On
the first day of guitar class junior year of high school, Mr. Anastasio asked
us all to introduce ourselves and say why we wanted to learn to play the
guitar. The class was full of eager boys with dreams of making girls fall in
love with them by screaming onstage with electric blue guitars. The boy I had
had a serious crush on in middle school was in this class and fell
into this category. When it was my turn, I announced as I cradled my mother's beautiful inlaid Spanish guitar that I was learning guitar
because I wanted to play flamenco. Mr. Anastasio raised his eyebrows and told
me that flamenco was absolutely the hardest style I could learn to play.
That
was the beginning of my education on flamenco. I had thought that flamenco was
the soundtrack to the Zorro movies. From Mr. Anastasio I learned what real
flamenco was: the sounds of Paco de Lucía, often considered the best flamenco guitarist.
Paco
de Lucía’s death on Wednesday has significance for anyone who has been
touched by flamenco and flamenco fusions. For me, it meant the death of the
first and perhaps most important flamenco name I knew. The allure of flamenco tremolos
and swirling red skirts is a large part of why I am currently living in Sevilla—and
more specifically, Triana, the birthplace of many flamenco songs. Flamenco
today is what it is largely because of Paco de Lucía’s revolutionary
musical creativity that blended flamenco with other styles without leaving
behind the flamenco essence. His death has brought into sharp focus the fact
that the twenty-first century experience of flamenco, which to me often feels
so electrically intimate, has been marked by the genius of an artist whose
legacy overruns borders from Algeciras to New York.
Yesterday
in Alcalá de Guadaira as I approached the city’s castle with its Islamic
foundations that date from the twelfth century if not earlier, I heard the unmistakable
sound of a cajón and palmas marking rhythms. It was the Day of Andalucía and
the town, not far from Sevilla, was sparsely dotted with clusters of families
enjoying meals in the sun and high school students getting up to no good on
their day off from school. A group of adults, teenagers, and children were
eating, drinking, and making music beside the castle. Paco de Lucía’s influence
was present in this ancient space just above the uber-modern dragon-shaped
bridge in the valley: his musical group introduced the cajón, a square Peruvian
instrument, to the flamenco scene in the 1980s (NYT).
Here, on this sunny day in Andalucía, it was being used to accompany the handclaps
and folk singing. The music was perhaps not precisely flamenco in the purest
sense, but the rhythms and minor sequences, sung in voices that always sounded
a little bit pained, channeled the same deep Andalusian heritage. With the cajón
and the dragon and the castle the scene was Andalucía globalized—but Andalucía
nonetheless.
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| Music by the castle walls in Alcalá de Guadaira |
Andalucía
is not a land of purity. Islamic, Christian, and Jewish traditions and
structures combine. Flamenco combines with rumbas and tangos, and flamenco
itself combines many elements of the diverse gypsy-Moorish-Andalusian
experience. One form of expression that typifies this tendency to combine
cultures and art forms is the song and dance called Sevillanas. Although
dancers wear flamenco outfits and shoes, and the dance itself is complete with
flourishes of the arms that very closely resemble flamenco movements, it is not
technically flamenco. It has four set parts that are always danced the same way,
so that in parties and social gatherings people can dance it in partners. It is
a folk tradition of Sevilla that has incorporated many flamenco elements, and it
is largely the dance of choice at Sevilla’s annual Feria, a big to-do in a huge
field with dancing and celebrations that falls in May this year.
I
got to practice the sevillanas I have been learning at a bar with flamenco on
Thursday night. So far I have only learned the first part; I look forward to
dancing all four parts in full regalia for Feria. After the sevillanas and a
few rumbas, the two guitarists in the bar played Entre dos aguas in homage to Paco de Lucía.
Flamenco
and fusion will go on. In the Plaza del Altozano and the Plaza de Santa Ana in
Triana, women and men will keep singing and dancing and playing guitar and
clapping their hands. But what will it take for someone to reach the level of
technical mastery and inventiveness of Paco de Lucía? I trust the land of Andalucía and its
capacity to meld art forms into something new and at the same time very, very
old. It is a land of venerated old poets and energetic young ones. Perhaps
today there is a little girl near the Guadalquivir somewhere, learning her very
first guitar chords, who is as familiar with the wooden curves of the
instrument as she is with the sleek silver silhouette of an iPhone—and perhaps
she will revolutionize this world of globalized flamenco.
