Flamenco Sketches

While Miles Davis continues to stand tall in the jazz pantheon,
it s a challenge and potentially a hazard for artists living in his
long shadow to reinterpret and even re-envision the iconic
trumpeter and bandleader s music. Hardest of all are his
classic recordings, especially the biggest-selling jazz album
in history, 1959 s Kind of Blue. But in a remarkable creative
achievement, Barcelona-based pianist Chano Domínguez
has brilliantly fused flamenco with jazz to cook up Flamenco
Sketches, a stunning new interpretation of Davis s seminal
music on Blue Note Records. It was commissioned by the
Barcelona Jazz Festival in conjunction with the 50th
anniversary of Kind of Blue and was recorded live at Jazz
Standard in New York in 2009.
Domínguez s seven-song collection features all of the Kind
of Blue tunes augmented by two of Davis s most popular
songs, Nardis (put on the jazz map by Bill Evans and never
recorded by the composer on any of his own albums) and
Serpent s Tooth (a pre-Kind of Blue tune that was part of
the trumpeter s 50s songbook).