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RE: flamenco vs nuevo flamenco
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Ricardo
Posts: 14819
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
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 RE: flamenco vs nuevo flamenco (in reply to shaun)
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quote:
The thing that's frustrating about reading through this thread is not everybody is talking about the same thing when they say "nuevo flamenco". In most things that I've read, nuevo/nouveau/new flamenco has referred to the quasi-Spanish-like guitar recordings like Ottmar Liebert's "Nouveau Flamenco" album. Flamencos get upset about this because it doesn't sound like flamenco, it isn't derived from flamenco, nor does it have anything else to do with flamenco. It is named such only to sell albums. Which is going to sell more: something labeled "easy listening latin guitar" or "new flamenco"? Playing that kind of music doesn't sell more, just the labeling does. If you want to sell more albums, write your songs in English with a catchy chorus that means virtually nothing.
Actually, if you can read spanish, there is a great coffee table book on the subject written by sevillano Luis Clemente, published in 1995 and is called "Historia del NUEVO Flamenco". The book covers it all from history of flamenco, through all the experiments from PDL Camaron etc to Pata negra Ketama, along side all the modern players, and touches on the off shoots including Gypsy Kings and rumba groups and genre, Ottmar and company of new agers etc. So the term has been coined and used in spain for a long time. I feel we english speakers, wanting to separate or make a distinction to weed out the embarrassing "fakemencos" have adopted the term "Modern" instead of "nuevo" as nuevo is simply too broad and carries too much negative bagage with all the "failed" experiments and such.
Ricardo
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Date Aug. 16 2012 16:28:32
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qzack
Posts: 39
Joined: Aug. 17 2011
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RE: flamenco vs nuevo flamenco (in reply to Arash)
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Wow the response is incredible! Thanks guys 
Pity I can't join this discussion deeper since I have limited thoughts but the infos about the misconception here in my place
If I ask them the word flamenco, most of them wouldn't know or start to name some artist like paul gilbert, ottmar liebert, Al Di Meola, Yngwie Malmsteen, john h clarke, jesse cook, even el mariachi and depapepe. Another case that they'll consider it as classic, latin jazz or even bossa nova  the worst part is when I heard a local artist that labelled his album with "flamenco", but the whole track sounds more like ottmar and his kind
I can't say more about this
Though they usually argue that the scales are just common so they generalize all the stuffs even to the higher level like using steel-stringed guitar or electric guitar to play flamenco.
The suggestion of putting them ear to ear with classical flamenco, modern flamenco, and "fakemencos" is effective than to tell them the hard-to-understand compas but the other thing they curious about is the differences in musical harmony theory. I kinda weak for that, but they told me that both flamenco and "fakemencos" has the same mode, scales and progression.. Really?
So I can say that if we want to label our music flamenco, simply obey its musical foundation and that's it, even if it has other minor influence they'll still sound like flamenco. So its about beetween being "spanishy" and "flamenco-y"
Or I have another problem of understanding here?
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Date Aug. 16 2012 22:12:14
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paleto3
Posts: 148
Joined: Nov. 7 2008
From: San Diego, CA
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RE: flamenco vs nuevo flamenco (in reply to Miguel de Maria)
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IMO, fakemenco and fusion are 2 different things. Fusion can be done in such a way that it has important elements of traditional flamenco, but fakemenco, IMO, is usually done by people who haven't put the time and effort in to grasp traditional flamenco.
Fusion can be a whole spectrum from great to crap depending on the level of musicianship.
There are several local guitarists here in San Diego who act like they have a grasp of traditional flamenco by saying they are firmly grounded in flamenco, but when you see them try to play a bulería, it's a joke and you can tell they don't really have the fundamentals down.
No one is perfect, not me, but from what I have seen and heard many of them don't make the effort.
It is true that "good" is subjective, but one's concept of good usually grows and changes with the addition of new knowledge and experience and what a novice thinks is good may not appear so to the seasoned artist.
The fact is, people will do and say what they like, no matter what anyone says. I accept that.
I, for one, find it difficult to enjoy something that seems to me to be lacking in fundamentals. But if other people like it, that's just the way it is.
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Date Aug. 18 2012 5:59:55
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Adam
Posts: 1156
Joined: Dec. 6 2006
From: Hamilton, ON
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RE: flamenco vs nuevo flamenco (in reply to Miguel de Maria)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Miguel de Maria
Paleto,
I have been thinking about what you wrote earlier, that you can listen to the good stuff and always find new things in it. I am trying to think of any fakemenco that could claim to do that. It seems the offensive thing is that they are just taking a few cliches, a few chord progressions, and mixing them into a pop/rock, hook-based mentality. The result is superficial since it is not based on a deep well of musical ideas and tradition, but rather is a formula.
What does it mean to claim to do something new? Should they have stickers on their CDs claiming "find something new on each listen!"? More seriously, it's a difficult standard to hold artists in any artform up to. Besides a few geniuses - Paco, Gerardo, and a few others - the majority of the excellent flamenco guitarists out there aren't really doing all that much that's new and innovative, and that's fine. We like the music they play, we find it interesting, so we listen to it. Great.
And to be honest, it's the same situation in "fakemenco." It's that way with any genre. There are a few innovators, and lots of imitators. Flamenco is sufficiently multifaceted, deep and rich in history, that even the imitators have plenty of room to add their own voice and make real art. Not so in "fakemenco" (for reasons you've hit on) - which is why, after a couple of years of listening to a lot of it in high school, I fizzled out on the stuff and switched to actual flamenco. But the formulaic behavior you ascribed to the whole genre is better suited to describing the imitators. Spend some time listening to the field and you'll find that no one's figured out how to quite reproduce the best music that, say, the Gipsy Kings or Ottmar put out (as far as the particular brand of music on his first CD goes, even Ottmar never managed to reproduce it. He tried a bit, it didn't work out, so he moved on to something different and, IMO, more interesting. But that CD, with a few very memorable tunes, set a whole boatload of imitators off and running). If these guys were being successfully imitated, I'm sure I would have fallen for it hard in my "fakemenco" days and would have lots more to say  but for the most part the competitors in the field are a forgettable line-up of boring-looking pretty white guys with long hair. It's not to say that the hardest to imitate artists are the best-selling ones, by the way - Benise sells out theatres because he has long flowing Fabio hair and this Cirque du Soleil gimmick, and Armik sells discs to people who've heard that one song he does somewhere before they realize he's put out a dozen CDs consisting of nothing but that one song - but on the whole imitators do have a more difficult time selling records, because there are plenty of imitators to be had, and they're bosonic - they're practically indistinguishable.
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Date Aug. 19 2012 5:01:08
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: flamenco vs nuevo flamenco (in reply to Adam)
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I think it was Stephen Faulk (Estebanana) who in another thread observed (I think I'm quoting correctly here):
"Flamenco gives, but it does not take."
I took that to mean that other genres can adopt some flamenco and the result, while not flamenco, can enhance the genre to which it is "given." Flamenco, on the other hand, cannot "take" from other genres without becoming something other than first-rate flamenco. Whether or not that is what Stephen meant, I agree with that interpretation.
Cheers,
Bill
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With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
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Date Aug. 19 2012 22:02:26
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Miguel de Maria
Posts: 3532
Joined: Oct. 20 2003
From: Phoenix, AZ
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RE: flamenco vs nuevo flamenco (in reply to Adam)
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Adam,
I take "new" to mean, everytime you listen to it, you hear a nuance that you didn't perceive the first time. It could be anything, a novel strum, a cool countermelody, a weird voicing... I don't mean "new" in the sense that it should necessarily be innovative in and of itself. I think it a matter of complexity. I don't know if you like classical music, but Bach is so full of things going every which way that it bewilders me, while Vivaldi delivers a happy feeling without any work on my part. It may be that I didn't enjoy the Paco de Lucia concert I went to in May because so much of what he did flew over my head.
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Date Aug. 20 2012 3:39:51
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jeff_hatcher
Posts: 46
Joined: Aug. 26 2012
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RE: flamenco vs nuevo flamenco (in reply to koenie17)
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quote:
I got into flamenco listening to Los Delincuentes, Ojos de Brujo, Martires del Compas and even the Gypsy Kings . So thanks to the "Fakemenco" I got into el Flamenco puro.
I agree. The "fake" flamenco is like a (heavily cut) gateway drug, giving the uninitiated a taste of the good stuff and making them seek out the pure stuff.
I had listened to Strunz and Farah, Jesse Cook, Armik, and some others, and thought the music was superficially pleasant to listen to, it lacked any real depth and fire. Rodrigo and (mostly) Gabriela renewed my interest in this thing called "Flamenco" and got me to look at it a little more closely. After listening to artists like Serrano and Sabicas... I had a better idea of what the source was like.
I have no illusions... I am a babe in the woods when it comes to flamenco, but I think that there are artists who respect to soul of true flamenco, but want to take it somewhere new. Benjamin Woods (flametal, heavy mellow) predominantly plays his metal/flamenco-influenced fusion (and has released some "nuevo flamenco style recordings), but learned to play in the flamenco style at a flamenco dance studio where he was required to play for the dancers and singers in return for his lessons. He is still active in this pursuit. For a boy from California, this is probably as close the the roots of flamenco as you can get.
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Date Aug. 30 2012 17:18:58
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. Altough almost all flamencos know how to play a rumbita or some sevillanas. Personally I quite enjoy a nice rumba or sevillanas. Also I don´t really like the term fakemenco, I prefer to call it flamenquito or musica aflamencado. The thing is when people call all this real or nuevo flamenco without having any knowledge about it 
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