Chano Dominguez

Chano Dominguez – “Flamenco Sketches”

While Miles Davis continues to stand tall in the jazz pantheon, it’s a challenge and potentially a hazard for artists living in his long shadow to reinterpret and even re-envision the iconic trumpeter and bandleader’s music. Hardest of all are his classic recordings, especially the biggest-selling jazz album in history, 1959’s Kind of Blue. But in a remarkable creative achievement, Barcelona-based pianist Chano Domínguez has brilliantly fused flamenco with jazz to cook up Flamenco Sketches, a stunning new interpretation of Davis’s seminal music on Blue Note Records. It was commissioned by the Barcelona Jazz Festival in conjunction with the 50^th anniversary of Kind of Blue and was recorded live at Jazz Standard in New York in 2009.

Domínguez’s seven-song collection features all of the Kind of Blue tunes augmented by two of Davis’s most popular songs, “Nardis” (put on the jazz map by Bill Evans and never recorded by the composer on any of his own albums) and “Serpent’s Tooth” (a pre-Kind of Blue tune that was part of the trumpeter’s ’50s songbook).

In reflecting on the deep connection Davis had with Spanish music—as evidenced on his album Sketches of Spain and the song “Flamenco Sketches”—Domínguez says that he wanted to pay soulful respect to the trumpeter and his music. “For me the music of Miles has been a constant in my apprenticeship as a musician,” he says. “It is very important to preserve the spirit of musical freedom that permeates the entire work of Miles, so I changed some elements in the music to approach the language of my culture.”

Indeed, Flamenco Sketches is unique in its flamenco-fueled view of the Davis repertoire, especially with Domínguez’s choice of band mates: bassist Mario Rossy, percussionist Israel “Paraná” Suárez (on the box drum cajón), vocalist Blas “Kejío” Córdoba, and dancer Tomás “Tomasito” Moreno, with the latter two contributing percussive hand claps (palmas). “I basically walk through the languages of jazz and flamenco,” Domínguez says. “I was born in Cadiz [Spain], where flamenco as we know it today was born. It was always around me through my parents who were big fans of flamenco. On the other hand, I’ve always felt the need to improvise and create in the moment.” (The pianist’s jazz influences include Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Red Garland, Tommy Flanagan, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock and Keith Jarrett, among others.)

For Flamenco Sketches, Domínguez arranged each tune in different flamenco styles and even included dance steps. “We use dance as part of the flamenco percussion,” he says, “integrating it in introductions and improvisations within the structures of the song.”

Domínguez opens the title tune with a gorgeous solo piano rumination that blooms into a rollicking, dance-oriented groove with explosive handclaps, vocals and piano runs. It’s 16 minutes of fiery beauty. On “Freddie Freeloader,” Domínguez’s pianistic riff on the familiar theme leads into another wild ride, with the palmistas punctuating and accenting the polyrhythmic music as they heat the tempo for the leader to play with fast and tumbling grace. “Blue in Green” features Córdoba’s raspy vocals singing the lyrics from the Spanish poem, “Canción 51,”by Rafael Alberta Gaditano from the book Ballades y canciones del Paranå, written in 1954 (in the “blue and green” era of Kind of Blue, Domínguez explains).

“So What” opens with Rossi’s bass line that Domínguez soon joins with left-hand bass notes before it too takes speed. “All Blues” is less flamenco and more swing with flamenco spicing, as is the jazz-steeped take on “Nardis.” The album closes with “Serpent’s Tooth,” another fast number with shifting tempos.

Domínguez performed with his bands in jazz and flamenco clubs in Spain before, at age 33, deciding to make a go at playing in New York City in 1993. His goal? As he told DownBeat, he wanted to “discover if I can play jazz in the right way.” The result was his 1993 album Chano, on Nubba Records. Later, he also added Afro-Cuban rhythms into his voice thanks to working with the likes of Paquito D’Rivera and Jerry Gonzalez as well as a trip to Cuba. In subsequent years, Domínguez recorded New Flamenco Sound for Verve as well as a trio album, Acércate Más, on Nuba with the late conguero Miguel Diaz and bassist George Mraz.

One prominent jazz musician who was duly impressed after an encounter with Domínguez was Wynton Marsalis, who subsequently invited the pianist and to collaborate with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra in 2003 on a program devoted to the fusion of jazz with flamenco, as well as a return concert in 2008 called “Tap Meets Flamenco,” which featured works by Domínguez and Marsalis. In a radio show documenting the latter event, Marsalis commented on working with Domínguez: “We learned a lot, in rehearsal, in discussions about how to interpret the different grooves, and rhythm harmonies because flamenco music is very different from jazz.”

But as Domínguez showcases on Flamenco Sketches, flamenco and jazz complement each other in quite an exciting way. In the DownBeat article, he said: “Superficially, flamenco and jazz are different, but at the core they’re similar. Both came from the culture of people who have a hard life. Jazz starts with black people, with the blues, the intention to express your happiness and your sadness—and flamenco is the same. But jazz is central to me. It pulls together many different cultures and allows them to think in the same direction.”

The Flamenco Sketches album got its start as a result of a commissioned piece for the 41^st Barcelona Jazz Festival. It was performed there to rousing approval on November 2009. “We were celebrating the 50^th year of Kind of Blue,” says festival artistic director Joan Cararach, who serves as the album’s co-producer. “One booking was obvious: the only survivor [of the album], drummer Jimmy Cobb [and his] tribute band. But I wanted to do something more, so I asked the two most original musicians living in Barcelona: Chano Domínguez and Omar Sosa, to write new music around Kind of Blue. The motto was total freedom, and the idea was not to play Kind of Blue, but to look at it from their own personal point of view and language. Of course, I knew Chano would do his version from his flamenco roots.”

After that triumphant debut, the festival co-presented Domínguez’s show the following month with the Jazz Standard. “It technically became the closing engagement for the Barcelona Jazz Festival,” says Jazz Standard artistic director/booker Seth Abramson, who also serves as co-producer. He knew that Domínguez’s performance in Barcelona had to be documented. “Thus having the multi-night run in place at Jazz Standard presented the perfect opportunity to capture it live on record.”

The reaction? As you can hear on Flamenco Sketches, it was highly enthusiastic. “The crowd response went beyond my expectations,” says Abramson. “The audience was ecstatic over the music, and I believe that for many in attendance it was their first exposure to flamenco music—the dancing, vocalization and palmas.”

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