Sketches of Spain got Miles Davis accused of theft by a living classical composer, enraged jazz purists, and drove a future rock critic to abandon jazz entirely, yet it became a platinum-selling, Grammy-winning masterpiece. This episode traces the 1960 album from a night out that Frances Taylor Davis insisted on, watching flamenco dancer Roberto Iglesias, to Miles clearing out the flamenco section at Colony Records. The original plan with arranger Gil Evans was modest: a single jazz version of the Adagio from Joaquin Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez. With no sheet music available, Evans transcribed the entire concerto by ear from a mono record, then dug into Alan Lomax’s Spanish field recordings for the folk material that became The Pan Piper, Saeta and Solea.

The hosts explain the Third Stream idea behind the record, how Evans inserted an entirely original section into Rodrigo’s concerto, why Miles chose the conical-bore flugelhorn over the trumpet, and his rehearsal discovery that playing softer made the melodies hit harder. They then unpack the fallout: nobody asked Rodrigo’s permission, his wife viewed the record as a desecration, a lawsuit against the Spanish Society of Authors and Publishers collapsed because Miles had already assigned the royalties, and today Rodrigo’s estate owns the rights to Evans’s arrangement. Recorded at Columbia’s 30th Street Studio and marking the first collaboration with producer Teo Macero, the album won a 1961 Grammy and went on to more than 860,000 certified sales.

• How Gil Evans mapped a full orchestra from a single mono LP without a score
• Knife grinders, Holy Week processions and street flamenco as source material
• Trumpet versus flugelhorn and the psychology of restraint in the Concierto de Aranjuez
• Why Robert Christgau walked away from jazz after hearing this album
• Miles Davis’s answer to every genre label: it was music and he enjoyed it