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enigmatic, talking in metaphors as he smokes his hand-rolled che- roots. While his wife prepared us all a huge supper, he sang for us sitting on his back porch, beers on the table, cheroot in hand. His son accompanied him on guitar. It didn’t matter that I had little idea what the words meant. He sang and I burst into tears, goosepimples on my skin.
This, I realised later talking to Inés Bacán, a celebrated singer from a Gypsy family in Lebrija, was what they call ‘el duende’, the expression used to describe a particular transmission of deep feel- ing through the music. It’s not, she explained, something that’s always present. But it’s what every flamenco musician, dancer or singer hopes for in a performance. I was amazed to discover that it could be present in dance. I’d welled up watching a zambra being danced in a cave in the Sacromonte, the ancient Gypsy settlement overlooked by the Alhambra from the hill across the valley. The musicians all worked to support the dancer. They fed off one another, the feeling in the room growing more and more intense as the performance became more and more impassioned.
It was guitarist Paco Peña in the beautiful Moorish palace he calls home in down town Córdoba who recounted the flamenco guitar’s journey from accom pany ing dance and song to becoming a virtuoso solo instrumental form demanding serious study. He explained the continuing relevance of the music as it incorporates other musical styles, such as jazz – exemplified by Paco de Lucía – and rock, as introduced by the legendary singer Camarón de la Isla in his groundbreaking 1970s recording La Leyenda Del Tiempo.
Later we saw a brilliant young group combining flamenco with Hungarian Gypsy music, highlighting the music’s common roots in the journey the Romani first took following their banish- ment from Rajasthan in about the 9th Century. Some groups went north, many ending up settling in Eastern Europe, whilst others travelled south through the Middle East and North Africa, then up into southern Spain.
T
You can hear the sounds of these places in flamenco, in the scales or the rhythms, or a particular melody. And you can hear the sound of different places in Andalucía, expressed in a particular variation of melody or rhythm or lyric that is completely inter- twined with the Andalucían soil which saw its creation.
hough it was popularised by Franco as a tourist attrac- tion, and wielded by him as an effective weapon in his campaign for national Catholicism, though it spread through Spain as migrants from the south moved north looking for work and though recordings made it widely known, flamenco remains the sound of Andalucía. And a vital, vibrant expression of life lived now.
It’s the sound of the poverty. It’s rebel music. In the current economic crisis flamenco is seeing a resurgence in popularity as a means of protest – a kind of reprise of its traditional role as a carri- er for the Gypsy’s concerns. In Seville, we met up with El Morisito, from the beautifully simple flamenco flashmob campaign, which uses flamenco dance and song to protest at the corruption of the banking system within the banks themselves.
Flamenco consists of three strands – music, song and dance. At grassroots level, all are thriving. Watching a class of three-year- olds effortlessly and elegantly go through their paces in their Jerez dance school, their teacher turned to teach me. “How long before I could dance professionally?” She looked astonished. “You can get a lot of enjoyment just watching.”
And I had, every day, for an amazing two weeks travelling Andalucía. I was unprepared for the visceral presence of flamenco. There is – as Mark Cooper at BBC4 put it – an “overwhelming case for the power, vitality and force of flamenco even as that music is threatened by a corporate future and nostalgia for a vanished past”. Just when you saw one amazing performance somewhere completely unexpected and thought it couldn’t possibly be topped, another one came and topped it.
The roots of flamenco might be contested, but in the words of Antonio Ortega, from the Tres Mil estate: “If flamenco was a cake, a big cake where someone has put the biscuits, others have put the cream, others have put something else, the Gypsy has put the cherry on top and given the hands with which to make it. The Gypsy is the cook.”
We relished every bite.
Ben Whalley, was shown on BBC 4 in August – and will undoubted- ly be repeated in the future. Keep your eyes open.
Flamenco: Gypsy Soul, presented by Elizabeth and directed by F
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