"Flamenco Sketches" is a jazz composition written by American jazz trumpeter Miles Davis and pianist Bill Evans. It is the fifth track on Davis' 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, 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 of the major scale of each tonality. 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.
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Famous quotes containing the word sketches:
“Turning one’s novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.”
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