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paleto3 -> RE: flamenco vs nuevo flamenco (Aug. 14 2012 4:46:06)
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I think the fact that there is so much response to this discussion is really a good thing.
I have fought with this whole issue the entire time I have been studying flamenco.
I thought I would share my thoughts and experience. Please know that what you read is not meant to offend, but if it does, realize that no offense is meant.
Like many, I heard flamenco-like music as well as flamenco from the beginning.
Once I really listened to Paco de Lucía and Paco Peña (because that's all that was available in Tower Records back in the late 1980's), I recognized that there was something fundamentally different about the Pacos from the imitators.
Not long after hearing the Pacos, I heard Ottmar Liebert and Strunz and Farah, Armik, Govi, Jesse Cook and all the others who are similar. Calling their "invention" flamenco was mostly a case of American ignorance. Admittedly, I liked them at first, but came to be bored of all of them because the songs are so simple that once you heard them 4 times, you knew everything there was to hear in it. Whereas with a great flamenco guitarist, their recordings can be listed to a thousand times and nearly each time you can discover something new and beautiful in it you didn't hear before. I haven't found that with the fakemenko players at all.
I believe I both read and heard that Ottmar went to France and that's where he became enamored of rumba, did he stay a while in the Camargue, where I believe the Gipsy Kings are from? If this is true, maybe he never really intended to do flamenco. I would bet that like many guitarists, he saw how challenging it is to play all the song forms well and decided what he already knew was working for him, so why make it harder on himself?
Calling his CD Nouveau Flamenco, I believe, was the idea of the Higher Octave label higher ups, although I can't say I know that for a fact. The problem is that they were using French to describe a treasured Spanish cultural art. I think it led a lot of people to call it flamenco who didn't know any better.
Personally, I have come to dislike the entire genre because it lacks the dynamic, rich, diverse song forms that comprise what we think of as true flamenco.
Nuevo flamenco, as I understand it, and believe me, I don't pretend to know it all, means something different in the US than it does in Spain.
Ricardo, please correct me if I am wrong, but in Spain, I thought Nuevo Flamenco mostly refers to younger flamencos who play pop-infused flamenco, sometimes similar to flamenquito. Whereas here in the US, it often refers to Ottmar and the like.
I agree with everything Ricardo has said, if you don't know the structure of the form, and you don't obey the compás, then you are not doing flamenco.
Everyone who comes to flamenco is going to draw the lines in different places, some along very, very orthodox, traditional lines, others will be less precise. But I think most would agree to following the song form and obeying the compás.
I, for one, cannot play Gipsy Kings, Ottmar Liebert, Armik, Govi, Strunz & Farah or others because, IMO, they have stripped away far, far too many things that make flamenco so wonderful, and because there are imitators on every block of every restaurant row from here to Timbuktu. Personally, it turns me off. But that's just me and my own hang-ups.
Because there is such a demand for Fakemenko, I have weighted our repertoire in favor of rumbas, which I enjoy as much as other song forms, but I insist on representing a much wider view of flamenco by also playing guajira, soleá por bulería, bulería, tangos, alegrías, farruca and more.
In my own view, Fakemenko dumbs it down and I just can't do that. What I play has to have something with what I see as a deeper, stronger artistic musicality.
That said, playing rumbas for people to dance to who don't know how to dance flamenco is perfectly fine, but it ceases to have the depth that flamenco offers when well performed.
For those newer to flamenco, rumba is often ridiculed by people who only enjoy cante jondo because it is not often interpreted with the depth and intensity of a seguiriya or soleá. Rumba originated in Cuba, so in a strict sense it is not flamenco like soleá, alegría or serrana, or seguiriya. But it can be very flamenco if the artist gives it that kind of interpretation.
Most flamenco artists play rumba because it is fun and very adaptable and for us musicians it gives us a lot of artistic license to try new ideas. I will continue to play rumbas, and enjoy them, but I won't market myself as a flamenco guitarist without playing all the other song forms too.
Well, that's my 2¢.
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