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Sketches of Spain was Miles Davis and Gil Evans’ third conceptual album (they had worked together back in the late 1940s on the celebrated “Birth of the Cool” nonet sessions and would record their first conceptual LP Miles Ahead in 1957, followed by their adaptation of George Gershwin’s music for Porgy and Bess in 1958). The trumpeter stated in his autobiography that the whole thing came out of listening to Spanish composer Joaquín Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez”. Even though the slow movement of “Concierto de Aranjuez” was the main feature of the album (Miles and Gil later performed it live at Carnegie Hall), its original composer, Joaquín Rodrigo, wasn’t pleased with the Davis-Evans version. As Miles stated: “I liked the record and thought everybody played well on it and that Gil had arranged his ass off, but it didn’t have a large impact on me. Joaquin Rodrigo, the composer of Concierto de Aranjuez, said he didn’t like the record, and he –his composition –was the reason I did Sketches of Spain in the first place. Since he was getting a royalty for the use of the song on the record, I told this person who had played it for him, ‘Let’s see if he likes it after he starts getting those big royalty checks’. I never heard anything about or from him after that.” Despite Joaquín Rodrigo’s reaction, Sketches of Spain was extremely successful from the start. |
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