressing: Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab (MOFI) Box Set, 2021  ·  45 RPM  ·  Purchased on Discogs, 2026

    For many people, this is their first jazz album. It wasn’t mine — but it became one of the most important records in my understanding of what jazz could be.

    I’ve been with Miles for a long time. I read his autobiography around 2018 or 2019, trying to understand the man and his music together. That book was my real introduction — not just to Miles, but to the wider world of jazz. Alongside Coltrane and Mingus, he forms the triumvirate that defines what I think of when I think of jazz greatness. Miles is the one I’ve followed most closely, given the most listening effort, and what comes back from that is a tremendous satisfaction. He was one of the best instrumentalists and pure musicians who ever lived. Full stop.

    I’d owned Kind of Blue on CD for years. Putting off the vinyl was intentional — I wanted an honest copy, something that did the record justice. The MOFI box set from 2021 was the answer. I bought it on Discogs in 2026, arrived open but in solid condition and ready to spin. The box is well made. The records are high quality. Each piece of music gets its own side or half-side at 45 RPM, which gives every track room to breathe. It’s a serious presentation of a serious album, and it sounds like it.

    Historical Context

    1959 was a year of radical divergence in jazz. John Cage could have been speaking about the music of that year when he said, “We are all going in different directions.” Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come, Charles Mingus’s Mingus Ah Um, and Dave Brubeck’s Time Out all arrived that year — the latter two on Columbia, same label as Miles. Four dramatically different statements about how to organize jazz music. Each avant-garde in its own way. Each arguing for the technical possibilities and aesthetic reach of the music. Kind of Blue landed in the middle of all that, and somehow became the most enduring of them all.

    The album was recorded at Columbia’s 30th Street Studio in New York — a converted church with natural acoustics that Columbia relied on heavily for both jazz and classical recordings throughout the fifties and sixties. The room is part of the sound. That warmth, that space, that sense of air around every instrument — some of it is the playing, and some of it is the building.

    Miles was always a chameleon. Jimmy Cobb said he craved change, that he lived in the unknown and didn’t give any care about the consequences. By 1959, Miles had already moved through bebop, the Birth of the Cool sessions, and the hard bop of his First Great Quintet. Kind of Blue was a deliberate move away from all of that. The switch to modal improvisation was a rejection of the dense chord changes of hard bop — Miles wanted open space. He wanted his musicians to invent in real time, without the furniture of a complex harmonic map getting in the way.

    It’s as much a Bill Evans record as it is a Miles Davis record. The two men had been working through modal ideas together for some time before the sessions — Evans introduced Miles to Ravel and Khachaturian, and their conversations about scales, space, and color shaped the album’s entire conception. Miles said plainly: “I planned that album around the piano playing of Bill Evans.” Evans wrote the liner notes. He developed the frameworks for several tracks. Miles retained sole authorship credit, a decision that remains contested, but the collaboration was real and deep.

    The classical influence runs throughout. Debussy, Ravel, Bartók, Stravinsky, Khachaturian — Miles spent six months listening carefully to Khachaturian before these sessions and told Nat Hentoff in 1958 that what intrigued him was “all the different scales he uses — they’re different from the usual Western scales.” That search for new scalar resources is exactly what Kind of Blue delivered.

    None of these tunes were written out beforehand in any conventional sense. Miles arrived at the studio with sketches — outlines, scales, frameworks — and talked the band through them on the day. No rehearsals. First takes. What you hear on this record is musicians encountering the music for the first time and finding their way through it together. That’s the spontaneity you feel when you listen. It isn’t a myth. It’s documented.

    The Musicians

    Seven people walked into 30th Street Studio in the spring of 1959. The average age was 28.

    Miles Davis — Trumpet — Age 32

    Leader and composer. The King of Cool. Miles plays trumpet throughout, frequently with a Harmon mute, which gives his tone that intimate, almost whispered quality that defines much of this album. He was the architect — the one who set the parameters, chose the musicians, and created the conditions for what was about to happen. He didn’t always give detailed instructions. He didn’t have to. He knew who was in the room and trusted them. His solos on Kind of Blue are lessons in restraint: he gives you just enough, holds back just enough, and makes the space between the notes feel as important as the notes themselves.

    John Coltrane — Tenor Saxophone — Age 32

    Coltrane was developing what would become known as his “sheets of sound” approach — dense, cascading, harmonically complex runs that were the opposite of everything Kind of Blue was asking for. The album caught him at a crossroads. Modal playing required him to slow down, work with less, and resist his instincts. In his own words: “There was a time in the past that he was devoted to multichord structures… But now it seemed that he was moving in the opposite direction to the use of fewer and fewer chord changes.” The tension between his instincts and Miles’s vision is audible, especially on Flamenco Sketches — and it’s part of what makes his playing here so compelling. He wasn’t fully comfortable, and it shows in the best possible way. Within a few years he would record A Love Supreme and reshape jazz again.

    Cannonball Adderley — Alto Saxophone — Age 30

    Cannonball joined the group in 1958 and remained something of a legend in this lineup. His playing is warmer and more rooted in the blues than Coltrane’s, and he functions as the center of gravity between two extremes. Where Miles holds back and Coltrane pushes outward, Cannonball swings. His solos have a naturalness and ease that ground the record. His work on Freddie Freeloader in particular is some of the most joyful playing on the album.

    Bill Evans — Piano — Five Tracks — Age 28

    The essential collaborator. Evans had actually left Miles’s working band before the sessions — Wynton Kelly was the regular pianist — but Miles brought him back specifically for Kind of Blue. His impressionistic approach to the piano, rooted as much in Debussy and Ravel as in jazz, gave the album its particular atmospheric quality. His piece “Peace Piece,” recorded in 1958, provided the direct foundation for Flamenco Sketches — Miles heard it, liked it, and the morning of the second session the two men went to Miles’s apartment and worked out the five-scale cycle together at the piano. Evans sketched the scales out on a small piece of staff paper and wrote the instruction: “play in the sound of these scales.” Jimmy Cobb said afterward that the music sounded more like what Bill would play than what Miles would play. It’s an observation about how deep the influence ran.

    Wynton Kelly — Piano — One Track — Age 27

    Kelly plays on exactly one track — Freddie Freeloader — and it’s the most traditionally swinging moment on the album. His earthier, more blues-rooted style suited the 12-bar blues structure of the track better than Evans’s impressionism. Evans himself reportedly felt he had little to add to that particular song, and Kelly’s presence there is exactly right. The contrast between his playing and Evans’s across the album is one of the subtle pleasures of listening closely.

    Paul Chambers — Bass — Age 23

    Chambers had been working with Miles for four years by the time these sessions took place, and his opening bass line on So What — stating the melody before Miles even enters — is one of the most remarkable moments on the record. He was 23 years old. His playing holds the album together with remarkable poise for someone that young, and the warmth of his tone is a constant throughout. He died in 1969 at 33, largely without the recognition he deserved.

    Jimmy Cobb — Drums — Age 30

    Cobb joined the band after Philly Joe Jones departed and brought exactly what this music needed — restraint, openness, and a willingness to serve the moment rather than dominate it. He played brushes rather than sticks across much of the album, and Miles’s instruction was simple: keep it light, keep it open. Cobb honored that completely. He spoke about the sessions extensively in the Birth of the Cool documentary. He was still performing into his eighties and passed away in 2020 at 91, the last surviving member of the Kind of Blue sessions.

    The Music

    All tracks recorded at Columbia’s 30th Street Studio, New York City

    Record 1

    So What  |  March 2, 1959  |  Session 1

    The great opening. Chambers states the melody in the bass before anyone else plays a note — an extraordinary compositional choice that sets the tone immediately. When Miles enters, he gives you just enough. It’s a “so what” solo in the best sense — unhurried, deliberate, almost indifferent in the coolest possible way. Coltrane’s solo opens up and goes somewhere freer. Cannonball follows with something more down to earth. He’s the middle between the two extremes of Miles and Coltrane, and that dynamic plays out across the whole record. The sound quality on this MOFI pressing on this track is superb.

    Freddie Freeloader  |  March 2, 1959  |  Session 1

    The blues. Wynton Kelly on piano instead of Evans, and you feel the shift immediately — something earthier and more settled in the groove. The blues structure lets the musicians move around and feel comfortable in the way that a standard blues always does. Miles’s solo here has more joy to it, a little more generosity, his horn right up in the mic. And the way Coltrane enters this track — huge, insisting his voice into the recording — is one of the great moments on the album. Cannonball delivers another carefree solo. Kelly is exactly right throughout.

    Blue in Green  |  March 2, 1959  |  Session 1

    Slow down and settle in. Miles’s intro feels like a quiet stroll around the recording room — no urgency, no statement to make, just a presence. Bill Evans’s piano is the shining moment of this record for me. There’s a depth of emotion in his playing on this track that’s hard to articulate. He wrote the music. You can hear that it came from somewhere real.

    Record 2

    All Blues  |  March 2, 1959  |  Session 1

    A 12-bar blues in 6/8 — Miles took the standard blues form and gave it a waltz feel, which opens the whole thing up. There’s an urgency to it, a forward motion that’s different from what came before. Miles floats on top of that rhythm wave. One of the real pleasures of this album is hearing how distinct the three voices are — Miles, Coltrane, Adderley — and All Blues is a good place to sit with that. They’re three entirely different personalities contributing to the same conversation.

    Flamenco Sketches  |  April 22, 1959  |  Session 2

    My favorite track. It reaches somewhere the others don’t. The structure is unlike anything else on the record — five scales, each soloist moving through them at their own pace, no fixed time, no formal repetition. Beauty out of improvisation. I don’t always follow the jazz mechanics and theory, but I know what this sounds like. It’s music to think by. It’s music that moves the way thought moves — associative, patient, occasionally surprising. It reminds me of Sketches of Spain, another Miles record I love, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

    The ending is somewhat abrupt, but it tails off beautifully. It ends the way a good conversation ends — not with a conclusion, just a quiet agreement to stop talking.

    Closing

    This is the record that lifts any situation. It’s romantic and direct. It works in the foreground and the background. I hear something new every time I play it. It’s perfect for any occasion and takes me somewhere that makes me appreciate art in the best way — which is quietly, without needing to explain it.

    I’m not a jazz scholar. I’m a lover of music and musicians, and what I appreciate is the story of how artists move through their lives and what they leave behind. The story of Kind of Blue, and Miles Davis’s life leading up to it and after it, is a perfect distillation of what it looks like when an artist commits fully to doing his own thing. An exhibition of the unknown. A drift into the new.

    In some ways Miles was never the same after this record. It shot him into a wider popularity and defined this period of his career. He kept doing great things — the electric years, Sketches of Spain, Bitches Brew — but Kind of Blue stands apart. If you’re coming to Miles for the first time, this is where you start. If you’ve been with him a long time, this is where you return.

    Essential item in the collection. I can put this on for anyone, any time, and the day will be better than it was before.

    RTR

    Further Exploration

    3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool — James Kaplan

    Miles: The Autobiography — Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe

    Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece — Ashley Kahn

    Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool — Documentary, dir. Stanley Nelson, 2019