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guitarbuddha -> RE: I'm learning Solea falsetas- what goes in between them? (May 9 2014 19:03:14)
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Best post ever !!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sincere to facetious on a hair, love it.
D.
quote:
ORIGINAL: solea1
Hi, Wiking –
First, let me wish you good luck in pursuing a rewarding non-career in solo flamenco guitar. (You won’t be able to make it a career, because there is no longer such a thing as a solo flamenco guitar recital. The days when a player could hold an audience spellbound armed with nothing but a three-pound flamenco guitar are long gone, ever since Paco de Lucía changed the music to incorporate a jazzier aesthetic, and changed the performance paradigm to match the jazz ensemble’s quart, quint, sex or septet concept.)
You’ll get a lot of flak from people who say it’s wrong to focus on the solo flamenco guitar. They have a sort of point, assuming you’re a genius. It’s great to accompany a good flamenco singer, since a singer gets closer to the beating heart of flamenco than any guitarist can. (All Paco really wanted to do was sing flamenco, but he was not competent in that area.)
The tricky part of accompanying a good singer is this: You must know flamenco song very, very well. There may be as many as a dozen non-Spanish guitarists who meet that criterion, but you will not join that elite.
It’s okay to accompany a good dancer, too, unless he or she demands that you learn specific routines for each dance, because that’s too much memorization – rotes and routines can be inappropriate in actual flamenco. Also, it takes a couple of decades.
So play the solo flamenco guitar. I think it’s the best kind of guitar music there is, because it uses the full range of the instrument’s possibilities, including percussion. I suspect it may also be the most difficult style of guitar as well, for that same reason. (I’ve been told that by excellent jazz, rock, blues and classical players over the years.) To get really good will almost kill you. Also, you won’t find many people who like, or are even willing to listen to, the finished product. The average human tolerance level for flamenco guitar is eight to twelve minutes. (For serious flamenco song, it’s about ninety seconds.)
But look on the bright side: You won’t have to put up with herding a whole flamenco ensemble or helping them through personal difficulties. (What do you call a drummer whose girlfriend has left him? Homeless.) You won’t have to drive a crowded VW camper or Dodge Caravan through the backwoods of Minnesota in a snowstorm, looking for a high school auditorium where thirteen people await your appearance. You won’t have to learn the wholly separate arts of musical arrangement, or sound and lighting, or publicity and financial management or defense against lawsuits by former ensemble members.
One more thing. Do not try to improvise until you have started to understand flamenco and the guitar, a few years from now. Otherwise, your improvisations will not be real flamenco or real improvisation. Yes, it will be “your music”, for whatever that’s worth. But it won’t be flamenco.
More likely, you will never be able to improvise actual flamenco. Paco de Lucía said that while he was the best flamenco player in the world for many years, neither he nor any other flamenco guitarist was able to really improvise – in the glorious, jazzistic, Charlie Parkerian sense of the word.
Flamenco players thought they were improvising, Paco said, but they were just reshuffling and inverting the stuff they had stolen or laboriously worked out. (I believe Niño Ricardo, Paco’s original inspiration, might have been able to truly improvise flamenco.) It wasn’t until Al and John and Chick dragooned the shy and reluctant (and often nauseous) Paco and stuck him into the onstage hot seat nightly for many months that he finally got the hang of it. He was no longer just a flamenco guitarist. He had become a real musician. He was very proud of that achievement.
Learn the best stuff from the best guitarists. The level of technique is so high today that playing late Paco or Post-Paco stuff will be a distant dream for a long time, and probably forever. But there are a lot of great pre-Paco players whose music is still very flamenco and fascinating and beautiful and powerful. You can be mimicking a few of them badly in just a few intense months, and less badly in a year or two. Early Paco, up to the eighties, can be imitated effectively by non-gifted but diligent humans after a few decades or so (trust me – we all thought he was from another dimension when he popped up in 1967, but ten years later we'd gotten the hang of his first four LP’s. – minus the command, creativity, genius, aplomb, expression and a few other cheesy tricks, of course.)
Woody Allen mentioned a concert violinist whose career was shattered when she realized she would have to practice the violin. Practice, practice. If people within earshot are not mad at you, you are not practicing enough. If they are yelling at you to stop, you are making progress. When they come running at you with sharp pencils or cutlery and screaming, you can ease up for a while.
I was driving around Cambridge once, lost as usual. I called out to an elderly pedestrian, “Excuse me, how do I get to Harvard?”
“Study,” she said.
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