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As well, this particular art is a culture and people do own cultures.
Careful, Lenny. We who love, play, and study flamenco on the Foro are likely targets for the ludicrous so-called "students" on university campuses today who charge anyone who displays atrributes of "non-Western" cultures with "Cultural Appropriation." We non-Spaniards performing flamenco, even as amateurs, and certainly as professionals, would be considered guilty of cultural appropriation by these little snowflakes searching for "safe spaces" and demanding "trigger warnings" before hearing about the exchanges that have been occurring between various cultures since cultures have interacted.
Bill
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And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East."
If you want to know more about how Lenny did things on a guitar like nobody had ever done before, how he "broke the rules"... Look up "Ted Greene Lenny Breau"on youtube.
It's four videos of Ted Greene private lessons, where Ted Greene explains how Lenny found his style. I could never explain it like Ted, my knowledge is not deep enough.
I also don't want to go on and on in an endless discussion about "breaking the rules". I'm more interested in talking about music. I think we're all musicians here. Listen to Lenny if you want to and open your ears. Talk about what he did and say if you like it or not. Don't judge him by one video where he plays a solea when he's twenty years old... Listen to some of his more mature playing.
He was very talented and he loved guitar. Playing guitar was all he did and he didnt care about styles. He did some very interesting things with the guitar, a lot of great jazz guitarists and guitarists from other genres know this. I think Lenny had a lot of duende in his playing. I'm more interested in feeling than in semantics and styles and rules... You have to know Lenny grew up in Canada in the fifties, he had no teachers and learned everything just from listening to records and then did his own thing with it. He had no access to internet like we have today... He did some crazy things with harp harmonics and he could comp and play melodies at the same time like no one before..
If a guy like Lenny would have lived in Spain he would have been a great flamenco player, no doubt.
"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
One guy I became friends with there told me that he hates how closed minded some people get when talking about flamenco. He told me music, including flamenco, is art and nobody owns art.
Well, the problem is is that when you have a very deep rooted family based closed oral tradition art form like flamenco is, people become very protective of it. Most people, even in silly pop rock fandom, are very concerned about “commercialization”, whatever it might mean. I can only say from my own perspective, some of the flamenco singers I first got into I no longer consider so important as I did at first...and it is simply because I have gone down much deeper into the rabbit hole of cante. I don’t think it fair to only describe people with strong opinions about art as “close minded”....of course there are those as well. I try to avoid talking negatively about some artists I don’t care for as I know some folks are truly moved by it, even if I know it is tosh relative to something else. All I like to do is promote stuff I think is good.
Now about your guitar player. Yes he is great player, the Sabicas transcription he plays is very accurate and he obviously loves the aesthetic of the flamenco guitar sound...however when he starts swinging and leaves the Taranta behind it leaves me like “what was the point?”....you see a lot of folks during that era look at flamenco as some flashy trick guitar playing that sounds spanishy....that sentiment has not really changed much generally speaking. Now if he had played a swing version of the Taranta then I would have been struck by the innovation there. Mclaughlin therefore, does a better job IMO by fusing what he knows more with proper flamenco concepts. (When he plays Zyryab or chiquito for example, he puts some Coltrane style swing in there at times). Of course he is a type of guy to actually jump down some rabbit holes himself (see Shakti, and of course he collaborated with Paco).
He is no better a jazz player as far as I can tell than Lenny, however it’s the approach to the idea....”here is some flamingo for ya, just kidding”, vs “now I will play buleria por solea with Paco freakin de Lucia”....you wanted to talk about it and that is how I see it.
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