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Ricardo -> RE: Jeronimo Maya (May 27 2022 16:37:35)
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quote:
RE: Jeronimo Maya (in reply to Melchor)
No New Messages
" I have the same feeling I had when I went to see Gerardo Nuñez in Jerez. Great techinique but no flamenco and no feeling."
That is hard to believe about Gerardo, he is one of the few guys who can make "modern flamenco" sound like flamenco puro,
Believe it or not, this was a consensus opinion on the internet back when I first joined some forums. It was very frustrating to read, (and hear spread throughout the flamenco community) that type of general opinion of my teacher and friend for many years. It was the main reason I took on the Nuñez Avatar and generally tried to inform people about his cursos in Sanlucar and the very different approach to TEACHING flamenco than people seemed to have about his music and performances. The main thing was people could not hear through his amazing technique, any flamenco going on. Being from Jerez the big comparison was always to Moraito, who people both felt was the epitome of flamenco and (wrongly) that he was the ONLY representative of “Jerez style”. Back in those days (early 2004-2008 or so) the only public defender he had was Morante who admitted Nuñez did a fine job accompanying Indio Gitano. This was also part of the problem…he only had ONE album with a singer. Exemplary as it was, the general opinion was “ultra modern guitar with ultra old fashioned singer” should not work. I always found this idea based on ignorance of accompaniment in general. I remember even arguing with a respected journalist that could not recognize Trafalgar as “buleria” claiming it was a jazz fusion piece that should not have a palo moniker.
Eventually Ron from the foro here witnessed a live concert of Nuñez and his trio I think, and raved about it, and gradually opinions changed. I remember Erol (an old foro member not posting for years) and a group of Spaniards from the PDL foro decided to crash the curso when I was there (upon my challenging them of course), as they accused it of being a “guiri” curso etc, and for that matter did not respect OUR foro being all in English….well those guys crashed and guess what? They all fell in love with Gerardo and the whole thing and kept returning year after year, some of my best friends now…some even joined our Foro here and got involved briefly with our discussions. And right when I saw all the opinions start changing about Gerardo and how great and pure a jerezano artist he was (lets say underrated in the puro regard, and over rated in the modern technical regard), he had an accident (2008) that stopped his career short for a few months. His return to the guitar showed that he was “ok” but had a psychological problem that continued, oddly, to get worse. It was about 2010 that his finger stopped working properly and permanently.
Not long after this depressing (to us his students at least) situation, the limitations of his repertoire resulted in his desire to present a typical flamenco cuadrao where he mostly played with his wife dancing and the singer (Jesus Mendez who he trained for this purpose being only a festero singer) in order to fill up the programs he had on the books. Understand right before this he could play a two hour concert totally SOLO, no cajon or anything. So this new situation brought out the critics that would claim “wow, Gerardo has returned to flamenco puro for some reason, much better than his old programs”. And his popularity grew from there as a respected flamenco artist maestro. You could imagine my personal frustration there, after years of defending the mastery and here he was unable to play the music he taught me, and NOW they consider him “flamenco”??? Ugh.
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