5. Miles Davis, Gil EvansSketches Of Spain

I like some jazz, but not that much. I like the idea of it, but in reality a lot of the noodlier end of jazz just irritates me. But Sketches Of Spain is a great balance between improvisation and composition. It’s a great collaboration between two personalities that are quite different.

[Jazz double bassist] Chris Laurence, who’s on a few of our albums, he played with Gil Evans, so he was telling me about working with him. In the rehearsals, Gil would just get them to play the same chord over and over again, not because he was trying to improve it, just because he really liked the chords and wanted to hear it. Which I really can relate to – a lot of the time in orchestral settings you can be rehearsing something, and you slow it right down, just to tune the chord or get the intonation right, and it always sounds better than the thing you actually composed. 

In collaborations, I think it’s important that you don’t step on each other’s toes. We are so different, but I’m sure we’ve got a lot to learn from Gil and Miles. It’s hard to see from the inside sometimes. I think a lot of times I’m really close up, whereas George has got a more zoomed-out view. We’re not duplicating one another’s work. George is also always wanting to sharpen things into the purest possible form, whereas I have a tendency to go off and write 1,000 variations on a piece of music.