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RE: Rumbas y los demás cosas.
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zata
Posts: 659
Joined: Jul. 17 2003
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 RE: Rumbas y los demás cosas. (in reply to KMMI77)
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quote:
Would i be right in assuming you have changed just as much as flamenco has since you made that decision?
No. I'm exactly the same person, just more wrinkly.
quote:
I have a friend here in Australia who has just returned from Jerez. He would love to give up everything and go and live in Jerez now. So that same alluring pull of flamenco must still be there today. Even if you don't feel it anymore, It doesn't mean it is not being felt strongly by someone else.
I feel the allure plenty. It’s what is being offered as flamenco that doesn’t quench my flamenco-on. That doesn’t mean it isn’t good music. Classic opera, country and western, Indonesian folk music and many hundreds of other excellent genres also fail to satisfy my need for flamenco.
quote:
I'm not arguing that modern flamenco is better or worse than before. To me modern flamenco just expresses people of today, and reflects the time we live in, the results of the past, and expresses what people feel now.
Evolution is a slow plodding process. For all practical purposes we’re no different from humans of millions of years ago. The same need for food and shelter, the same hopes and desires, the same disappointments in love, the same fear of death. If today José Mercé sings about his cell phone battery running out just when he’s talking to his girl, a hundred years ago the same cantes and compases had verses about equally painful separation resulting from other causes.
Flamenco fills an emotional niche not broached by other genres. That’s why fusion, although it produces nice music, ultimately leaves (some of) us hungry for something else.
_____________________________
Estela Zatania
www.deflamenco.com
www.expoflamenco.com
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Date Jan. 14 2013 14:59:59
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Ricardo
Posts: 14822
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
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RE: Rumbas y los demás cosas. (in reply to zata)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: zata
quote:
I was shocked by Chozas in rito because he made up his own solea. Now if some kid did that today, he would be made fun of by aficionados.
Actually, the opposite is true. Singers used to stick to traditional verses, but nowadays everyone tries to write their own. Unfortunately that can make for some dorky poetry...probably best not to renew too much all at once. I enjoy hearing about two thirds traditional verses to one third original at most. There's some brilliant poetry in the traditional ones, that's why they've stood the test of time.
People can create whatever they want, what's to stop them?
I was talking about the style of solea, the unique melody timing and delivery, not only the lyrics. Please point me in the direction of anybody singing their own made up style of solea (or siguiriya) alive today, that isn't taken as a joke, or considered "bad" as far as singing goes. I am not a big fan of Morente but for sure when he tried doing his own versions of cante melodies some aficionados said he was the assassin of cante etc.
And aside from that, as you are on the same boat as anders that cante is almost dead...who still alive "does it" for you these days?
Ricardo
_____________________________
CD's and transcriptions available here:
www.ricardomarlow.com
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Date Jan. 14 2013 18:40:04
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estebanana
Posts: 9352
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: Rumbas y los demás cosas. (in reply to bursche)
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I don't know as much about flamenco as Anders, but I know where he's coming from. When I got into flamenco 20 years ago the people I knew who were good aficionados in their 50's who had spent 20 years in Spain were saying it was just about over. Then as people passed away one by one they became circumspect about flamenco. Ten years ago I remember older ones complaining that buleria cuple of pop songs are not really very flamenco.....
I'm not old enough to have heard some of the great people sing, so in sense there is a hollowness to flamenco for me in that I feel my experience is incomplete because the things that are held as bench marks of importance are all in the past. A past I will not be able to even look back and say at least I heard it then. Just about everything in flamenco that is moving for me is recorded music, of Fernanda, Mairena, Borrico...the list goes on, right? Of course there is still flamenco, but I missed the Belle Epoch.
It's strange in a way to be interested in something that largely exists in recorded form, in something that you can't go back to. Or in something that if you chase it around Spain you might never see. Odd that I've seen/heard some of the remants of the cante in California in kitchens and living rooms when artists come here, living rooms that if I were in Spain I would not get invited into. It's so real and yet so out of context. Then to top it off knowing that cante is really the basis for flamenco and knowing that the guitar is more or less aside note, I mean really. The guitar is great and all, but I hardly ever listen to recordings of solo guitar, maybe once every six months.
To me flamenco has mainly become about student dancers learning enough stuff to do buleria in a student show. Sad I know to think that way, but the majority of everything I see is marketed towards that. Teaching something that really is fading away. Student dancers are almost always interested in cante as far is it serves their needs, it's just something to dance to. Seldom to you hear them talking about Cante' outside the context of foot work or which letra will you dance to?, seldom. To say that is a turn off is an understatement. People call me on the phone as ask me why I don't go to see friends dance or why I'm so unsupportive. Because I can't delude myself into feeling or thinking that it is actually real. Unless flamenco is a spirit or state of being and not actual fleshed out cante'.
I've seen enough dance students to last a lifetime and if I were to have watched that many scratching unseasoned student vioinists, pianists or trombonists at that level with out any meaty substantive classical music to back it up I would give up on classical music altogether. Take my meaning?
But I do have a few friends who are the core of the scene here this area, professionals who are vetted who do good flamenco and I love them, and I support them. But I understand Anders, as you get older you get discontent about things. MAybe because we both make guitars and see the unsavory things in flamenco it is difficult to justify learning to make flamenco guitars which have not much to do with cante', knowing that you love to hear solea sung with only knuckles hitting a wood table top. Or that you spend 15 years getting good at something and then feel like the situation is hollow in some way. Hollow in the sense that most of the guitar making talk is guitar-o-centric and full of crap. See when you make a flamenco guitar you don't think about how other guitars sound or why Conde's do this or that, or which species of wood is better, it's all nonsense, trade talk. What you really deep down think about is how will this guitar sound with a good flamenco singers voice? Then it dawns on you that flamenco in the sense that it was sung, which shaped the way the guitar developed, could be gone. Then you think am I making guitars for what? Will it ever be played by a guitarist with real singer? Maybe, but probably not in almost all cases.
So if you are Anders what keeps you going?
In a way you have to practice self delusion to keep you going, you have to tell yourself a small lie. Most days telling yourself a small lie is bearable, other days it is a great inconvenience or burden to getting on in the practical matters of the world.
So cut him some slack, cut your self some slack. Some of us are more hard wired to resist deluding ourselves about how we make a living. Some people can tell themselves the lie to go to work and when they get off they shift gears out of work mode, artists/creatives usually walk around 24 hours a day in self critical work mode. It's a hazardous job, like all jobs.
_____________________________
https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
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Date Jan. 14 2013 21:46:23
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