Three great albums reappear this week repackaged, expanded, remastered — you know the drill – under the banner “1959: Jazz’s Greatest Year”. True, some great music appeared that year, but it’s one of those retro propositions that doesn’t get you very far — a bit like “1808: Classical Music’s Greatest Year”. Jazz, like any healthy art form, should be in constant evolution. Anyway, it’s a pleasure to welcome again Charles Mingus’s scuffling, bustling and joyous Ah Um, and Dave Brubeck’s urbane Time Out — the first jazz album to sell a million, thus ensuring the scepticism of jazzbo elitists everywhere. But the album in the series that, for me, still possesses the biggest emotional clout comes from Miles Davis.

Sketches of Spain, the trumpeter’s third collaboration with the great orchestrator Gil Evans, did not actually appear until 1960. But Davis’s 1959 release, Kind of Blue, has already been energetically celebrated this year (Kind of Blue on blue vinyl, anyone?). Sketches of Spain, too, has had to endure the doubts of some jazz fans, who complain that there isn’t much jazz on it and that some passages are too close to easy listening. They may be right on the first charge but surely not the second.

Evans and Davis had become fascinated by the idea of finding a common ground between American blues and the sad beauty of flamenco. A rearrangement of part of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez is the key work. Throughout, Davis’s trumpet playing — moody, brooding — has rarely sounded so eloquent. His lengthy improvisation on Evans’s Solea must rank among his best work. Even the cracked notes, and there are a few, sound right in a Miles sort of way.

An additional CD offers a useful crop of outtakes and addenda, though nothing that hasn’t been released on one of several other reissues. Among them is the sole live performance of the Concierto de Aranjuez, from the Carnegie Hall in 1961. Rarely available, this would be the reason for repurchasing. Critics cite the occasionally muzzy ensemble playing on the original release . This was partly intentional — a desire to get away from classical perfection — and partly simply because Evans’s charts were complex and not over-rehearsed. The 1961 performance is better realised. It’s hard now to appreciate how novel this music must have sounded — the castanets, the mournful bassoon, the warm haze of the brass. Forty-nine years on the novelty may have worn off but the beauty endures.

Columbia/Legacy, TS £14.67

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