Sketches of Miles is exactly that. Loving recreations of the sacred cows of the Miles Davis canon – including ‘Pinocchio/Milestones,’ ‘Footprints,’ ‘My Funny Valentine’ and ‘So What’ by Theo Croker's quartet on the first disc, and ‘Miles Ahead Suite,’ ‘Sketches of Spain Suite,’ ‘Porgy and Bess Suite’ and ‘All Blues’ with Croker's quartet and the Mitglieder der Berliner Philharmoniker on the second CD, all lovingly recreated with a mixture of respect, affection and awe. Croker steps inside his role of Miles-Davis-for-a-night, his tone and the outline of his improvisations remaining idiomatically faithful to the material at hand, while his quartet give every indiction they too have really got inside these compositions.

There is no question this would have been a wonderful concert to witness, especially the performances captured on compact disc two, with the Mitglieder der Berliner Philharmoniker and the Croker quartet playing reimagined arrangements of Davis’ Miles Ahead by Magnus Lindgren, Sketches of Spain by Hans Eck (who wrote the EST Symphony), and Lindgren's Porgy & Bess. ‘All Blues’ is a head arrangement put together by Lindgren. Live, jazz repertory is one thing, being witness to what Miles Davis might have sounded like live almost 70 years ago can be both exciting and stimulating, but on record it stands in competition with the real thing, the original recordings, where there is only one winner.

Yet such nostalgic endeavours, when well produced and performed, like (Sketches of Spain) can have great appeal to those unfamiliar or resistant to the ever-changing present in jazz, or those who yearn for the imagined “normalcy” of a jazz past that seemed far more secure.