Modern Art Orchestra: Miles Davis 100 | Sketches of Spain (HU/SK)

Of Miles Davis and Gil Evans’ timeless albums, the Grammy-winning *Sketches of Spain* was the first to go platinum, yet it was also the one they spent the longest time working on in the studio. Davis was inspired by Iberian music in several ways; his wife took him to a flamenco show, which had a huge impact on him, but one of the pieces had already appeared on the slightly earlier Kind of Blue, their epoch-making album. Moreover, Columbia Records was already releasing authentic Spanish folk music at the time, which Evans explored in depth. The Aranjuez Concerto, an expanded movement from Rodrigo’s guitar concerto, rolls along majestically at the beginning, followed by folk song arrangements, a Villa-Lobos theme, and a flamenco paraphrase composed by Evans. Evans’s maximalism yielded the desired result, and Davis’s fame skyrocketed; many even trace the concept of world music back to this point. By the end, the trumpeter was completely emotionally drained, having given his all while continuing to tour. He performed a retrospective set of his earlier albums only once in his life, when, a few months before his death, he gave a concert in Montreux with Quincy Jones’s band featuring songs from the albums he made with Evans.

The Modern Art Orchestra’s three-part concert series pays tribute to the jazz icon, who would have turned 100 this year, through the legendary collaboration of Miles Davis and Gil Evans. The evenings dedicated to three indispensable albums in jazz history—Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess, and Sketches of Spain—are not merely reinterpretations of iconic records, but trace the arc of a shared musical vision: the expansion of the boundaries between jazz and classical music, the redefinition of the orchestral sound, and a revolutionary rethinking of the relationship between soloist and orchestra. The series is both a tribute to the centenary of Miles Davis’s birth and an articulation of the Modern Art Orchestra’s artistic creed: to openly seek new sonic ideals while drawing from the tradition of jazz. Three concerts, different facets of a single musical concept.