When Chano Domínguez was a boy in Cádiz, Spain, he played the flamenco music his father loved on guitar. At the Jazz Standard in Manhattan in December, he reached briefly into the guts of his piano, damping its strings to make his notes sound as though plucked. He was performing "Freddie Freeloader," a Miles Davis tune, but save for Mario Rossy's acoustic bass, the stage evoked the flamenco of his native city and of Barcelona, his current home: Drummer Israel "Piraña" Suárez sat atop a cajón, a boxlike hand drum, and used his hands to strike cymbals. Seated stage right were Blas Córdoba, a singer, and Tomás Moreno Romero, known as "Tomasito," a palmero in the flamenco tradition, who clapped out rhythmic accents along with Mr. Córdoba. At one point, Mr. Romero rose. He struck birdlike poses, darted his eyes. He spun, shimmied, pounded out beats with his heels. He rotated his wrist and extended his fingers to punctuate a phrase, then stomped it to a brilliant conclusion.

Chano Domínguez adds some flamenco flavor to Miles Davis's classics. Zak Szyszko

Mr. Domínguez, now 49, switched to piano in his teens, first playing what he calls "symphonic rock" (inspired by bands such as King Crimson), then falling under jazz's spell. One experience that changed his musical course was his first listen to "Kind of Blue," Davis's epochal 1959 release that has gone on to become the best-selling jazz album of all time. Despite Mr. Domínguez's high profile in Europe, he has performed only twice before in a New York jazz club. His three-night stand at the Jazz Standard was billed as "The Flamenco Side of 'Kind of Blue,'" part of a trans-Atlantic exchange program with the Barcelona International Jazz Festival.

"There is no one sound that defines Catalan jazz, any more than you could say there is a certain style that jazz has in any place," said the festival's director, Joan Cararach. "But Barcelona is one of the places around the world where jazz lives today, and is home to some of its most distinctive voices." For his 2009 festival, Mr. Cararach had booked a "Kind of Blue" tribute band led by drummer Jimmy Cobb, the last surviving member of the album's original ensemble. "But I wanted to do something special to honor Miles Davis," he said, "and to highlight Catalan voices." He offered commissions based on Davis's album to pianist Omar Sosa, who was born in Cuba and now lives in Barcelona, and to Mr. Domínguez; the two works that resulted both had their premieres at the festival. Mr. Domínguez's three-night engagement at the Jazz Standard was billed as the festival's official closing program, and it was recorded for release in the fall.

Mr. Domínguez has been playing jazz with flamenco musicians for more than 15 years. "I'm seeking to find a new language," he said at his hotel one afternoon, "where the line is not so clear as to where one begins and the other ends." He's neither the first nor the last musician with such ambitions. Tete Montoliu, a blind Catalan-born virtuoso, blended flamenco rhythms with bebop in his playing, and was integral to Lionel Hampton's 1956 recording "Jazz Flamenco"; more recently the trumpeter and conga player Jerry Gonzalez, an American of Puerto Rican descent who resettled in Barcelona, has collaborated to great effect with the flamenco musicians.

"Jazz improvises within a musical form," said Mr. Domínguez. "In flamenco, you improvise the musical form. Typically, the guitar player is waiting for the singer: When the singer starts to sing, he knows what happens—but that is changing every day. It depends on how the singer feels—or, in my case, how the pianist feels."

It's only natural that "Kind of Blue" is a powerful vehicle for Mr. Domínguez. There's the obvious reference point—one of the album's five tracks is titled "Flamenco Sketches"—but more significant is Davis's bold decision that all the music be modal, based on specific eight-note scales rather than chords, as had been the case for bebop and its precursors. It was a liberating concept Davis absorbed from composer and scholar George Russell, a game-changing improvisation of form.

In assigning one or more flamenco rhythms to each tune, Mr. Domínguez lends both rhythmic variation and extroverted emotion to music that is famously restrained. "Freddie Freeloader," the album's only conventional blues, was set to an African-influenced tanguillo. "So What" featured a bulería, indicative of joyful celebration. For the balladic "Blue in Green," Mr. Domínguez used a soleá ("the rhythm of sorrow and anguish," he said); here, Mr. Córdoba's pained melismata embellished a text drawn from "Canción #51," written by Rafael Alberti, a poet from Cádiz. As Mr. Domínguez explained in an introduction, Alberti was a contemporary of Davis, an ocean away.

Mr. Cararach was a music critic before taking up the Barcelona festival's reins in 2003. Since then, he has pursued an ambitious agenda as a producer, quadrupling the number of concerts in the festival to 60 spanning six weeks, including some landmark shows—most notably last year's duo-piano performances by the father and son Bebo and Chucho Valdés. Both Mr. Cararach's festival and Mr. Domínguez's music speak of a still-vital and deep-rooted Catalan connection to American jazz. Barcelona's Club Jamboree has been open since 1960. The festival was created in 1966; its 1969 edition included a performance of Duke Ellington's second Sacred Concert at Barcelona's Santa Maria del Mar Cathedral, with the Ellington orchestra augmented by a Catalan choir. "Our concert hit a new and unforgettable high," Ellington recalled in his autobiography, "Music Is My Mistress." "In Barcelona, the audience entered into the spirit of the finale, they burst into the aisles and joined in the dancing."

In Davis's autobiography, "Miles," written with Quincy Troupe, the trumpeter recalls seeing the Ballet Africaine from Guinea when describing "Kind of Blue." "I wanted a lot of spontaneity in the playing," he wrote, "just like I thought was in the interplay between those dancers and those drummers and that finger piano player." Despite its success, Davis felt that "Kind of Blue" failed to get that impulse across. ("I just missed," he wrote.) At the Jazz Standard, punctuating some brilliantly inventive runs by Mr. Domínguez, Mr. Córdoba did the dancing—and gave fresh entrance into the spirit of Davis's half-century-old gem.

Mr. Blumenfeld writes about jazz for the Journal.