Piwin -> RE: Lenny Breau (May 22 2018 20:09:46)
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I don't think Paco blended jazz with flamenco in any real sense. In fact, I don't think it's ever been done and I tend to doubt it's even possible. He brought in some novelties into flamenco, some of which were inspired by jazz musicians he had worked with. But it wouldn't make any sense in my mind to say that he "broke the rules of jazz". I don't think Paco was jazz-literate. Maybe it's a distinction without a difference, but I don't think PdL was inspired by jazz at all. I think he was inspired by certain musicians who happened to play jazz. And I suspect, from what you say, that Lenny Breau wasn't inspired by flamenco but by Sabicas. Like PdL with jazz, I don't think Breau was flamenco-literate. So I guess you could say he was breaking the rules out of ignorance. Breaking the rules he didn't know were there. But I'm not sure that has any artistic significance. Using a tremolo or playing in tono de taranta or phrygio por arriba or whatever are just varnish, nothing more. The "rules" run much deeper. For me, anyone attempting to really fuse two styles would have to be aware of all of that. Which is why fusion is very difficult to do and fails more often that it succeeds. What I hear when I listen to Breau is not fusion. Just some borrowing of certain superficial aspects of flamenco (which is fine btw, not saying there's anything wrong with that). Or to put it simply, when I listen to his "taranta", I don't hear a taranta at all. So by that standard, if I'm told that his intent was to create a flamenco-jazz fusion, I'd say he failed. But I don't know that he was even attempting to fuse the two. I do know that Paco certainly wasn't trying to fuse the two (at least not in his own playing). The problem goes both ways too. A jazz player uses the Andalusian cadence and for some that's enough to say it's flamenco or flamenco-inspired. A flamenco player plays an unusual chord and that's enough for some to call it jazz or jazz-inspired. To me that misses the essence of both genres entirely. Anyways, none of this it meant to be critical of Breau as a guitarist. It's just the idea of blending or fusion that I'm talking about.
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