Flamenco Sketches

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"Flamenco Sketches" is a jazz song co-written by American jazz trumpeter Miles Davis (1926-1991) and American jazz pianist Bill Evans (1929-1980). It is the fifth track on Davis' 1959 album Kind of Blue, one of the best-selling jazz records of all time, and an innovative experiment in modal jazz. The song 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 Evans' standard "Some Other Time." Because of the prescence of this vamp, "Flamenco Sketches" is usually played as a ballad. The modes used in "Flamenco Sketches" are as follows:

  • C ionian (C major scale)
  • E-flat dorian (D-flat major scale over a pedal A-flat)
  • B-flat ionian (B-flat major scale)
  • D phrygian with an optional F-sharp (alternates over bass notes D and E-flat)
  • G dorian (F major scale)

An alternate take of "Flamenco Sketches" is the sixth and last track on the album.

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