Richard Jernigan -> RE: History of Paco de Lucia? (Apr. 16 2013 18:18:06)
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Okay, I've got a comment--though I certainly am not familiar with all the details of Paco's discography, I've listened to a fair amount of it. An idea has finally occurred to me why the bossa nova harmonies I hear on Paco's later stuff doesn't really excite me that much. When I was in high school in the early 1950s I listened to Willis Conover's radio show, while he was still a local jazz DJ in Washington, DC, before he became the Voice of America jazz ambassador. I never missed going to Jazz at the Philharmonic when their show came to town. By the time I was 16 my buddies and I were using our fake IDs to get into jazz clubs in DC to hear Oscar Peterson, Getz and Chet Baker--you name it. We went to New York to hear Duke Ellington. Willis played everything from Louis Armstrong to Count Basie to Monk to Lennie Tristano to Stan Kenton to hard bop-Diz, Bird and those guys. I could go to Waxy Maxie's record shop downtown, buy stuff that I heard on the radio, and try to figure it out on the piano at home. I wrote arrangements for the 9-piece band i organized among friends: a lot of standards, some of the great American songbook, some swing, but some a little bit adventurous--for that time and place. When bossa nova came along, I thought it was really cool. It sounded to me like cool jazz harmonies incorporated with laid back Brazilian rhythm. I'm not talking about primarily guitar stuff, I'm talking about Getz/Gilberto and the like, horn players doing bossa, though I did listen to Bonfa, Baden etc. This was before I got into guitar, before scheduling in college made it impossible to continue on trumpet in the symphony and concert band. After I took up guitar, I did mostly flamenco because there wasn't a classical teacher in Austin who I thought amounted to much in the late 50s-early 60s. The rhythm and harmony of flamenco appealed as something new to me--phrygian, taranta, rondeña--I thought it was cool, and different from the diatonic, serial and atonal stuff I played on classical trumpet, and the stuff I played on jazz trumpet or wrote for my little band. So the stuff that the experts inform me is bossa--not jazz--in Paco's stuff sometimes sounds kind of old, third hand, superimposed on traditional flamenco. It sometimes sounds like kind of an uneasy marriage to me, given the sequence of my experience. I can see that someone who began with classical and flamenco might find Paco's harmonic adventures fascinating. But I was listening to the most up to date jazz on the radio and on records 62 years ago when I was 13, and playing Bartok and Stravinsky in the Summer Symphony when I was 15, and doing the high notes in screaming jazzed up mambo charts when I was 16, so bossa "innovations" in flamenco don't sound all that innovative to me. Sorry, guys, no offense, just my take based on the quirks of personal history. And I do like a lot of Paco's stuff from his various periods where he subtly alters flamenco harmony and rhythm--but not all of it. And like a lot of flamenco fans, as time has gone on, I seldom listen to solo guitar these days. It's mostly cante when I decide to listen to flamenco on the hi-fi. RNJ
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