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Or old LP or whatever it is that I bought from Amazon in the form of a set of MP3s--Honores a Diego del Gastor Un Genio de la Guitarra. Can anyone tell me about its provenance, the source(s) of the tracks, or other background? Sound quality is all over the place, so I'm guessing it was assembled from amateur tape recordings.
As I wrote in my introductory post a couple weeks back, I'm not a flamenco player, only a long-time listener and owner of a very modest old Mexican flamenco guitar. I stumbled across Diego when using YouTube to get reacquainted with the music, and something about his playing grabbed me. Then I was looking at a memorial recording distributed at the funeral of a long-ago classmate who had been a very serious player and who I knew had studied in Spain--we shared a junior-year-abroad in Italy, and every vacation we were told that Lenny had gone off to "live with the gypsies" and study flamenco. In any case, the photo of the memorial CD bore the caption "Student of Diego del Gastor, Moron de la Frontera, Andalucia, Espana, 1964-1965." Which means that the flamenco he played for us (the first flamenco I ever heard) was strongly influenced by Diego--and probably explains why those videos struck such a chord with me.
So I'm learning a bit about Diego as well as remembering an old acquaintance (whom I wish I'd gotten to know better) and reflecting on the strange connections one finds.