Richard Jernigan -> RE: The Flamencos of Cádiz Bay (Nov. 21 2014 4:24:12)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Paul Magnussen quote:
He probably would consider today's flamenco a bastardization of the real (i.e. "traditional") thing, perhaps even a Leftist plot to undermine traditional Spanish values. You mean it isn’t?? [:o] I have been a spectator for two musical revolutions and a latecomer to a third one. In high school I organized a dance band. In that previous geological era, people danced to the sound of wind instruments, and there were set patterns like the fox trot, the two-step, swing and the like. We learned to improvise in the styles then called "traditional jazz" and "swing." The kids we played for much preferred the big band music of the 1930s to the rather insipid Tin Pan Alley stuff we heard on the radio. But jazz was undergoing a revolution in harmony, form and style. There was bebop, West Coast, "Modern" etc., all very different from the preceding era. A lot of people really didn't like any of it. I found some of it pretty challenging, but my curiosity was aroused, and I tried to learn what I could about the new stuff. Bebop was too foreign for me to develop any facility at it, but I made some inroads into the other genres. Thirty years later my Japanese girlfriend and I were at a trendy restaurant in San Francisco. There was a trio, piano, sax and bass. I commented, "Thirty years ago Bird [Charlie Parker] was revolutionary, now everybody plays like him." The revolution in classical music came before I was born. But it was still new when I played in the Washington Summer Symphony. Stravinsky and Bartok were exotic and difficult, even Hindemith was avant garde. Schoenberg was beyond the pale. Schoenberg still is pretty much beyond the pale for general audiences, but the rest have become standard repertoire. Today's showbiz flamenco is very different from what I heard in Spain in the late 1950s. Although "Opera Flamenca" and other novel developments had already come to pass, then fallen by the wayside, there was still a lot of flamenco played in public that was closely related to more traditional stuff. It's what I cut my teeth on. I still enjoy playing Ramon Montoya, Sabicas, Escudero and Niño Ricardo, who were the cutting edge in those days. But no living art form stands still. Paco revolutionized the solo guitar, but he did it step by step. If you stayed with him, he brought you into a new era. I didn't much care for the multi-player stage shows, but they were immensely popular and spread the popularity of flamenco. I say "flamenco" because that's what Paco said it was, and if anyone had standing to define it, I suppose he did. I went to see Tomatito when he came to Austin chiefly to see the dancer Paloma Fantova. I wasn't disappointed. The rest of the show was a loud, fully rehearsed instrumental sextet, with three singers doing utterly ironed-out, rehearsed recitations. But it was rhythmically and harmonically exciting. I enjoyed it. If you asked me, I would have said it was "derived from flamenco." You even hear "modern" guitar stuff accompanying traditional cante these days. The singers don't seem to mind. Some seem to like it. When we look to the past, we hear the stuff that has survived. We listen to Beethoven, but not so much to Clementi. We listen to Mozart and Haydn, but not so much to Hummel and Salieri. Clementi, Hummel and Salieri were competent, charming composers. They just weren't blazing geniuses like Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. I probably have never even heard the names of the real second-raters of the Classical period. In flamenco the process of innovation is going on at this moment. A lot of what we hear now will fall by the wayside in the future. But some of it will last, just as Ramon Montoya, Niño Ricardo and Sabicas have survived the passage of time. RNJ
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