Billboard : 08/01/1960
Jazz Spotlight Winner

Miles Davis and Gil Evans join forces again and come up with an off-the-beaten track jazz set that should interest Davis’ adventurous fans. The tunes included originals by Evans, such as The Pan Piper, and Solea, as well as Will o’ the Wisp, which is taken from De Falla’s El Amor Brujo. Davis plays them with his usual aplomb and the backings are a gas.

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Cashbox : 08/13/1960

The third collaboration between Davis and arranger Evans again points up that this is the most successful, consistent and challenging combination practicing modern jazz for both musical and experimentation value. From a distance the album appears to be an elaboration of Davis’ loose Flamenco Sketches from his best-selling Kind of Blue album but the presence here of Evans is felt in the complicated harmonies, the superb orchestral backing, in general the entire scope of the album. And Miles comes through for him with an unerring performance of clarity and soul. A great LP.

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Louisville Courier-Journal
Robert Hermann : 08/28/1960

Some of the extremes of jazz are audible on records up for review this week.

Miles Davis–Gil Evans Sketches of Spain.

Porgy and Bess by this pair was possibly the greatest jazz record ever made. Now, what do you do to top that?

Davis’ answer has been to swerve almost completely outside the Western musical tradition, to seek inspiration in the brooding, Moorish-influenced esthetic of Spanish flamenco music.

The major work here is an Evans rewriting of part of Joaquin Rodrigo’s Concierto do Aranjuez for guitar and orchestra. There is also an arrangement of Will o’ the Wisp from De Falla’s El Amor Brujo, and three Evans originals based on folk material.

This record pushes the limits of jazz in new and severe directions. It will not arouse the universal affection that greeted the pulsing, warmly human Porgy and Bess.

The jazz beat is virtually abandoned. The orchestra is more of a wind symphony (with a harp and a big woodwind (not saxophone) section) than a jazz band. There are only a few moments of Evans’ rich, full-band scoring.

The harmonies are static for long passages. And the mood throughout the more than 40 minutes of music is one of almost unrelieved loneliness and sorrow, which of course are beautifully expressed in Davis’ trumpet work.

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Oakland Tribune
Russ Wilson : 08/14/1960

When 1960’s flood of recorded music is assayed there will be a flagrant miscarriage of justice if Sketches of Spain, the new Miles Davis–Gil Evans album, is not rated with the best instrumental LPs of the year.

Evans’ scores for the orchestra, which besides Davis included four other trumpets, three French horns, two trombones, a tuba, five woodwinds, harp, string bass, jazz drums and percussion, surpass his extraordinary writing for the Miles Ahead and Porgy and Bess albums, while Davis has never communicated more emotion. As its title indicates, the album is composed of Spanish themes, rescored by Evans and improvised on by Davis. The principal number is Concierto for de Aranjuez for Guitar and Orchestra by the contemporary Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigo. The other selections were drawn from De Falla’s El Amor Bruja and folk music, including flamenco. The pervasive feeling of al is a brooding loneliness, established by Evans’ masterful use of orchestral color and Davis’ conceptions. This album should appeal to anyone who delights in beautiful music.

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San Francisco Examiner
C.H. Garrigues : 08/21/1960

With many of the bright young men in classical music showing a serious interest in jazz and many of the bright young men in jazz taking time to study formal theory and composition, it has long seemed probable that the boundaries between jazz and the classics would soon cease to exist and musicians would find themselves playing “just music.”

Indeed, some of the greatest figures in jazz in the 50s have labored assiduously to bring this about: one can think of mine like John Lewis, J.J. Johnson, Jimmy Giuffre, William Russo, Bill Holman, Bill Smith, Teo Macero and Charlie Mingus as some of the formally trained musicians who have endeavored to produce music that reached the heights of the classics without losing the roots of jazz.

Each of these, however, has come up against the same problem: the fact that jazz must swing and the classics must not so that, in any given case, for any given section of his work (or even for any given bar) the composer must decide whether he is to swing or not. If he swings it is jazz and if he does not (in the words of a great jazzman) “you’re playin’ against Beethoven and, man he cuts yuh!” Thus, though a composer may mingle jazz and the classics in intricate mixture (sometimes in the same measure) he cannot weld them into one; either the music swings or it does not.

Three ways in which this problem may be met – or avoided – are found in three rather remarkable records issued by Columbia.

(Dave Brubeck – The Riddle and Dave Brubeck – Bernstein Plays Brubeck Plays Bernstein omitted here)

The third album is the most remarkable. Indeed, it may well be the most remarkable record by a jazzman you have ever heard. In it Miles Davis, a thorough jazzman, transcends jazz; he plays against Beethoven and Beethoven doesn’t cut him. What he plays is not, in my opinion jazz; it does not swing – in the technical sense of the word.

But this is no mere endeavor of a jazzman to play the classics; to get away from the roots, to lose his “soul.” Here is a jazzman – one of the undeniable greats – who brings to a nonjazz performance the exact, identical contribution which he has brought to jazz. The lyricism, the sadness, the lonely bitterness, the almost religious passion which has marked Miles’ playing is all here. The difference is that Miles is playing – wailing, in the technical sense of the term – in a context which is orchestral and not jazz; there is no rhythm section to give the beat, there are none of the relationships between “infra-structure” and “super-structure” which Andre Hodeir has so aptly defined as the essence of swing. There is simply Miles, wailing against a background created for him to wail against.

The album is Sketches of Spain; it consists of the Concierto de Aranjuez, composed for guitar and orchestra by the contemporary Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigo, plus Will o’ the Wisp from De Falla’s El Amor Brujo, both arranged for Miles and orchestra by Gil Evans, plus three originals arranged out of the Spanish tradition by Evans.

If this were a classical album, the major credit would properly be given to Evans; his is the written music; his is the conducting. But here is the link to jazz: the fact that the written music is nothing until Miles lifts up the voice of his horn and breathes life into the score; it is only then that the music becomes sheer impassioned greatness.

There is this link to jazz, too: that nobody else will ever play these pieces like this again – and unless they are played like this, they are not played. For Evans, though he is not the arranger his admirers believe him to be, can. And (more important) Miles can hear in his scores what no other man can hear.

When you have listened to Miles, enchanted by the guitar part of the Concierto and translating it with his horn, when you hear his horn, translating the voice part Saeta as it recounts the Passion of Christ in the Holy Week rites, you will realize that, despite all that the bright young men can do with their welding of styles, there remains but one answer to the problem of jazz and the classics: Give us more Miles Davises!

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Saturday Review
Wilder Hobson : 10/29/1960

Speaking last month of general jazz tendencies, I referred to the development of what I call an International Style. This label is mean to cover, very loosely and voluminously, the part of modern jazz that shows a marked debt to our general musical heritage – as against the larger part which harks back especially to the American folk-blues roots of jazz music.

A few examples may make the matter clearer. It is quite natural that some of the finest modern jazz men should be Internationalists. They have been studying music formally, as well as in the conservatories of their spirits; they are fascinated by seventeenth-century counterpoint or Ravel or Webern; they have become citizens of the world. One might suppose that attempts to blend such interests with the idiom of jazz would result in pretentious, artificial music. Such has frequently been the case. But it is an exciting fact of this jazz period that certain men are bringing to this blend richness of feeling and felicity of form. They are proving that the spirited improvisation and irresistible rhythms of jazz can be wholly natural elements in compositions of musical pith and subtlety.

The album Sketches of Spain features the trumpeter Miles Davis whom I regard as the most poetic player in modern jazz, in the compositions and arrangements of the remarkable Gil Evans (for a small, brassy, wonderfully moody ensemble). The intense Andalusian gypsy spirit prevails here, nor is there anything affected about it. Davis and Evans move as naturally into Spain as Debussy and Ravel did (the former pair on earthier terms, which is in no way intended as a reflection on the latter’s high fragrance). Davis is a darkly lyric, incantatory soloist – one of the greatest voices among all the jazz horns – and he sounds as though he grew out of Evans’ soil. The basic rhythms are definitely Spanish rather than jazz in character, except as they suggest an amplification of that “Spanish tinge” which has been a part of jazz rhythm since the early New Orleans days. The program opens with the Davis-Evans version of the Concierto de Aranjuez, by the contemporary Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigo, and proceeds to Will o’ the Wisp, from De Falla’s El Amor Brujo. One the reverse side are three Evans originals, The Pan Piper (from a Spanish morning song), Saeta (suggested by flamencan Holy Week songs of the Passion of the Christ), and Solea (which might be called a flamencan blues). I cannot recommend this music too strongly to any flamencan devotee.

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Washington Post
Tony Gieske : 08/14/1960

Aranjuez, which is in Spain between Toledo and Madrid, was the 17th century country seat of Spanish royalty. “When we arrived there,” wrote a certain Mme. d’Aulnoy in 1679, “I believed myself in some enchanted Palace. The morning was fresh, birds singing on all sides, the water murmuring sweetly, the espaliers loaded with delectable fruit and the beds with fragrant flowers, and I found myself in very good company.”

Be about the last place you’d ever expect to find Miles Davis. I mean, it doesn’t exactly sound like Birdland. Nevertheless, Davis is there, so to speak, on his new album Sketches of Spain, along with Gil Evans, both sweet, delectable, fragrant, and very good company.

This uniquely successful circumstance began in 1959 when Davis heard a recording of a guitar concerto celebrating the ancient city.

The Aranjuez Concerto (available on Columbia ML 5345) “is meant to sound like the hidden breeze that stirs the tree tops in the parks, and it should be only as strong as a butterfly, and as dainty as a veronica,” declares the composer, Joaquín Rodrigo, who takes a passionate and scholarly interest in the guitar.

“After listening to it for a couple of weeks,” Davis says, “I couldn’t get it out of my mind.” He let the butterflies of Aranjuez flit for Evans, who also dug them.

Evans re-orchestrated the second movement of the Concerto, its richest, using intertwining flutes, oboes, French horns and tubas in the lavender, faintly decadent style of which he is currently the sole proprietor. Davis plays the guitar part on trumpet, cutting right to the heart of it and not fooling around too much with improvisation.

And by golly it’s a toss-up as to who did better, Rodrigo or Evans and Davis. That’s why I say the thing is unique. Imagine what would have happened if, say, Paul Whiteman had got hold of a thing like this 20 years ago!

Evans is right inside Rodrigo’s head, both being followers of Debussy, Ravel and the early Stravinsky. He is, it seems to me, a better orchestrator than Rodrigo. There is plenty of tempo in both pieces, but nothing could be further from “swinging the classics” than what Evans has accomplished.

In fact, Evans’ version seems at times hardly to be jazz at all; just excellent music. But that’s only a columnist’s theorizing, whether it’s jazz or not. The question never comes up when you’re listening.

The other tracks are equally luscious. The Pan Piper has a tune that seems unsurpassable. But after he states it rubato, Davis improves on it in temp, atop one of those subtly shifting Evans figures – Summertime had one in the Porgy and Bess album – that reminds you of Ravel’s Bolero, only not so oppressive.

Saeta, a long, sobbing Davis solo over a drone bass, sandwiched between two extremely well written fanfares by Evans, might lean just a little into bathos. Solea undoubtably does.

Not, however, if the listener can meet the basic Davis-Evans price of admission: a willing suspension of sophistication.

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Down Beat : 09/29/1959
Bill Mathieu : 5 stars

This record is one of the most important musical triumphs that this century has yet produced. It brings together under the same aegis two realms that in the past have often worked against one another – the world of the heart and the world of the mind.

So much of the jazz we hear today is one-sided. Either it is cold and calculated, with a minimum of feeling, like a lot of west coast ensemble jazz, or it is a sloppy gush of terrifying emotion, like the music of some of the party-line Hard Schoolers.

But calculating brain and feeling heart need not cancel each other. Under the best conditions, one becomes the other – the mind feels; the heart thinks. This happy union has not often prevailed in jazz. Indeed, one camp abuses the other, and each threatens to suck dry its heritage. For this reason, we would all be well-advised to curl up in a quiet room and listen at length to this newest product of the Evans–Davis collaboration. Somewhere in the labyrinth, they have found the answer.

To give this “answer” in words is approachable but ultimately impossible. What is involved here is the union of idea with emotion, precomposition with improvisation, discipline with spontaneity. Every big band chart with built-in improvised solos is an attempt at this synthesis. But almost always there is simply compatible juxtaposition, not a true synthesis. (Let’s except the music of Duke Ellington. He has succeeded more consistently than anyone else.)

The real value of Sketches of Spain lies in the fact that the intellectualism is so extreme, and, at the same time, the emotional content is so profound.

Evans’ writing shows that he has been in good company. There are strong traces of seriously contemporary European music, especially Bartok and Stravinsky. The mind reels at the intricacy of Evans’ orchestral and developmental techniques. His scores are so careful, so formally well-constructed, so mindful of tradition that you feel the originals should be preserved under glass in a Florentine museum. Yet the sheer emotional impact is overwhelming, almost embarrassing, in its power and honesty.

Similarly, Davis’ playing is often so well thought out that you are overpowered by the cold logic of the man’s brain. Yet there is nothing cold about the tears that Miles weeps for every man.

The experience you go through listening to this music is extraordinary. If you generally hear music as a series of moods, or emotional states, you will suddenly notice that you are hearing something else too: the connection of the large, formal selections, the careful building up of a certain harmonic progression, or of a certain melodic idea, the ingenious development of a thematic fragment.

On the other hand, if you tend to hear music analytically, as I do, this record will twist your ears too. Suddenly there will be no desire to figure out Miles’ scale patterns, or to rush to the piano to check that ending chord. Instead you will be willing – I mean compelled – to accept this music as an experience in virtue itself, and not as a combination of so many analyzable details.

In short, this music is freedom incarnate. It transcends artistic prejudice – even, so help me, esthetic point of view.

Sketches of Spain is a suite of Spanish-influenced music. Both Davis and Evans delved into early Spanish folk material for much of their inspiration. The result is about as “Spanish” as Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra is “Hungarian” or Stravinsky’s Petrouchka is “Russian.” But it does make brilliant integral use of Spain’s musical flavor.

The first side starts out with a 16-minute masterpiece, Concierto de Aranjuez. This is the best track of the album. It is, to my knowledge, the first jazz work containing improvisation that stands complete in an extended form. It isn’t a bunch of little pieces strung together, it is one long organic piece, like the first movement of a late Beethoven quartet. Joaquin Rodrigo composed the work.

Will o’ the Wisp is taken from a 1915 ballet score of Manuel DeFalla. It contains some high sustained French horn notes of unsurpassable beauty.

The Pan Piper, which begins the second side, is closest to the identifiable jazz style for which Miles is best known. He plays in a Harmon mute here, over delicate ostinato figures from the orchestra. It ends, however, with a whimper. I would rather hear the worst kind of goof than be subjected to the torture of a fade-out “ending.”

Saeta is the most “Spanish” of the five works. It is the story of a religious procession, which approaches and recedes with very authentic-sounding trumpet fanfares. The bulk of the piece consists of wildly emotional playing by Davis. In the flamencan tradition, this part is sung by a woman, on a balcony, who is addressing an image of the crucified Christ. “It is the measure of Miles stature as a musician and as a human being,” Nat Hentoff says in the liner notes, “that he can absorb the language of another culture, that he can express through it a universal emotion with an authenticity that is neither strained nor condescending.” I noticed in this passage an element of strain, of overreaching, but there is no dishonesty.

The final track, Solea, is a little disappointing but only in that it doesn’t match the inspired near-perfection of the others. Miles runs into difficulties.

Miles’ style is so personal (though not especially intimate) that the listener feels he is actually experiencing the moment of creation. Also, at his best, Miles has the quality of inevitability, like Beethoven: one feels that every choice has been rightly made. These are the factors that have contributed to the myth of the divinity and/or infallibility of Miles. Miles isn’t divine and he’s not infallible. he gets hung, and everybody knows it.

But the pain is only temporary. And hearing him get out of a jam is almost worth hearing him get into it. There is, for instance, one passage in Solea where, during a descending run of (music note) figures, he gets so hung up that, towards the end, when the immediate future looks hopeless, you can almost hear him fling (musically) his patented two-word epithet right through his golden horn. Evidently disgusted, he stops playing for a long time. But when he comes back it is with an ascent of such startling beauty that you know he did it all on purpose.

Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess, and Sketches of Spain form a kind of terrifying triumvirate. If there is to be a new jazz, a Shape of Things to Come, then this is the beginning.

To Davis and Evans goes not the distinction of five or ten or a zillion stars in a review rating, but the burden of continuing to show us The Way.

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Liner Notes by Nat Hentoff

The uniquely creative collaboration between Miles Davis and Gil Evans has already resulted in two extraordinary evocative Columbia albums – Miles Ahead and Porgy and Bess. Of the former, British critic Max Harrison wrote: “These scores represent the full expression of Evans’ powers. In elaboration and richness of resource they surpass anything previously attempted in big band jazz and constitute the only wholly original departure in that field outside of Ellington‘s work… In any given chord careful consideration is given to the best instrument to play each constituent note. The weight of that instrument is most sensitively calculated in relation both to the others used and to the particular effect the chord is meant to have.”

Porgy and Bess was, in a sense, even more challenging because the score was so familiar. Miles, however, played so strikingly from inside the music that I’m convinced the Davis-Evans version of that score is the most expressive yet recorded. In Sketches from Spain, the two have gone on to challenge themselves even further. A brooding, dramatic Spanish sound and feeling pervades all the works on this record. Davis, I believe, has rarely if ever soloed with such concentration of emotion as in several sections of this album, particularly in Concierto de Aranjuez and Saeta. What is most remarkable is the surprising authenticity of phrasing and timbre with which he plays. It is as if Miles had been born of Andalusian gypsies but, instead of picking up the guitar, had decided to make a trumpet the expression of his cante hondo (“deep song.”) And Evans also includes a thorough absorption of the Spanish musical temper which he has transmuted into his own uncompromisingly personal style.

This album came about because when Miles was on the West Coast early in 1959, a friend had played him a recording of Concierto de Aranjuez for Guitar and Orchestra by the contemporary Spanish composer, Joaquin Rodrigo. “After listening to it for a couple of weeks,” Miles said later, “I couldn’t get it out of my mind. Then when Gil and I decided to do this album, I played him the record and he liked it. As we usually do, we planned the program first by ourselves for about two months. I work out something; he takes it home and works on it some more; and then we figure out how we’re going to do it. He can read my mind and I can read his.”

For this album, Gil rewrote and extended the middle section of the Concierto. The recording took place in late 1959, and in the February, 1960 issue of HiFi Stereo Review, I described what happened in the studio on one Sunday afternoon. Excerpts from the article are reprinted through the permission of the Ziff-Davis Publishing Company:

“In the studio, Gil Evans was checking the parts with his characteristically preoccupied look. A lean, graying 47, Gil looks like a gently aging diplomate who collects rare species of ferns on weekends. Though always polite, he is in firm control of his record dates and insists on hearing exactly what he has written.

“Miles had joined Gil at the spare piano and they started discussing Miles’ part which spread out, accordion-fashion, over many sheets of manuscript paper.

“… Miles went back in the control booth. ‘I always manage to put my foot in it,’ he said of the Spanish experiment. ‘I always manage to try something I can’t do.’ The statement was mockingly self-depreciating and no one bothered with the logical rebuttal that Miles is able to accomplish exactly what he sets out to do, and even rarer among jazzmen, he’s always clear as to what it is he does want.

“‘I’m going to call myself on the phone one day,’ Miles continued, ‘and tell myself to shut up.’

“The take began with Miles sitting on a stool; a trio of trumpet, trombone and flute behind him; and Gil directing in the center of the orchestra. Evans conducts with an almost ballet-like flow of motion. He uses both arms, and keeps the beat going like a firm Poseidon calming troublesome waves. Evans is extremely careful that all the dense textural details and markings for dynamics are performed precisely and are recorded so that all the interweaving parts emerge clearly.

“At one point later in the afternoon, Evans cut off one take and said into the microphone, ‘Are you getting a blending of the three flutes? I only hear one flute out here.’ A&R man Teo Macero assured him that all three were distinctly audible in the control room. Gil went into the booth, heard from himself, and was satisfied.

“Miles came in for a sip of vodka, ‘I can’t eat. That’s what’s wrong with me.’ After the vodka, he chuckled as he went out, saying, ‘Me and Buddy Bolden.’ (The reference was to the first ‘name’ trumpeter, a New Orleans barber with a reputation for high and hard living).

“By four, the shape of the piece was becoming established. The characteristic, fiercely mournful Spanish melody was a strong one. Evans’ sketch for Miles looked complex, but Miles seemed to have no difficulty improvising around it. The orchestra’s function, as in other Evans’ scores, was to provide partly a support for and partly a commentary on Davis’ solo statements. The range of colors was extensive, and they changed often, sometimes subtly dissolving into slightly different shades and at other times breaking sharply from ominous cool to brighter blends. By means of more complete instrumentation and varied voicings, Evans gets an unusually full-bodied orchestral sound for jazz from the deep bottoms of the tuba and French horns to high register woodwinds and brass. ‘These look like flute parts we’re playing,’ lead trumpeter Ernie Royal said during one break, shaking his head in respect and exasperation.

“The rhythms were complex and several of the musicians found it hard to keep their time straight. Gil stopped one take as the rhythms became tangled. ‘The tempo is going to go,’ he wave his arm in an arc, first to the left and then to the right, ‘this way and that way. Just keep your own time and let the rhythm go.’ He again made a slow, even wave to further illustrate his point.

“As more and more takes, most of them fragmentary, were tried, Miles’ confidence in his own role grew markedly. He had already demonstrated in his Flamenco Sketches (Kind of Blue) and Blues for Pablo with Gil Evans (Miles Ahead) a basic affinity with the Spanish musical temperament and sinuous rhythms. He played as if all by himself, his tone becoming burningly dark in the somber passages and then cutting through with sharper loneliness as the music grew more animated.

“In the control room, the visiting Hall Overton, a classical composter who has also been involved in jazz as a pianist and arranger, said, ‘This is the toughest notation I’ve ever seen in a jazz arrangement. It could have been written more easily for the players and the result would have been the same, but Gil has to have it exactly the way it happens in the piece. Another thing that makes it so tough is that he’s using so many different levels. Like the little trio part at the beginning that has to be balanced with Miles on his microphone. Then the three players go back to their places and that makes for another balance problem. And that’s just the beginning. Fortunately, these guys are among the best readers in town. Two of those horn players, Jim Buffington and John Barrows were in New Jersey last night playing a Beethoven sextet for string quartet and two horns.’

“‘This,’ said trombonist Frank Rehak between taking pictures of Miles and Gil during the playback, ‘is a tough one. To count at all, you have to count four on every beat.’

“For the rest of the afternoon, the takes continued to improve. On one, Miles began to play in the lower register with deep feeling and a fuller tone than is usual in his work. ‘Beautiful,’ Macero said. ‘The writing there is almost Gregorian,’ he turned to Overton, ‘It’s all diatonic.’

“Gil and Miles came in to listen to a playback. ‘I love that chord,’ said Miles, ‘and the end of that section with the flutes way up there. That’s all I could hear last night in my sleep. Hey,’ he turned to Macero, ‘don’t forget take three. That was a good one.’

“Teo asked Evans if the tympany came in too softly. ‘I wanted it to be just a whisper,’ said Evans, ‘a little cushion of air, something to keep the thing floating. I think it’s all right. The tuba is too loud though.’

“‘You know,’ Miles returned to the conversation, ‘the melody is so strong there’s nothing you have to do with it. If you tried to play bebop on it, you’d wind up being a hip cornball. The thing I have to do now is to make things connect, make them mean something in what I play around it.’

“In the control room, Evans was listening to the last playback. ‘Damn! Miles can play beautifully down low.’ In the studio, the musicians were packing up. It was a few minutes before six. ‘This,’ said Gil, back in the control room, ‘is where the heroine is crying for the dead bullfighter.’

“‘Really?’ said a visitor.

“‘No,’ Gil smiled. ‘it’s an old Spanish vamp.’

“‘That melody,’ Miles was still marveling at the piece, ‘is so strong that the softer you play it, the weaker it gets.’

“‘Yes,’ said Gil, ‘it’s distilled melody. If you lay it on too hard, you don’t have it.’

“It should take two, maybe three more sessions to finish the album,’ Teo was speculating.

“‘When Gil and I start on an album,’ Miles was relaxing, ‘we don’t know how it’s going to wind up. It just goes on out there.’ ‘Gil,’ he turned to Evans, ‘our next record date will be silence.’

“‘You,’ said Gil, ‘and your big ideas.'”

Gil Evans has been an autodidact throughout his career. Almost entirely self-taught, he does not limit himself to what the books say can or cannot be done. “I have always,” says Gil, “learned through practical work. I didn’t learn any theory except through the practical use of it.” For this assignment, he, characteristically, went to the library. He read several volumes on Spanish – particularly flamenco – music and on the life of the Spanish gypsy. He also borrowed a number of recordings, including Alan Lomax’s field work for the Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music series and for other labels.

Among the music he and Miles listened to in preparation for the album was Manuel de Falla’s 1915 ballet score, El Amor Brujo. From it, Gil and Miles chose Will o’ the Wisp. Gil’s unusual feel for orchestral colors is evident immediately. Miles plunges in with the orchestra commenting. Note again how, as in Concierto, Miles has managed to combine his customary jazz timbre and beat with what Jelly Roll Morton once called “the Spanish tinge” – except that Miles has much more than a tinge of the Spanish musical ethos in his work here.

The Pan Piper is a folk melody Gil heard on an ethnic recording. It’s a morning song and is probably sung in festival time as well as in ordinary diurnal circumstances. On the recording, the melody was played on the penny whistle by the local pig castrator who was whistling up business. Listen to the Joseph’s coat of colors behind Miles. As Max Harrison wrote in Jazz Monthly: “One might have thought that comparatively few instrumental combinations remained to be ‘discovered,’ but Evans seems able to hit on endless mixtures of sound that are not only new to jazz writing but to all orchestra music. Indeed, while the listener may at first be preoccupied by orchestral virtuosity and harmonic individuality, it is the imaginative freshness that suffuses almost literally every detail of the orchestral fabric that implements so powerfully the beauty and originality of the whole.” Or, as Miles puts it, “He made that orchestra sound like one big guitar.”

The saete, in flamencan music, is “the arrow of song.” One of the oldest religious types of music in Andalusia, it is usually sung without accompaniment during the Holy Week religious procession in Seville. It tells of the Passion of Christ and is usually address to the image of the crucified Christ that is carried in the march or to the Virgin Mary. As described by Gilbert Chase, “The singer, usually a woman, stands on a balcony overlooking the procession, grasping the iron railing firmly in both hands (the grip tightens as the emotion grows). The procession stops so that the image which is being addressed remains stationary while the saeta is being sung. A fanfare of trumpets gives the signal for the procession to move on.”

Gil has recreated the street procession, and Miles has the role of the woman aiming the “arrow of song.” His performance here captures the essence of the saeta – “the heart pierced by grief.” It is a measure of Miles’ stature as a musician and a human being that he can so absorb the language of another culture that he can express through it a universal emotion with an authenticity that is neither strained nor condescending. How many other American musicians – jazz or non-jazz – could come close to what Miles has achieved in this one track? “It was hard,” says Miles, “to get the musicians to realize that they didn’t have to play perfect. It was the feeling that counted.”

A basic form of flamenco is the solea, an Andalusian version of soledad (“loneliness”), “Generally,” writes Chase, “it is a song of longing or lament, like the Afro-American blues.” Many other forms of flamenco have stemmed from the solea, but this is one of the roots of the genre. “I chose this rhythm,” explains Gil, “because it kind of (swung) and it was so conducive to development.” Miles again performs with a depth of emotion and strength of rhythm that represent a compelling blend of the “deep song” of flamenco and the cry of the blues.

There is a line from the Spanish writer, Ferran, that characterizes both the music on this record and the unsparing voice of Miles Davis:

“Alas for me! The more I seek my solitude, the less of it
I find. Whenever I look for it, my shadow looks with me.”