The subtitle – From Segovia and Sabicas to Miles Davis and John Coltrane – explains the thinking behind this good-value boxette rather nicely. Virtually every reader will have the landmark Miles Davis/Gil Evans collaborations in their collection. All of Sketches of Spain and chunks of Miles Ahead (plus ’Flamenco Sketches’ from Kind of Blue) are included here; little more needs to be said about those, other than that these recordings bought the colours of orchestral music (not just Spanish) to jazz in a way that hadn’t been heard before, outside of Ellington. What’s more interesting is the way in which the set contextualises Evans’ innovations. So, as well as other jazzers who delved into Spanish textures (Trane, Django), we get the classical French (Ravel, Debussy) and Iberian masters (Rodrigo, Albéniz. de Falla, Granados) who profoundly influenced Evans in his approach to tonal colour.

The towering, and key, figure here is the jazz-loving Maurice Ravel, whose oeuvre is rich with the perfumes and colours of Spain; many regard Ravel as the supreme orchestrator of all time, and peacocking his heritage (his mother was a Basque) allowed the composer to demonstrate his extraordinary gifts. Three orchestral works are represented here, played by Orchestre National de l’Opéra de Paris, conducted by the great Manuel Rosenthal. Aside from a curiously draggy ‘Boléro’, they’re very good: ‘Alborada del gracioso’ and the glorious Technicolor reverie of ‘Rapsodie espagnole’ are full of the requisite colour (as a bonus there’s a lovely ‘Pavane’ with Julian Bream on Spanish guitar); together they demonstrate that Evans, a great tonal painter himself, drew heavily from the greatest chromaticist of them all.