Close your eyes and let the music move you... to Spain

The kids were wound up and wouldn't go to sleep. My nerves were frayed and I felt myself sinking into a black morass of grumpiness.
I desperately needed to relax, so this is the CD I automatically pulled from the shelf.
When Miles Davis' "Sketches of Spain" debuted in 1959, jazz purists did not know what to make of it.
Pieces such as "Concierto de Aranjuez" and "Saeta" aren't really jazz, are they?
Who cares?
As Miles himself remarked: "It's good music. And I like it."
"Sketches of Spain," with Gil Evans' luxurious orchestration, could serve as background mood music.
I relax to it best, however, when I concentrate on it.
I close my eyes and I "see" sun-drenched Andalusian hills and Spanish peasants returning to the fields to share bottles of wine. What's more relaxing than that?
A.B. Spellman of the National Endowment for the Arts once described the album as: "listening music that is pensive and penetrating" that also "has the kind of depth to it that is transporting."
"Sketches of Spain" has always transported me to a calm, restful place.
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