1 November, 2011
Another autumn of glorious, cathartic flamenco. First the September New World Flamenco Festival here in Suburbatorio, Orange County. Then last month the Bay Area Flamenco Gitano Festival in San Francisco and Berkeley. Both were immensely satisfying; in the case of the latter, also “philosophically” rewarding.
Having had a big say about flamenco last year in these pages, I shall pass on specifics, except to mention that Diego El Cigala’s concert opened my eyes or rather ears to possibilities of “fusion” I had always resisted.
Though I came to flamenco late in life and from far outside, I have always been something of a purist, preferring the traditional forms, the palos, each with its compás of designated rhythm. From the point of view of a guitarists, these are toques.
Last Sunday Cigala, who has the license to do what he wants, mixed in the same show traditional flamenco, at a high level, and his extraordinary tango renditions, including two of my favs, Carlos Castaña’s Garganta con arena (Throat with Sand) and Gardel’s Tomo y obligo (I Drink and I Invite — a loose translation would be “the drinks are on me”). In fact, he structured the show around their difference, keeping the genres straight, respecting each, bringing to tango his decidedly flamenco voice and intonations but singing each style of music on its own terms. (see the New York Times review.)
For some idea what that means, click on this link and go to the yellow box on the upper right, where there are many MP3 versions of Garganta con arena. Here is one I especially like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXSbXOXwSgQ&feature=player_embedded#!
And here is Cigala’s version.
As for the flamenco that night in Berkeley, it was indeed occasionally inflected by the different harmonics and rhythms of tango, especially when the full ensemble was playing. But there was no doubt where Cigala was coming from when he sang flamenco cante (superb alegría and soleá, plus a classic burleria).
As important for me, though, was the experience around the music, the fiesta which continues once the show is over, noctural dionysian carnival, almost a kind of anticipatory wake, one for which we all pay a price the next day, such as day remains to us when we drag ourselves out of bed bleary-eyed late the next afternoon. And this same genie — there is something magical here — is shared with tango.
Hence the beauty of Cigala’s choice of Garganta con arena as opening song both in this performance and on the album:
Ya ves,
el día no amanece,
Polaco Goyeneche,
cántame un tango más.
Ya ves,
la noche se hace larga,
tu vida tiene un Karma,
cantar, siempre cantar.
You see,
day is not yet dawning
Polaco Goyeneche,
so sing one more tango.
You see,
night is stretching out before us,
your life has its karma,
singing, just singing.
Last year I quoted Donn Pohren saying that flamenco is a way of life, open to those who love it, who will follow it where it leads until the sun comes up, or we die. Day, in the poetics of flamenco and tango, is the death of night, a way of life being also, ideally, the way to die, fully in your chosen life, not in the hands of others.
*
Only on the drive the next day back down horrific Interstate 5 — a highway apparently intended to convert us all into vegetarians, so putrid are the gigantic feedlots you pass by — did I clue into my second lesson of those three days.
On that Saturday morning I had audited a master class by Diego del Morao.
It was a humbling experience, especially since I had been playing a few hours every day for a month or so in order to set my mind on flamenco. As usual, when it comes to my music, more frustration than satisfaction ensued.
Diego is the grand nephew of Manuel Morao (these things matter in that world), son of the great Jerez guitarist Moraito Chico, who died at 55 in August and to whom the first night’s performance by Diego and his group was dedicated.
No one can fault Diego’s mastery of the idiom of his father’s and grandfathers’ music, though he belongs to a generation at ease with crossing out of flamenco into other genres, is more Madrid than Seville, let alone Jerez. In fact, he is only one guitarist on Cigala’s tango album (Cigala y tango), and regularly plays with the other sidemen — I am especially fond of Yelsy Heredia, the Cuban contrabassist.
Yes, I am unabashedly plugging this album, and dropping names.
Where do I belong in all this, I had been wondering as I cruised down I-5, eyes peeled for lurking CHP.
I have rarely played before others and I would never dare take up a guitar in a flamenco fiesta, especially the special one on Saturday night and Sunday morning where my main man Keni, among others, passed the guitar around, others providing baile and cante, dancing and singing.
So what was I doing there? And why was it, by all evidence, okay for me to be in that select group at 5 am in some private house in the Oakland Hills to which the group had retired after we shut down Picaro, the tapas bar in the Mission District where the post-performance fiesta had begun?
As I passed the feedlots (which always remind me of Keni’s categorically negative reaction to bullfights, followed by my own in 1995, one which required copious quantities of cheap Spanish brandy to squelch), I suddenly blinked on something that happened forty years ago, in Paris.
On the boat over in September, 1972, the Soviet liner Alexandr Pushkin (yes, what loss it is to the young now to have to fly to go anywhere — it is so much easier to make love on a boat, so many more occasions for it), I had befriended a young Québec musician, a pianist and concertmaster. For much of the ensuing year in Paris I would meet him at one or another concert in the decommissioned churches of Paris, host then to dozens of virtually free concerts a week. Afterwards I would accompany him to whatever post-performance events there were, sometimes in bistrots and brasseries, often in what one might call salons.
It was part of his own career to curry contact with Paris musicians. I was an attractive enough twenty-six year old, especially to many of a certain orientation, though never those I wanted to be attracted to me. In those settings I passed as his lover, and I presume he was happy to have me do so.
On that occasion, we were with an ally of his, a rising young classical trumpetist, still in 2011, after all these years, recording obscure, recherché baroque pieces. The trumpetist was dashingly handsome and accompanied by one of the most gorgeous women I had ever seen, a non-musician for sure, who had me down for what was just beginning to be thought of as gay, hence safe to chat with, even exchange intimacies, like two kept-women in the powder-room. She told me fascinating things about the trumpetist’s instrument.
There must have been a half dozen ambitious young musicians in that cenacle. Everyone was on display and pushing their credentials. I had none to push, musically speaking, apart from having plinked away for years at classical guitar.
(I was playing Villa-Lobos at that point. This I can recall because the Brazilian composer, who himself lived in Paris in the late twenties, is indeliably linked to my memories of that impoverished year of research in Paris, when I survived largely on couscous three times a week, could afford the public baths only once a week, pinard and cheap beer, gauloises but never before 5 pm.)
When I was finally put on the spot by the host in that make-shift salon in 1972, I stammered something about being a pure amateur, fully aware of the double meaning of the term. An amateur, in good French, is someone who loves music. Even in France, though, the word had taken on the disparaging connotations of English amateuristic.
I can’t recall the precise words with which this very intimidating maître de salon replied, but they went something like: Well, welcome among us then, Monsieur, for without you we musicians would be all alone with ourselves.
There is an excellent passage on what amateur meant in Vienna at the turn of the eigtheenth century in Lecture 3 of Robert Greenberg’s great Great Courses course on The String Quartets of Beethoven. An amateur then and there, in that Vienna, was someone who could take up his instrument and play it whenever there were ears to hear. That I am not.
In the case of classical music I did have three years of violin in elementary school. Yes, you read that correctly. In the fifties the working class and aspiring lower middle class in the industrial East End of Houston insisted that the public schools provide access to the practice of the arts, art which we make for ourselves rather than consume passively through the media as a commodity, as if we reside in a putrescent feedlot of commercial culture.
But in my third year I was driven from violin by a newly-arrived teacher of violin who replaced the inspiring one I had had. This Tartuffe incarnate insisted that morality and musicality were connected. If you are not good inside, he would opine, you cannot play good music. And you alone will know. It’s like wearing dirty underwear, clean on the outside, dirty inside. Those were his very words. They are graven into my eleven-year-old memory. I think my anti-puritanical twig was bent at that very moment, my eventual path to flamenco set.
I came home that afternoon and handed in the violin which Mother sadly mothballed in the confines of the hall closet. Only in my twenties did I turn to classical guitar to fill what had become a void.
So I do have some approximate notion of what it takes to produce classical music, though no idea at all about the corporeal challenges of trumpet or piano. Some of the hands-on experience of classical guitar has transferred to flamenco, with the nuance that I have had to learn to play very differently. That, in and off itself, is already an important piece of visceral knowledge, not enough to make me more than an amateur, in the modern sense, but certainly one step towards assuming the role of aficionado, one who embraces the flamenco way of life, and, if possible, a flamenco way of death.
It was therefore with an sense of relief, emotional release, that I crossed the Tejon Pass and came down into the murk of the L.A. basin, accepting of my limitations but also embracing my place in the order of things flamenco: aficionado who knows well enough to know he will never play well enough, but who knows what it feels like to play.