srshea -> RE: Must know cante (Aug. 31 2012 23:26:50)
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I’m only starting to get into the thick of this stuff myself, so the advice I have to offer is pretty low-grade, but here goes: Start small. Just like a lot of beginners make the mistake (guilty as charged) of getting a bunch of method books and grinding their way through them and trying to learn every toque all at once (because there’s so much stuff you have to learn, and you have to learn it all right now!!!) and not really getting anywhere, when they would have been much better off focusing ONLY on, say, solea and tangos and only playing super basic compas and simple falsetas for two months or six months or however long it takes them to really nail some basic stuff down before moving on to the next thing, I think it’s also a recipe for failure when it comes to studying and making sense of cante to try and “learn it all” all at once. Unless you’re a freak who can just soak stuff up like a sponge, you should try to focus on a small handful of things at any one time. So, there’s important stuff, and less important stuff, but even if you narrow your focus down to the most important stuff, that still a lot of stuff! Too much to take in at once, so I think you have to just pick a spot, almost at random, and pitch your tent there for a while. There are any of a number of campsites to pick: Like the others have mentioned, Norman’s site is an invaluable resource, particularly because solea and siguiriyas are both really large in scope, with lots of regional styles and personal sub-styles, derivative sub-styles of the substyles, and hair’s-breadth differences between this guy’s and that guy’s version of whatever; it’s a thick forest to hack through. So, pick a place to start and go. On the solea page Norman has helpfully broken each style down into “Popular” “Known” and “Not Popular” which is nice because then you can skip the weird, obscure stuff for now and just focus on the stuff people actually still sing. And then of course, when you narrow it down to just the “poplular” stuff, it’s still a lot of stuff. Pick a couple. Lately I’ve been focusing on Mellizo’s and Joaquin el de la Paula’s stuff. For siguiriyas I’ve been working on Molina 1/Torre 1 (two very closely related cantes that are two of the most popular and important styles), and some variants of the style Viejo de la Isla, which has a number of offshoots that have developed from it, Paco La Luz, El Marrurro, Francisco La Perla, etc. So, all that stuff is basic, essential stuff, and as good a place to start as any, but I’m sure there are other equally important places you could start out from. Another launching pad could be bulerias por solea, which is also broken down on Norman’s site. There are only half a dozen of those cantes: buleria larga, buleria corta, La Moreno, Sordo La Luz, etc. So, that’s a concise, comparatively manageable little chunk of stuff to learn, and for me, once I’ve “mastered” one thing and have it firmly under my belt, it makes learning the next thing that much easier. So if you can learn the melodies and structures of those cantes, you’d have a nice little base of knowledge to build off of. Though, as a word of warning, things could get tricky and confusing there because if you listen to something on a record or watch something on youtube that’s labeled “bulerias por solea” or solea por bulerias or solea al golpe or bulerias para escuchar or whatever, you might get just straight bulerias por solea cantes, but you might also hear the singer mix some other “regular” solea styles in, like solea de Frijones, or you might hear someone sing just straight solea styles at a fast tempo with the same aire as bulerias por solea, but no actual bulerias por solea cantes. Which could freak you out and overwhelm you and make you think you’ll never make any sense of all this stuff, in which case you could just take a deep breath and focus on those clips on Norman’s site (and if you listen to older recordings labeled ‘bulerias or solea’ chances are it’ll actually be just that; I think a lot of the “mixing” came later), and learn those cantes. Then, if you hear something on a recording that you can’t reconcile to an “official” bulerias por solea melody, you might not know what it is, but you know what it ain’t, and can start your search from there. I find myself using that kind of process of elimination a lot “Hmn, it’s not that that. Then what is it? Maybe it’s this….” You could also pick a single singer and just focus on them for a while, someone you like and preferably someone on the older end of the spectrum. I’d offer up Tomas Pavon as a good choice for a number of reasons: 1. He’s good. 2. He’s an essential reference point in the styles that he sang and recorded and is an important influence on later singers. You can also trace his own influences back to Torre, Mellizo, and big sister Pastora, so he can serve as a nice “ground zero” to work your way backward and forward from. 3. He recorded very little; it all fits on a single cd, about twenty tracks. Which kind of sucks, since it’d be nice if there was more stuff, but for study purposes it’s nice because it makes for an easily digestible portion, half a dozen soleares and siguiriyas, a few bulerias por solea, some granainas and other fandangos and then just a couple saetas and tonas. So just digging into one guy like Tomas (or some other important singer who you can put into a context of influences) for a while could be a good first brick in the foundation. You could also just start with what you already know and work from there. That “Triana, triana” tangos was, if we’re thinking of the same cante/melody, recorded by Pastora Pavon as ‘Del Color de Cera Mare’, and other times with other letras, most likely. Most tangos and tientos roads lead back to Pastora, then to Torre, and back to Mellizo and the whole Cadiz and Los Puertos area (and I think the ball might have been passed off to Chacon at some point.) There are other tangos styles like tangos de Extremadura and stuff, but I’m just talking about garden-variety “regular tangos” here. So, you could dig into Pastora’s tangos (and tientos), of which there are plenty, with lots of hits ‘Al Guguru,’ etc. , and then check out Torre, who recorded just a few, and then look into some singers from Cadiz, Aurelio Selles, La Perla de Cadiz, etc. If you keep listening to tangos and tientos from those guys after a while you’ll find that for the most part you’re just hearing a pretty small handful of melodies over and over, I don’t know how many, maybe fewer than a dozen total? That’s one advantage to focusing on something like tangos; unlike solea and siguiriyas, and fandangos, which can also be a big sprawling monster, stuff like tangos, tientos, alegrias- that stuff is relatively “small” without zillions of variants. Speaking very generally here, of course. And focusing specifically on the Cadiz/Jerez/Sevilla triangle; as you get farther away from there you pick up more and more stuff and regional styles and it all adds up and gets unwieldy, but just sticking with core stuff from the Cadiz/Jerez epicenter, a lot of stuff ends up boiling down to a relatively small handful of melodies in each style. (I wanna point out that I don’t presume to be dishing out definitive knowledge here. I know a lot of this is above my pay grade, and I don’t pretend that I’ve got it all figured out, or that I even have a fraction of it all figured out. I’m just blabbing about stuff I’ve learned, as I learn it, so take it all with a grain of salt, and if anyone out there finds me dispensing off-base info, please set me straight!) So, you can take that “Triana, triana” tangos, and trace that back to Pastora, and wind your way to Los Puertos and then learn, as I recently did, that that cante is attributed to a singer named Manuela “La Gitana” from Sanlucar, and along the way you hear a bunch of other stuff and hopefully pick up a few things. Listen to those older Cadiz singers and you’ll hear the same tangos/tientos melodies sung over and over. There are any of a number of ways to set off learning this stuff. I think you just gotta start poking around, pick a place where the water doesn’t look too deep, and jump in. And this babble is all concerned with learning cante stuff in a general way. If you’re looking to accompany singers in your area you should just hit them up and find out what they sing, which is probably just a small repertoire of stuff they learned from a teacher or cribbed from recordings. No point in wood-shedding a bunch of historically important stuff if you’re just looking to accompany the one and only singer that lives in your town who stares at you blankly when you start talking about Joaquin Lacherna. You could just learn the stuff she sings and then work your way outward from there. I don’t spend a lot of energy listening to stuff for which I don’t have letras. And it’s also nice to have CDs that clearly and SPECIFICALLY label stuff. Norman’s site is great because it breaks stuff down very specifically- not just “solea de Mellizo” but Mellizo 1, Mellizo 2, etc. Diego Clavel has a handful of encyclopedic double CDs dedicated to solea, siguiriyas, cantes de levante, and fandangos de Huelva where each cante is labeled by authorial style, but you just get “solea de Joaquin el da La Paula” and are left to your own devices to determine which of the four styles attributed to La Paula is being sung at a given moment. The Magna Antologia is a nice ten or twelve disc resource with tons of stuff that’s labeled by author or region. But again, it’s a little less detailed in the labeling. Each track will just be labeled “solea de whoever or wherever” and you’ll have to figure out on your own what each cante is. Which is fine, because you have to do some homework to figure stuff out, but in general I find it very helpful to have as much stuff as possible that’s accurately and specifically labeled to serve as a reference to fall back on. Then you can quiz yourself when hearing stuff that’s generically labeled, compare it to what you know, see what’s what. I like to know WHAT I'm listening to in as much detail as I can find. These days I try to mostly listen to stuff that falls somewhere within the wheelhouse of what I already know, working my way out... Anyway, that’s a lot of blah blah. Take it for what it’s worth. Bottom line advice is to just pick a few things and focus all your efforts on them. Don’t try to take it all in at once and end up overwhelming yourself; it’ll just lead to frustration and a stilted learning process. Unless your a preternaturally gifted wiz at this stuff. Take it slow, cante by cante.
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