#690 Miles Davis - Sketches of Spain

If there's any major western style of music I know less about than jazz, its classical, and I'm not sure this isn't a bit of both. Or maybe its neither. I wouldn't know! You see my dilemma.

An album of huge, dramatic moments that you're likely to associate with classical music, with the extended focus on the trumpet that jazz normally trucks in. There are minimal drums, minimal accompaniment of any kind, the spotlight trained blazing on looooong notes, broken up by period of silence, trumpet music stripped nearly bare, possibly escaping classification. Davis, counterpunching at contemporary criticism questioning the album's jazz pedigree quipped "it's music, and I like it". I guess I agree. Except I don't much like it.

There's not much song here, just a single long line of melody at a time, winding and winding around and around, and unless you're a serious trumpet tone wonk that somehow hasn't heard this, I don't know if that's going to be enough to keep you interested.

It's evocative, but in a movie soundtrack way, in that way that suggests something outside itself, suggesting that that suggested something might be the point, that it might be more the point than the music itself. And that something evades me, I just don't get it in my gut. And more generally, I admit it, I just don't get it. I fear you won't either 2.5/5