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Richard Jernigan -> RE: Old School Tone (Mar. 17 2011 21:12:30)
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The last time I heard Sabicas live was at a concert in San Antonio, Texas in 1965. It was in the pseudo-Spanish auditorium of Thomas Jefferson High School--maybe 800-1000 seats, lots of plaster walls. We were on the front row. Sabicas played unamplified. You could hear the sound bouncing off the back wall!. There was lots of loud buzzing.
I had heard Sabicas live in smaller rooms several times. There was
little or no buzzing, full clear tone, but still with that cutting brilliance.
I think many of the old school guys, used to playing in noisy rooms with no amplification, had learned to produce a sound that cut through the fog. Much of Melchor de Marchena's recorded work has a rawness and brilliance, both in tone and aire, that we don't hear from many of the modern solo stars.
There is a wide variety of sound on Sabicas' LP recordings, ranging from the dry, cutting tone of 'Flamenco Puro', often with the cejilla as high as the fifth fret, to the fuller more reverberant sound, with the cejilla lower or absent, on some of the later LPs.
Mario Escudero made some recordings with a Hauser guitar, no cejilla. His tone was more 'classical' than Sabicas', though his aire was fully flamenco.
Recording technology on Spanish flamenco LPs at least up to the 1970s, was audibly inferior to that in use in the rest of western Europe and the USA. That would also contribute to quite a different sound.
RNJ
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