In celebration of WAM's inauguration:
The buzzword among young artists is *mestizaje* - the
word for racial mixing, used here to mean the blending
of different cultural currents.
-----
Financial Times, June 24, 1996, Spain Survey, p. VI.
Spain. New flamenco: by Kathy Karmen
Out of tune with tradition
Bongo drums and bare-chested stars have attracted a new
audience to flamenco music.
[Bare-chested photo] In the flesh: Joaquin Cortes has
melded ballet and flamenco traditions
The polka dots and flounces are gone. Forget about the
castanets. And the lone guitar now has company on stage.
Take "Gypsy Passion", the latest show by rising star
Joaquin Cortes. Women in plain black dance to the wail of
flutes, violins and the beat of bongos. The stylised
contortions of bare-chested Cortes even get the grannies in
the audience leaping to their feet.
Flamenco purists grumble but the sounds and look have
opened up a new era in the music. In recent years young
flamenco musicians have been bridging the gap between
traditional flamenco and other music forms - salsa, blues,
jazz and pop/rock. An assortment of instruments, ranging
from the Peruvian *cajon* or box-drum to violins, flutes,
blues guitars and even the piano, has invaded the scene.
Cortes admits to having danced a "seguiriya" - a basic
flamenco song - to a grand piano. In the recording "10 de
Paco" a piano, saxophone, flute. double bass and percussion
reinterpret 10 compositions by master guitarist Paco de
Lucia. It is "flamenco fusion" at its best - though few
would have thought a piano could sit in for the flamenco
guitar.
"Experiments aside, flamenco will always be based on the
guitar." says flamenco critic Joaquin Albaicin. The guitar,
he says, has evolved more than anything else because of
Paco de Lucia's innovations. De Lucia, an extraordinarily
gifted and precocious guitarist, himself outgrew
traditional forms and techniques of playing.
This is a result of his mastering flamenco's strict canons
at too young an age, sigh the purists with some misgivings:
one gets bored and starts messing with bossa nova and such.
By the early 1970s de Lucia, who is now 48, was
incorporating bongos and a bass guitar to enhance rhythm.
Persuasive Latin American rhythms are not entirely new to
flamenco. The connection with Spain's new world colonies
left its mark a century ago with a form of flamenco called
*de ida y vuelta* or "there and back here" song. Afro-Cuban
rhythms such as the rhumba gave a new twist to flamenco's
lighter forms. Compared with a solemn bit of chair-binding
*cante hondo* (deep song), a burst of gypsy rhumba comes on
like an attack of ants in the pants. The French group Gypsy
Kings has taken the rhumba to its ultimate commercial
success with music made to get the dead going. The group's
Andalucian cousins claim more subtle variations.
*Cante* or flamenco song was revolutionised by the phrasing
and personality of the Cadizborn singer Camaron de la Isla
(Little Shrimp of the Isle). Camaron, a blond, flamenco
version of James Dean, moved a whole generation with his
fantastic *rajo* voice - a hoarse quality caused as much by
his gypsy origins as by cigarettes. An idol at home and
admired abroad by the likes of Mick Jagger and Leonard
Cohen, Camaron died in 1991, aged 41, of lung cancer.
In the wake of such heavyweights, young flamenco talents do
not always have an easy time finding a voice of their own.
Sound-alikes abound, but imitators are ruining the essence
of flamenco, fret the critics. Few have the ability of
Camaron or de Lucia to revert to traditional forms at will.
For some, having it in the blood is as good as having it in
the fingertips. The offspring of various flamenco dynasties
have simply opted to do their own thing. Groups such as.
Ketama or Pata Negra have broken new ground by mixing their
flamenco base with salsa, blues and rock.
Spanish jazz musicians have also joined in, realising that
flamenco is not only a source of untapped riches but also
Spain's most exportable cultural product. The result of all
this is uneven. Rock music, for example, is a rhythmically
more limited and less melodic partner. As flamenco evolves,
the debate is about where to draw the line.
Some flamenco artists remain hostile to what they see as
pure commercialism. There is also unease over excess
technical perfection detracting from essence. Virtuoso
*zapateado*, or noisy footwork of the clockwork kind, can
drown out the subtlety of dance movement. Older artists are
also cautious about the borrowing. One veteran dancer
compares flamenco with clay: "You can make a thousand
marvellous figures with it, without having to use other
materials."
But the buzzword among young artists is *mestizaje* - the
word for racial mixing, used here to mean the blending of
different cultural currents. Cortes, 27, a former ballet
star who went back to his gypsy origins to take up
flamenco, is one of several such cultural hybrids. The
result is a ballet flamenco where the two dance forms fuse
or taunt one another like two street fighters, or blend
together to a jazz trumpet. With his fluid movements,
Cortes takes some of the strutting out of flamenco. The
critics and the public may at times be sceptical, but
Cortes has undoubtedly freshened up the rigid as well as
macho world of flamenco.
He and a bevy of other flamenco stars appear in Flamenco,
the new film by Spanish director Carlos Saura in which the
classic and the new have their say in a feast of song,
dance and guitar.
Paradoxically, the mixing of cultural currents goes along
with a strong emphasis on ethnic origins. On stage,
Andalucian gypsy performers fete their history and cultural
specificity. Though non-gypsy artists such as Paco de Lucia
have always thrived. flamenco owes its survival to the
gypsies and their oral tradition. The closed world of
flamenco has opened up, especially in Andalucia where
gypsies have moved to the cities and become more
integrated, and it has gained a new following.
The debate about new flamenco is bound to continue. Will a
packed stadium hurt the essence of flamenco? As society
evolves. will an art form preserved until now by a
marginalised people lose its roots? Does flamenco risk
being absorbed into "world music"?
One happy outcome of all the experimentation is that many
young adepts who are drawn to the new sounds turn to
traditional flamenco for more. And there is enough young
talent around to satisfy the demand for the genuine.
[End]
To see color photo:
http://pwp.usa.pipeline.com/~jya/cortes.jpg
-----
And be sure to fire your privates watching *Riverrun*, the
Irish dancing spectacular with blends of tap, flamenco and
other percussive dance. It's on world tour and on video,
$19.95. Watch the two stars float above the stage and weep
with envy of their antigravity.
Then for even more sexual longing, grab anywhere you can
the touring Indian dancers, Nrityagram Dance Ensemble, and
suffer almost unbearable full-flesh Kama Sutra seduction.
The New York Times writes:
The five young women offered a sense of the delicately
sensuous Odissi, a classical Indian dance form believed
to have originated in the temples of Orissa as early as
the second century B.C. They performed with a burnished
grace, a selfless concentration that reflected their
intensive training in dance, music, literature, language
and philosophy.
[Photo] Pavritha Reddy performing with the Nrityagram Dance
Ensemble.
To see b/w photo:
http://pwp.usa.pipeline.com/~jya/reddy.jpg
