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mark indigo -> RE: What do you think of????? (Dec. 17 2009 14:33:22)
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for PromCrit, everyone else, sit back with your popcorn, go back to sleep, flip channels, play some scales, whatever we'll wake you up when we're done
quote:
You forgot to mention Paco de Lucia himself
i didn't forget, he was one half of "los chiquitos de algeciras" which was why i mentioned that stage name
The point is, everyone knows where Paco is from, that his mother is from Portugal, etc. etc. he doesn't hide anything, he doesn't make a big deal of it.
JM presents himself in his promotional publicity material as the torch bearer of some kind of pure and sacred tradition, you know, as if he were someone like Pedro Bacan or Moraito or someone. So in order to present yourself as someone like that you have to have flamenco ancestry going back generations, and grow up in Barrio Santiago or Lebrija - are you with me so far? - and if you want to appear like that you would definately state your place of birth in Andalucia in said promo stuff. But JM doesn't ("early days in Malaga") and that absence in itself is noticeable, significant - are you getting this? - why doesn't he say where he was born on his website or publicity etc.?
If this is true, it might have started out as a thing to get work in the UK by exaggerating or over-emphasising or even faking the "Spanish" and "Andaluz" thing. What i was trying to get at with my previous post about that was in the UK you often find yourself playing to an audience that has no knowledge or appreciation of flamenco, who are unable to judge based on listening to the music, and who want to know that you are "authentic" so they can let themselves like what they hear safe in the knowledge that it's the "real thing".
I don't care where he was born, or where he grew up, or which accent he started out with, i just think the guy is not completely straight up. I have never thought his accent sounded the same as other Andaluz people i have known, even ones who came over the the UK in their twenties and stayed twenty years, i have always thought that there is something not quite right about JM, his accent, his publicity, it just doesn't quite square up for me... but i could be wrong. Maybe he is English and grew up in Spain, maybe he is Spanish and grew up in England. Maybe he is Gibralterian. I just don't know, and nor does anyone else, and that's kinda odd too, I think. A copy of his birth certificate would clear it up once and for all, but you know what, i don't really care, and i'm not gonna lose any sleep over it, i just think it's worth pointing out some of this stuff to someone who has obviously never come across this info before.
There are lots of guitarists who i like who aren't Andalusian, who aren't Spanish, who are English, American, half English half Spanish, etc. etc. That really isn't the issue for me. The issue is that there is a noticeable lack of a piece of information that is only really important because it is missing and because if the context it is missing from.
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