Sketch (pronounced skech)
(1) A
simply or hastily executed drawing or painting, especially a preliminary one,
giving the essential features without the details, later to be elaborated.
(2) A
rough design, plan, or draft, as of a book.
(3) A
brief or hasty outline of facts, occurrences etc.
(4) As
thumbnail sketch, a piece of text which summaries someone or something.
(5) A
short, usually descriptive, essay, history, or story.
(6) A
short play or slight dramatic performance, as one forming part of a variety or vaudeville
program; a short comedy routine (a skit).
(7) To
make a sketch.
(8) To
summarize, to set forth in a brief or general account.
(9) In
metallurgy, to mark a piece of metal for cutting.
(10) In
music, a short evocative instrumental piece, used especially with compositions for
the piano.
(11) In
the slang of the Irish criminal class, as “to keep (a) sketch), to maintain a
lookout; to be vigilant; watch for something.
(12) In
journalism, as parliamentary sketch, a newspaper article summarizing political
events which attempts to make serious points in a lest than obviously serious
manner (mostly UK).
(13) In
category theory, a formal specification of a mathematical structure or a data
type described in terms of a graph and diagrams (and cones (and cocones)) on
it. It can be implemented by means of “models” (functors) which are graph
homomorphisms from the formal specification to categories such that the
diagrams become commutative, the cones become limiting (ie products) and the
cocones become colimiting (ie sums).
1660–1670:
From the Dutch schets (noun), from
the Italian schizzo, from the Latin schedium (extemporaneous poem), noun use
of neuter of schedius (extempore; hastily
made), from the Ancient Greek σχέδιος (skhédios)
(made suddenly, off-hand, unprepared), from σχεδόν (skhedón) (near, nearby), from ἔχω (ékhō) (I hold). The German Skizze, the French esquisse
& the Spanish esquicio are also
from the Italian schizzo. The related forms are the nouns sketcher
& sketchiness, the adverbs sketchily & sketchingly and the adjectives sketchlike
and sketchable.
Sketch
became a verb in the 1660s in the sense of “present the essential facts
of" and was derived from the earlier noun. This idea of a sketch as a “brief
account” by 1789 had enlarged to a "short play or performance, usually
comic", still maintaining the connection from art as something less than
full-scale, the reference to comedy suggesting something slight rather than a
serious work. The sketch-book was first recorded
in 1820. That
sense extended beyond text to art and design from 1725 when it came also to
mean "draw, portray in outline and partial shading", firstly to
describe simple drawings, referring later to preparatory work for more
elaborate creations. The adjective sketchy
is noted from 1805, describing art “having the form or character of a
sketch". The colloquial sense of
"unsubstantial, imperfect, flimsy" is from 1878, possibly to convey
the sense of something "unfinished". Adumbrate
(faint sketch, imperfect representation), actually pre-dates sketch, noted
first in the 1550s. It was from the Latin
adumbrationem (nominative adumbratio) (a sketch in shadow, sketch,
outline). The meaning "to
overshadow" is from the 1660s at which time emerged the derived forms
adumbrated and adumbrating and related forms are adumbration (noun),
adumbrative (adjective) and adumbratively (adverb).
Sketches
of Spain
Although
not yet regarded as the landmark in jazz it would come to be in the decades
which followed its release in 1959, even in 1960 Miles Davis’ (1926-1991) Kind of Blue had already created among some aficionados an expectation; realising it was
something special, this was what they hoped would be the definitive Davis style
and they were anxious for more. The next
release however, wasn’t indicative of what was to come, Workin' with the Miles Davis Quintet (1960 Cat# Prestige P-7166) was
the third of four albums assembled from sessions recorded long before the Kind of Blue sessions and released to
fulfil contractual obligations to the independent label Prestige. Although some purists were pleased, after Kind of Blue, the music seemed
old-fashioned.
Miles Davis, Kind of Blue, (1959, Columbia, Cat# CS 8163).Davis had
enjoyed considerable success in the 1950s but, needing the distribution and
promotional network of a major label to reach a wider audience, he’d signed
with Colombia (CBS internationally). The
early Colombia releases had been well received but it was the sixth, Kind of Blue, which made him a star
beyond the world of jazz, the album selling in volumes unprecedented in the genre;
to date, over four million copies are said to have been shipped. Davis had been innovative before, his
performance at the 1954 Newport Jazz Festival defining what had come to be
called “hard bop” (a flavor of jazz influenced by other forms, especially rhythm
and blues) but the appeal extended little beyond already established audiences. What made Kind
of Blue so significant was that Davis essentially created modal jazz which
shifted the technique from one where the players worked within a set chord
progression to soloists creating melodies using modes which could be deployed
alone or in multiples. Musicians explain
the significance of this as a movement to the horizontal (the
scale) rather than the traditional vertical (the chord). In the somewhat insular world of jazz, that
would anyway have been interesting but the sound captivated those beyond and was
a landmark in what would come to be known as musical fusion, the cross-fertilisation
of sound and technique. Among composers,
fusion was nothing new but Kind of Blue
realised its implications in a tight, seductive package.
Sketches of Spain too
was a fusion but it was different to what had come before and no attempt to be Kind of Blue II. For one thing, the sound was big, recorded in
the famously cavernous converted church in Manhattan which for decades was
Colombia’s recording studio. Lined with
old timber and with a ceiling which stretched 100 feet (30 m) high, technicians
called it the “temple of sound” because of the extraordinary acoustic
properties. The ensemble too was big, a
necessity because this time the fusion was with the orchestral, the long opening
track an arrangement by Davis and Gil Evans (1912-1988) of the adagio movement
of Joaquín Rodrigo’s (1901-1999) guitar concerto, Concierto de Aranjuez. Such
was the extent of the fusion there were traditionalists who doubted Sketches of Spain could still be called
jazz; they saluted the virtuosity but seemed to miss the sometimes arcane
complexities in construction inaccessible except to the knowing few.
A wider
world however was entranced and technical progress needs also to be noted. Colombia had recorded Davis before in the then
still novel stereo but even fans acknowledged the mono pressings remained
superior and it wasn’t until 1960, after extensive testing and the refinement of
equipment that the technique had been perfected. Sketches
of Spain was lush or austere as the moment demanded, listeners new to
stereo especially enchanted at being able to hear the sounds hanging in a
three-dimensional space, each instrument a distinct object in time and place. Nobody asked for mono after that. Influential as it was, to Davis, Sketches of Spain was just another
phase. Ten years later, noting the
increasing sparse audiences in jazz clubs and aware a new generation had
different sensibilities, Davis would fuse with other, more recent traditions
and Bitches Brew would cast his shadow over a new decade.
Six photographs of Lindsay Lohan, rendered in software as pencil sketches.
