Remember a Day

Tag: rock

  • 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

  • Muddy Waters – The Best of Muddy Waters

    Muddy Waters – The Best of Muddy Waters

    Compilation | April 1958 | Chess Records

    “He lived on the Stovall plantation, three or four miles outside Clarksdale, in a cabin that doubled as a good time place, a juke house, on weekends. He made the best moonshine whiskey in the vicinity. Sometimes he played guitar in a little country string band, sometimes he played with a partner, and sometimes he played alone. His name was McKinley Morganfield, but everybody knew him as Muddy Waters.”

    My fascination with Muddy Waters has been part of my life since my first deep thinking on the blues began. If you get serious about this music, you’ll be led to Muddy eventually — it’s inevitable. He’s one of the originators, but what separates him from a lot of foundational figures is that he kept moving, kept changing, kept recording well past the moment that should have defined him. For a lot of rock musicians, the argument about where rock and roll actually begins comes down to Muddy or Wolf. Blues had a child, and that child was rock music. That’s set in stone, and Muddy is one of the names carved into it.

    The name itself carries weight for me. Muddy Waters. The music he created feels like it comes from the ground up — from the earth, the mud, the work and the toil, the plantation. It’s evocative in a way that’s hard to articulate and harder to resist. You don’t analyze Muddy Waters so much as you absorb him.

    This record was his first album — a greatest hits collection issued by Chess Records, and one of the first LPs the label ever released. What you get here is a combination of Muddy’s deep Delta roots alongside his full-band Chicago rocking blues of the 1950s. A real historical document. Astonishing works of inspired music. The whole arc of a man’s artistic life compressed into twelve tracks.

    THE OBJECT

    I picked this up in March 2026 at Siren Records. It’s another of the Chess 75th Anniversary releases, same series as the Howlin’ Wolf Moanin’ in the Moonlight pressing I wrote about previously. I was pleased with that presentation, and I’m equally pleased with this one — happy to own a piece of blues greatness in these tracks.

    The cover is a powerful profile image of Muddy that earns its place in the canon of great blues album artwork. There’s an intensity in his face, a longing look upward. This was a man seeking more out of his life and his journey from the Delta to Chicago. It has a pastoral feeling to it despite being so spare: the black background, Muddy’s face, the bold all-caps lettering of his name. Pure simplicity. It reminds me of the Etta James At Last cover — that same combination of commanding presence and elegant restraint. Great cover for 1958.

    When the Rolling Stones first visited Chicago in 1964, they made a pilgrimage to 2120 S. Michigan Avenue and recorded there. Keith Richards has said this record — alongside Robert Johnson’s recordings — was foundational to everything the Stones became. The British Invasion was, in large part, American blues records shipped across the Atlantic and returned electrified, sped up. This compilation was one of the primary texts that made that possible.

    The liner notes on this record are among the best I’ve read from the era. Studs Terkel — Chicago’s great chronicler — wrote them, and he puts Muddy’s legend down with real skill. He establishes the mythology, generates excitement, and leaves you with a kind of eerie awe for what you’re about to hear.

    The Band

    The core ensemble across this period included:

    • Little Walter Jacobs — harmonica. Arguably the greatest blues harmonica player who ever lived. His amplified harp sound, run through a PA microphone, created a tone that had never existed before and hasn’t been replicated since. He’s all over this record and the album is richer for every second he’s on it.
    • Jimmy Rogers — second guitar
    • Elgin Evans / Leroy Foster — drums, varies by session
    • Big Crawford / Willie Dixon — bass (Crawford on the early recordings, Dixon later)
    • Otis Spann — piano, appears on the 1954 sessions

    Production Notes by Track

    Side One

    “I Just Want to Make Love to You” — Recorded April 13, 1954 | 2120 S. Michigan Avenue | Chicago, Illinois

    “Long Distance Call” — Recorded 1951 | Universal Recording | Chicago, Illinois

    “Louisiana Blues” — Recorded late 1950 / early 1951 | Universal Recording | Chicago, Illinois

    “Honey Bee” — Recorded 1951 | Universal Recording | Chicago, Illinois

    “Rollin’ Stone” — Recorded 1950 | Universal Recording | Chicago, Illinois

    “I’m Ready” — Recorded 1954 | 2120 S. Michigan Avenue | Chicago, Illinois

    Side Two

    “(I’m Your) Hoochie Coochie Man” — Recorded January 7, 1954 | 2120 S. Michigan Avenue | Chicago, Illinois

    “She Moves Me” — Recorded 1951–52 | Universal Recording | Chicago, Illinois

    “I Want You to Love Me” — Recorded 1950 | Universal Recording | Chicago, Illinois

    “Standing Around Crying” — Recorded 1952 | Universal Recording | Chicago, Illinois

    “Still a Fool” — Recorded 1951 | Universal Recording | Chicago, Illinois

    “I Can’t Be Satisfied” — Recorded April 20, 1948 | Universal Recording | Chicago, Illinois

    The record is sequenced to open with the most polished material and close with the sparest. You’re hearing the story in reverse — from the full-band Chicago electric sound back toward the lone man and his guitar in 1948.

    THE MUSIC

    Listening Notes — March 11, 2026

    Side One

    “I Just Want to Make Love to You” (1954)

    Blunt lyrics. No idioms, no coded language — just a direct, plainspoken statement of desire. Willie Dixon wrote it and Muddy delivers it like a verdict. Little Walter’s harmonica on this track is otherworldly, a wicked spirit inhabiting the room alongside you. And that’s true for the whole record — Little Walter is a recurring specter throughout.

    The Rolling Stones’ version pumps the tempo up and you have rock and roll alchemy at work — pure magic. You can hear the beginning of an entire movement of music in the distance between these two recordings. Muddy’s voice has a very specific timbre, extremely unique to him. Many people noted that he carried the quality of a church call in his delivery, a spiritual invocation. Here that same quality exists entirely outside any church walls. It sounds great on this pressing — powerful and present, Muddy’s wails right there in the room with you.

    “Long Distance Call” (1951)

    The guitar steps into the foreground more here than on the opener. Muddy’s expertise is on full display, and his blues phrasing is exceptional throughout. But the line that stops you is this one: “the party said another mule kicking in your stall.” One of the best blues lines ever written.

    “Louisiana Blues” (1950)

    “Get me a mojo hand” — Muddy’s source of luck in gambling and with women, rooted in Hoodoo tradition that runs deep through Delta blues culture. Worth spending time with if you’re unfamiliar. There’s also a call and response element here — someone says “take me with you man when you go” — that adds a communal, almost ceremonial quality to the track.

    This is a deep and murky blues. The waters of Louisiana are in the sound itself. Robert Palmer wrote in Deep Blues that this track had a power all its own — the power of the Delta’s deepest music unleashed by electricity. He called it irresistible.

    “Honey Bee” (1951)

    Stripped down to its essentials — first and second guitar, and Muddy. Blues in its plainest form relative to the full-band tracks. When Muddy draws out the “pleaaase” on this one, it’s something else. Listen also for the guitar imitating the buzzing of a bee. It’s a small touch and it’s perfect.

    “Rollin’ Stone” (1950)

    Just Muddy and his guitar. This was his first single for Chess Records, and it sold well enough to give him his freedom — his leverage, his foothold. Even in that uncertain moment, the confidence in his singing and his playing is staggering. All of rock music lives somewhere in this guitar. It’s not about technical skill — it’s about feeling and sound. You can hear what the Stones were inspired by. You can hear riffs from across decades of rock music in the spaces between Muddy’s moving fingers and the strings.

    “I’m Ready” (1954)

    The full band comes back after the intimacy of Rollin’ Stone, and the contrast lands hard. Swinging blues, the drums and bass really walking around on this track. “I’m drinking TNT, I’m smoking dynamite” — that line just works every time. Little Walter again is a spectre here. Something about his sound conjures spirits, makes spooky thoughts. Deeply evocative. There’s a reason people reach for supernatural language when describing this music.

    Side Two

    “(I’m Your) Hoochie Coochie Man” (1954)

    A severe, brutal announcement of a song. Muddy didn’t introduce himself here — he declared himself. The stop-time effect that structures the whole track became one of the defining motifs in electric blues, and you can hear why — those gaps, those silences before the band crashes back in, create a tension that’s almost unbearable in the best way. “John the Conqueror Root” referenced in the lyrics is worth looking up — Studs Terkel addresses it in the liner notes and the context deepens the song considerably.

    When Muddy screams “everybody knows I’m here” — my system shudders. The room shakes.

    “She Moves Me” (1951–52)

    A woman with supernatural powers — the reverse angle from Hoochie Coochie Man. Here it’s the woman who holds the magic. “She can make a blind man see.” The bass drum sound on this track is genuinely curious — it has a resonance I can’t quite place, something uncanny about it. Not sure if it’s a conventional drum or something improvised.

    “I Want You to Love Me” (1950)

    The confidence on this track is what I’m pretty sure inspired generations of rock musicians to pick up guitars and try to feel the same way. Little Walter stands out again here.

    “Standing Around Crying” (1952)

    Low and slow, mournful blues. It’s worth noting that for a compilation of this size and reputation — twelve tracks representing Muddy’s essential early output — this is the only song that’s squarely about a man upset with his circumstances. One out of twelve. That says something about the personality projected across this record. Muddy is rarely a victim. He’s more often a force of nature.

    “Still a Fool” (1951)

    More of that spooky guitar. On this track you can hear voices somewhere in the background It adds immersion. Ghosts are present. Muddy here is acknowledging the terrible weight of the situation — getting involved with another man’s wife, knowing it, doing it anyway. The blues doesn’t moralize.

    “I Can’t Be Satisfied” (1948)

    The album closes with the OG — one of the most important records in blues music, recorded when Muddy was still finding his footing as a recording artist and somehow already fully himself. The fact that Chess saved it for last is a statement. You’ve traveled backward through twelve years of recordings, and you land here, at the source. Just Muddy and his slide guitar, 1948, and everything that followed is already present in the room.

    Closing

    Every song on this collection is a masterclass in electric blues. If it’s an invention, this record is the patent. If it’s a library, these are the essential texts. There’s such a ferocity here that you can feel its influence as the needle tracks along the groove — the record bouncing with Muddy’s wails, his claims full of supernatural imagery and self-mythologization. Robert Palmer called his persona “imperial and commanding.” Listen to this record and you understand exactly what he meant. Even when Muddy gets vulnerable, he never stops being Muddy. That’s a rare thing.

    Essential stuff. Impressive, irreplaceable stuff.

    Thanks for reading.

    RTR