Flamenco Sketches
| "Flamenco Sketches" | |
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"Flamenco Sketches" is a jazz composition written by American jazz trumpeter Miles Davis and pianist Bill Evans. It is the fifth track on Davis's 1959 album Kind of Blue, the best-selling jazz record of all time, and an innovative experiment in modal jazz. The track features Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb and Bill Evans.
The piece has no written melody, but is rather defined by a set of chord changes that are improvised over using various modes. Each musician separately chose the number of bars for each of the modal passages in his solo. Davis gets credit for the song form, but Evans is credited with the opening 4-bar vamp over Cmaj7 and G9sus4, which is the opening theme to his ballad improvisation "Peace Piece". Because of the presence of this vamp, "Flamenco Sketches" is usually played as a ballad. The modes used in "Flamenco Sketches" are as follows:
- C Ionian (natural major scale)
- A♭ Mixolydian (Major with a minor 7th)
- B♭ Ionian
- G Harmonic Minor over D Phrygian Dominant (alternates over bass notes D and E♭)
- G Dorian
An alternate take of "Flamenco Sketches" is included on most recent re-issues of Kind of Blue as the sixth and last track.
It has been suggested by musicologist Jeremy Yudkin that the titles of the last two tracks on the album may have been reversed. He posits that "'Flamenco Sketches' is the correct title for the strumming medium-tempo music on the track that is now known as 'All Blues' and that 'All Blues' is the correct title for the last, very slow, track on the album."[1][2]
References
- ↑ Jeremy Yudkin. "Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue", OUPBlog.
- ↑ Jeremy Yudkin, "The Naming of Names: 'Flamenco Sketches' or 'All Blues'? Identifying the Last Two Tracks on Miles Davis's Classic Album Kind of Blue", Musical Quarterly (Spring 2012), 95 (1): 15-35.
