International artists fascinated by flamenco

A genre that has crossed borders from within the music itself

Flamenco has a well-earned reputation as an art form closed in on itself, hard to break into from the outside and even harder to play with any authority without having grown up inside its tradition. And yet, across the 20th and 21st centuries, a number of foreign musicians — most of them already established in jazz — became genuinely fascinated by flamenco, to the point of dedicating whole albums to it, seeking out its great performers, and speaking publicly about that admiration. These aren’t anecdotal cases or passing stylistic nods: they are documented collaborations, with dates, records, and testimony from the musicians themselves. This article covers the most solid of them, leaving out any connection that can’t be backed by a reasonable source.

Miles Davis and the origins of “Sketches of Spain” (1960)

The earliest case, and in some ways the most surprising, is Miles Davis. It’s documented that Davis’s fascination with Spain began with a live flamenco performance he attended with his wife, Frances: he was so struck by the rhythm and expressive force of what he heard that he started collecting flamenco records on his own. Producer George Avakian, who also ran a world-music series with ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, took that interest further by passing flamenco recordings on to arranger Gil Evans as well, hoping they might inspire him.

That cross-pollination produced “Sketches of Spain” (1960), an album built with Gil Evans that starts from Joaquín Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez but directly incorporates structures from cante flamenco: the track “Saeta” recreates the saeta sung during Holy Week processions, while “Solea” draws on the soleá, one of the foundational palos of cante jondo. This isn’t a superficial imitation of “Spanish color” — it’s a jazz trumpeter studying the language of flamenco firsthand and, with Evans’s help, translating it into the orchestral vocabulary of the jazz of the time.

John McLaughlin: from a radio in Paris to Paco de Lucía

No case illustrates the idea of “fascination” better than John McLaughlin’s, the British guitarist already established in jazz-rock through his work with Miles Davis and his own Mahavishnu Orchestra. By his own account, McLaughlin was in Paris in 1978, listening to the radio, when a Paco de Lucía recording came on. It was, in his words, love at first listen: he decided he had to play with that man no matter what, and he kept searching until he found him.

That meeting first produced The Guitar Trio, formed with Paco de Lucía and flamenco guitarist Larry Coryell, soon replaced by Al Di Meola. The project led to two albums that have become essential references for understanding the dialogue between jazz and flamenco: “Friday Night in San Francisco” (1981), recorded live on December 5, 1980 at The Warfield theatre in San Francisco, and “Passion, Grace & Fire” (1983), this time in the studio, where each guitarist played a different instrument — McLaughlin a nylon-string classical guitar, Di Meola a steel-string acoustic, and Paco de Lucía his traditional flamenco guitar — so each could be picked out in the stereo mix. Both albums show two foreign guitarists absorbing the technical language of flamenco — the rasgueo, the falseta, the compás — without giving up their own jazz-rock vocabulary, in a genuine meeting point between traditions.

Chick Corea: from “Spain” to collaborating directly with Paco de Lucía

Pianist Chick Corea represents a different but equally documented case. His composition “Spain” (1971), included on the album “Light as a Feather,” also grew out of a fascination with Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, but over time Corea himself acknowledged that this initial interest deepened once he personally met Paco de Lucía: “something got turned on when I met Paco de Lucía,” the pianist said, explaining that from then on he began meeting other flamenco musicians and studying their history.

That relationship didn’t stop at one famous piece. Over the following decades, Corea collaborated directly with flamenco musicians such as guitarist Niño Josele and dancer Nino de los Reyes, and formed the Spanish Heart Band, a project built explicitly around his connection to Spanish and flamenco music, which recorded the album “Antidote” (2019) with flamenco guitar as a central part of the band’s sound. This is probably the longest-sustained case of fascination covered here — not a single record, but a relationship with flamenco spanning nearly half a century.

Cases left out for lack of verification

Researching this topic makes it tempting to assume flamenco connections that aren’t actually well documented. Deliberately left out, for instance, is any direct collaboration between Ry Cooder and flamenco musicians: his best-documented fusion projects point toward Cuban music (Buena Vista Social Club), Malian music (Ali Farka Touré), or Tex-Mex music (Flaco Jiménez), not flamenco. Pat Metheny was also left out: there is a real project bridging his music with flamenco — the album “Metheny Flamenco” by Sevillian guitarist Santiago Lara, which Metheny himself publicly praised — but that’s a flamenco musician covering Metheny, not Metheny’s own fascination with flamenco, so it doesn’t fit the angle of this article.

A fascination that’s still alive

What connects Miles Davis, John McLaughlin, and Chick Corea, beyond the decades separating their respective discoveries of flamenco, is that none of them simply borrowed an exotic color for their music: all three actively sought out contact with real flamenco performers, listened to records, attended live shows, and, in the case of McLaughlin and Corea, ended up sharing stages and studios with the genre’s own leading figures. That combination of genuine curiosity and musical fieldwork explains why, more than sixty years after “Sketches of Spain,” flamenco keeps producing that same sense of discovery in musicians who approach it from completely different traditions.