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I have been lurking around the forum for a while now and it seems that some of the users here are from other countries than Spain.
It has made me wonder when, where and how your interest for flamenco started? What brought you to this particular culture of music?
For me it started about three years ago. I spent two years travelling in and around Andalucia. I bought my first guitar in Cadiz and I heard flamenco live for the first time around a fire pit outside one of the caves in Sacramonte on a full moon celebration.
I was fascinated from the start, but real interest in playing first came when I returned home from Spain. I had already developed a lot of the technique, because I learned from watching people play flamenco, but failing to understand the rhythm and the harmony I applied the techniques to my own creations of music =)
I'm looking forward to hear all of your stories!
And is it only me that find it incredibly hard to learn flamenco? It takes me so long to grasp new concepts and get full control of technique. Bulerias is the only compas I can listen to and pick up the rhythm and even still it is difficult.
Posts: 1805
Joined: Nov. 8 2010
From: London (living in the Bay Area)
RE: How did you get into flamenco? (in reply to UnderTheSun)
OK, you asked for it
I got interested in guitar in my teens, as many people do. One day a bunch of us were having a discussion, and an acquaintance said “Well, I’m going to John Williams’s father for lessons” — at that time Len was running the Spanish Guitar Centre off Charing Cross road.
So I thought “If he can do it, so can I”; because I’d seen a lot of my friends grind to a halt after 6–8 months, when they got to the point where the novelty had worn off, but they still couldn’t play anything interesting. And I knew lessons would get me past that hump.
A year or so later, I walked into a record shop where some other friends of mine were listening to The Fantastic Guitars of Sabicas and Escudero. It was like the road to Damascus.
My girl-friend happened to mention that at the weekend there was classical and flamenco guitar at a local pub. So away I went, and met many guitarists who are still my friends to this day.
In particular, I met Paco Peña there in 1963; and when he came back to England in 1967, I asked him if he’d teach me.
RE: How did you get into flamenco? (in reply to UnderTheSun)
That's a great story! You say you met Paco peña in '63 in England? May I ask how old you are?
All this makes me curios about how the flamenco scene in England was at that time? Were you learning around the 60's? What kind of music were you playing before you got interested in flamenco? did you have a lot of Friends who also liked flamenco?
Posts: 1805
Joined: Nov. 8 2010
From: London (living in the Bay Area)
RE: How did you get into flamenco? (in reply to UnderTheSun)
quote:
That's a great story! You say you met Paco peña in '63 in England? May I ask how old you are?
68
quote:
All this makes me curios about how the flamenco scene in England was at that time? Were you learning around the 60's?
Yes, I started learning from the players at the pub, the Coach and Horses in Ickenham. The man who started the club was the late Richard Lawrence, who’d been to Spain and (I think) learnt there. The others were all older than me, in their 20s or even 30s; I was still a schoolboy, and then a university student. They were very kind, and bought me pints I couldn’t afford.
The available material was very scarce, and we all learnt from Sabicas LPs until we’d sucked them dry; his and Pepe Martínez’s were all that was available — no Ricardo (only in Spain), and of course no Lucía as yet.
I used to transcribe by taping the recordings (on an open reel machine) and then playing them back at half speed; but some of my friends slowed the records themselves down (16 rpm) and kept moving the stylus back. Needless to say, this wrecked the records!
As far as published material went, the only tutor was that by Ivor Mairants. Richard, typically, marked all the mistakes he found in it and sent it back to Ivor. (I got a nice e-mail from Richard’s great-nephew a few weeks ago: he’d seen my mention of Richard on the Amazon review I wrote of Ivor’s tutor.)
In 1963 Paco was visiting England for the first time, playing at Antonio’s Spanish Restaurant in Shaftesbury Avenue. Richard went there, met him, and brought him back to the Coach. And the rest you know.
quote:
What kind of music were you playing before you got interested in flamenco?
My first love was the folk music of the British Isles. I discovered Bluegrass shortly after that, and for a while played banjo (which I picked up second-hand, in bits, for 30 shillings) in an English Bluegrass group called the Cardboard Mountain Boys. But I love most kinds of music except Country and Rap.
Later I played with the group that did the residency at Nic Jones’s folk club in Chelmsford, and that gave me some wonderful experiences.
quote:
did you have a lot of Friends who also liked flamenco?
Well, my friends at the pub obviously. In 1980 I was working in the US, and wrote to Guitar magazine (later Guitar International), offering to review a Sabicas concert I’d seen.
And that led to my being invited to write a regular column; after which I made many more flamenco friends, including Ian Davies. When GI folded, I moved to Classical Guitar.
Posts: 1531
Joined: Nov. 7 2008
From: New York City/San Francisco
RE: How did you get into flamenco? (in reply to UnderTheSun)
I like this thread. I believe it is important to remain faithful to those pivotal moments that brought change in our lives.
After a decade long pause from guitar, in 2005/6 I resumed playing. I bought a nice Jose Ramirez from GSI and was gleefully posting on their Forum.
It was on the GSI forum that I saw/heard this... and it changed my life. For that -and many other contributions that Ricardo makes to this forum and generally to Flamenco- I am most grateful to him, one of my idols, both as a musician and as a person.
RE: How did you get into flamenco? (in reply to UnderTheSun)
I'll bite
Came across a nylon string guitar at my girlfriend at the times house. Began youtubing classical and flamenco, soon realized I had a preference for flamenco. Started looking around for a teacher and voila. Now it's 3 years 3-4 teachers and one trip to Spain later. Started guitar when I was 13 and played death/thrash metal off and on till flamenco when I was 28. Es todo!
RE: How did you get into flamenco? (in reply to UnderTheSun)
half of the people here will tell you they got in thru : al demiola and paco de lucia thingy quarter of there people here will tell you : because of women/girlfriend etc. the other quarter is the interesting one
RE: How did you get into flamenco? (in reply to UnderTheSun)
quote:
half of the people here will tell you they got in thru : al demiola and paco de lucia thingy quarter of there people here will tell you : because of women/girlfriend etc.
the other quarter is the interesting one
That's not true, my story isn't either one and it's EXTREMELY uninteresting! Hahaha
Posts: 14797
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
RE: How did you get into flamenco? (in reply to UnderTheSun)
I first heard about flamenco from a magazine interview of Van Halen when I was kid. He liked Carlos Montoya and my dad had that record. Later he showed me the "best" flamenco player Sabicas (I didn't really like carlos montoya so much) and THAT was very impressive. I shared his solea guitar solo with a summer guitar camp I was attending as a teenager. I relate more of that summer camp teacher in this thread:
RE: How did you get into flamenco? (in reply to UnderTheSun)
This song was very popular in Beirut at one point:
I wanted to learn it & thus I needed to play guitar. The only lessons in high school were in a guitar club where the teacher focused on classical. I came across malaguena for the first time (the classical piece). I then found a version of PdL playing it & thought it was amazing, so I looked him up. Once I knew he was a flamenco guitarist, I delved into that style & never turned back.
Posts: 357
Joined: Dec. 5 2008
From: New Jersey USA
RE: How did you get into flamenco? (in reply to UnderTheSun)
The 1950s were a time in the USA when traveling troupe flamenco could be found on TV, in the movies, on records, and on the stage. As a teenager, I saw Jose Greco now and then on the Ed Sullivan TV show; my first purchased flamenco recording was Mario Escudero and the Bailete Escudero, with cante by Chiquito de Levante, followed by Sabicas' "Festival Gitana", with cante by Enrique Montoya and Domingo Alvarado --that's when cante first blew my mind; I saw Vicente Escudero (then a living fossil) both dance and sing in New York city; and on the Big Screen one could see Sophia Loren dance, accompanied by 6 guitars and a cantaor, in The Pride and the Passion. I went again to the record store and bought the Westminster/Hispavox anthology with Perico, and a friend bought the Manolo Caracol/Melchor de Marchena definitive recording---and my love for cante was permanently set in place.
Posts: 1531
Joined: Nov. 7 2008
From: New York City/San Francisco
RE: How did you get into flamenco? (in reply to Ricardo)
quote:
I first heard about flamenco from a magazine interview of Van Halen when I was kid. He liked Carlos Montoya and my dad had that record. Later he showed me the "best" flamenco player Sabicas (I didn't really like carlos montoya so much) and THAT was very impressive. I shared his solea guitar solo with a summer guitar camp I was attending as a teenager. I relate more of that summer camp teacher in this thread:
From that link, Ricardo wrote: "(...) Soon after I met Gerardo Nuñez on tour in US and invited him to do a workshop in DC but he couldn't fit it in, and instead invited me to Sanlucar. The doors he opened for me in that environment were amazing. (...)"
Hence, the tribute through your avatar, and in many respects through your plying style, Ricardo?
How much of that "epiphany" (the first sound of flamenco that affected us) stays with us? I think this could be an interesting corollary to the question posed by this thread. Because, after all, we learn by emulation, don't we? Is our intonation faithful to that of the masters we admire?
For me the first sound -as I said - was that of Ricardo's guitar, followed (most accidentally) by that of Jim Opfer (a member here who kindly directed me to this forum) who had composed -inter alia- this beautiful Solea.
And later, what blew my mind was a person no less than Vicente Amigo, with these two videos I must have watched a thousand times, never tired of that hollow sound that gave his guitar a new dimension of eloquence; nothing had spoken to me as these songs did: "Callejon de la Luna" & "Tio Arango".
Funny enough, I have chills posting these videos again, as they truly represent a defining moment of my rapport with music and guitar.
RE: How did you get into flamenco? (in reply to UnderTheSun)
I started playing guitar when I was 12, mostly rock stuff, Hendrix, Kiss, Blackmore, Beck etc. Worked freelance playng guitar for a while. Got more into producing/writing after that, and had my own studio since my early twenties (I´m 44).
About 2,5 years ago I ripped a tendon on my left hand middle finger (drop finger, or mallet finger) and had to wear a splint for 6-7 weeks. I stopped practicing a long time ago, and only played in my studio the past 10-15 years, working on productions.
So when I removed my splint, the finger was really stiff, and I decided to start practicing again as therapy. But I wanted to learn something new, so I had a look at YouTube to see what I could find.
First I saw a video by Carlos Montoya in a church, that I thought was really interesting. Then I saw Paco doing Impetu, and I decided I wanted to do that.
The past 2 years or so I have only listened to flamenco style guitar, bought 2 Cordoba GK studio (1 at home and 1 in studio) for learning, then when I decided I really liked to play this stuff I bought 2 very nice guitars from Anders.
Now I listen a lot to Amigo, Jesus de Rosario, Antonio Rey, Paco, Moraito and many more.
I don´t have any ambitions other that enjoying the music, and discovering new artists, learning as much as possible. It´s a whole new world to me, and ripping that tendon probably was the best thing that could happen, I would never have gotten into flamenco otherwise.
RE: How did you get into flamenco? (in reply to Paul Magnussen)
Wow great stuff Paul! Makes me realize how lucky I am to have youtube and this forum. I don't even know what an open reel machine is! It must have been much harder to get into exotic genres like flamenco back in those days.
When did you start playing music? And how did you handle the transition to flamenco? Did you have days where it seemed impossible?
Do you know where I can find copies of these columns you wrote? It would be interesting to read =)
RE: How did you get into flamenco? (in reply to UnderTheSun)
Honestly, I'm fascinated by the difficulty of playing it well. I didn't love the way some of it sounded at first but I was intrigued by the deep cultural integrity of it.
So... I'm not "enchanted" by the sound. There are a lot of other music styles I find easier to listen to casually.
I was into percussion and the polyrhythms of Cuban and African music and I was making drums and then I got interested in making guitars and I built some flamenco guitars and it went from there. I stopped playing the hand drums years ago because of the loss of finger mobility. Some conga guys pee blood. I don't play cajon anymore either.
Posts: 1805
Joined: Nov. 8 2010
From: London (living in the Bay Area)
RE: How did you get into flamenco? (in reply to UnderTheSun)
quote:
Wow great stuff Paul! Makes me realize how lucky I am to have youtube and this forum. I don't even know what an open reel machine is!
Also called reel-to-reel.
quote:
It must have been much harder to get into exotic genres like flamenco back in those days.
Yes indeed. Also Bluegrass; and for anything like Scandinavian folk music, forget it. There was little printed music either: Mairants's tutor that I mentioned; Joseph Trotter’s Sabicas book that appeared in 1962 (a major breakthrough); John Magarshack’s transcription’s of Pepe Martínez; a few odds & ends by people like Luis Maravilla and Vicente Gómez; and a plethora of garbage apparently transcribed by pianists.
Pepe had a nice routine going where he would buy a flamenco guitar in Seville, bring it to England along with his records, play it at a series of concerts in houses and small halls (dripping hot cigar-ash on it all the while) and sell it in England at the end of the tour, presumably at a fat profit.
(I mentioned to him one time that Ricardo records were unobtainable in the UK, and he offered to mail me one. So I paid him for it, and it duly arrived, along with his standard autographed photograph of himself with Montoya. Unfortunately, the post had cracked it from side to side.)
quote:
When did you start playing music?
Tuesday 4 February 1962.
quote:
And how did you handle the transition to flamenco?
With difficulty. But I was lucky enough to have an expert to teach me.
quote:
Did you have days where it seemed impossible?
Yes indeed.
quote:
Do you know where I can find copies of these columns you wrote? It would be interesting to read =)
The British Library
Seriously, I’ve collected and revised them all, together with all the interviews I’ve done over the years, and put them together into a book,which I hope to publish shortly. Mel Bay offered to publish it around 2002; but then they seemed to lose interest. A year or so ago I heard from them again, but now of course it needs revising. So: hopefully soon.
Somebody posted my December 1981 interview with Sabicas on the ’Net somewhere, you should be able to find that without too much trouble.
P.S. At one point in the interview, I asked Sabas what he strings he recommended, and he mentioned some brand (I forget which).
Mario Escudero was with us, and he said in caló “Are you sure you want to say that?”
Paco Peña was helping me translate Sabas’s replies, as my Spanish was pretty rudimentary at that time. He said “They are trying to conceal something”, and tried to follow the conversation in caló, but it was too faint.
Eventually Sabas said “All good, they are all good.”
I left that bit out of the published interview, as it didn’t seem very illuminating.
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
RE: How did you get into flamenco? (in reply to UnderTheSun)
I started on the trumpet when I was nine years old, and was lucky enough to have some good professional teachers. By the time I was in high school, I was fairly active in various scenes in the Washington, DC area.
At the University of Texas at Austin I played in the Symphonic Band and the Unversity Symphony during my first two years, but as a science major the schedule became unworkable.
I had heard Segovia on records by the time I was a young teenager, and took up the guitar to fill the gap left by lack of trumpet opportunities. But in the second half of the 1950s I found no classical guitar teacher in Austin who was of the same high quality as my trumpet teachers.
Then I ran into a couple of guys my age who played flamenco. They were students of Ed Freeman in Dallas. Clearly Freeman knew what he was doing. He taught his students to play accurately transcribed pieces by Ramon Montoya, Niño Ricardo, Esteban de Sanlucar, Sabicas, etc.
Unfortunately, Freeman and I were somewhat incompatible. Freeman seemed to me to be a "my way or the highway" kind of guy, and I have almost always had a problem with figures of authority. Most of Freeman's students really liked him, and got on really well with him and his wife.
I picked up a few hints of technique from my friends who studied with Freeman, and went my own way. I have no doubt I would have progressed much faster had I stuck with Freeman.
There were very few decent transcriptions available in the late 1950s-early 1960s. Most were immediately recognizable as being seriously wrong. A major exception was a collection of pieces by Mario Escudero, transcribed by Joseph Trotter and Freeman. I learned to play all of them. And in my trumpeting days I had learned to cop stuff off records.
While I was in the U.S. Army at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, MD, I went to New York City on weekends, and hung out at the club Zambra, where there was a steady stream of visiting artists from Spain. Sabicas showed up frequently for after hours juergas. I watched closely. Quite a few of the visiting Spaniards were willing to give a lesson or two at reasonable rates.
After I got out of the Army I spent a fair amount of time in Mexico City, where there was a lively flamenco scene centered around Manolo Caracol's club El Rincon de Goya, and the competing club Gitanerias. Again, visiting artists were willing to give lessons at a price I could afford.
I made the requisite pilgrimage to Spain, and lived in Triana for a few months, traveled to Jerez and Cadiz. Again, a few lessons from a variety of players--nobody famous, or even particularly well know outside Triana.
Then I settled down, got married, followed a career in physics, mathematics and engineering. Practice time suffered because I traveled a great deal on business. I even tried to quit playing because I was dissatisfied with the deterioration of my technique--but I couldn't stop.
When I took a job at a remote military base in 1991, the constant traveling stopped, and I made substantial progress. Then a few years ago I began to experience numbness in 3 and 4 of the left hand. My brother the medical doctor agreed it was probably due to an old motorcycle injury which eventually led to bone spurs in the neck, trapping the appropriate nerve and giving me sharp pains in the neck from time to time. I put the guitars away.
But an active life and luck led to a couple of incidents where I experienced popping and grinding noises in the neck. The neck pain stopped, but the fingers remained a bit numb. My brother said I was lucky not to end up paralyzed.
My brother knows something about bone spurs in the neck. As Head of the Flight Medicine Branch of the NASA Manned Spaceflight Center during the Apollo moon landing program, he was the guy who grounded Deke Slayton, the most senior of the astronauts, for a bone spur in his neck.
By the time I retired at the end of 2009, my technique was essentially gone. But a couple of years ago I decided to see what progress I could make with regular practice. Of course my left pinky couldn't even find the right string most of the time.
But I made progress, slowly at first, then more quickly as time went on. To keep from making an already too long story any longer, I will say I think there is a good chance I will be back playing as well as I ever did within six months or a year.
The story goes that the great 'cellist Pablo Casals was asked why he still practiced when he was 90 years old. He replied, "Because I am making progress."
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
RE: How did you get into flamenco? (in reply to UnderTheSun)
In 1960, my parents gave me a guitar for my 17th birthday. It was during the folk music boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s--The Kingston Trio; Peter, Paul, and Mary; The Limelighters; Ramblin' Jack Elliot; Harry Belafonte; and others (Bob Dylan and Joan Baez had not come into their own yet). I loved folk and learned to play three and four chord progressions which enabled one to play hundreds of folk songs. At the same time, I was introduced to flamenco by Carlos Montoya. He performed in Phoenix, Arizona where I was living, and I bought several of his albums. I loved flamenco guitar, but knew nothing about flamenco, other than I loved the sound of the flamenco guitar.
I went to the university, spent a few years in the U.S. Air Force, and eventually entered the U.S. Foreign Service and the State Department. Most of my career was spent in Maritime Southeast Asia, with several assignments to Latin America and Washington, DC. While I took my guitar with me everywhere, I did not advance beyond what I knew during the folk boom. After retiring from a career in the Foreign Service (while still doing some consulting work for the State Department overseas and with a Defense Department contractor), I decided I wanted to learn flamenco.
So, at an age when most people are thinking of where they want to retire and play golf, I found a great flamenco guitar teacher in Washington, DC named Paco de Malaga. Paco teaches flamenco guitar, and his wife Ana teaches dance. I have been with Paco now for several years, and we are not only teacher and student, but my wife and I have become good friends with Paco and Ana as well.
Through my relationship with Paco, I have learned some nice pieces on the guitar, and more than that, I have learned a great deal about the history of flamenco and the great figures that it has produced. Paco was a very good friend of Paco de Lucia (As a boy, he studied flamenco guitar under Paco de Lucia's father and his older brother, Ramon de Algeciras.) At my age, and considering my late start, I will never be a first-rate flamenco guitarist or even a very good one, but I enjoy playing and it is fun to entertain friends. And the friendship I have with Paco de Malaga is worth its weight in gold. Flamenco has added a whole new dimension to my life, and I am grateful for having had the opportunity to pursue it.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East."
Posts: 1743
Joined: Jul. 11 2003
From: The Netherlands
RE: How did you get into flamenco? (in reply to UnderTheSun)
Long ago I wanted to learn to play the guitar. Paco peña was the first flamenco cd I heared. I heard the possibilities from a guitar to the fullest, the "orchestrality" from the flamenco guitar and the variations in sounds that made me want to play flamenco guitar. Never liked the singing a lot and still after 25 years listening to flamenco singing, I prefer Caruso more.
Posts: 3532
Joined: Oct. 20 2003
From: Phoenix, AZ
RE: How did you get into flamenco? (in reply to UnderTheSun)
Richard, Paul, I had mentioned that a few months ago, at a library sale, I got a few choice gems, including Trotter's Escudero book. Haven't really studied it, but the rhythms look a little white-washed to me. Also picked up a Falseta Anthology from the Bold Strummer, by a Ray Mitchell (this one from 1990). The young today could have no idea the difficulty involved in learning the guitar long ago, the difference in available resources!
How did I get into flamenco?
It's like this: After getting a business degree and working in a corporation for a few years, I decided that lifestyle was not for me. I got a job as a waiter in a Spanish restaurant. Simply because the idea occurred to me while I was having lunch. On weekends, they had a rumba group entertain the diners. It was a fun scene. It was also a watering hole for musicians getting off work, who I met when I became the bartender. Sometimes there would be jams after the band quit, the owner would drink his profits each Friday night. One time, there was a problem while the band was in Sevilla and half the sub band didn't show up. It was a slow night--I asked the manager if I could help them out--I grabbed an extra guitar--the rest is history :)
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