ARCHIVO DEL CANTE FLAMENCO – TRANSLATION OF NOTES BY J.M. CABALLERO BONALD

Translator’s note:  The Archivo del Cante Flamenco of 1968, originally released as a six-LP set on Vergara and later in CD format, is a monumental document.  It was important not only for the caliber of the artists, but because it was recorded in the field (that is, in homes, barsand ventas, rather than in a studio), trading a slight loss in sonic fidelity for a large gain in emotional and expressive fidelity to the core aspect of good flamenco — the spontaneous transmission of emotion,Here is the creation story, a story of the people and places and the era. Fernanda and Bernarda de Utrera, still young and fresh; Juan Talega and Manolito de la María and La Piriñaca de Jerez and Tomás Torre (son of the immortal Manuel), old but very much alive; and other giants as well as extraordinary little-known non-professionals.  And an illuminating report from Morón de la Frontera, featuring Luís Torres “Joselero” with Diego del Gastor, his brother-in-law, backing him up.  All in the context of a time and place that I was fortunate to witness as an obviously confused but respectful outsider, a world that would soon vanish.The organizer, and writer of the notes, was J.M. Caballero Bonald, who wrote the first book I bought on flamenco in Spain, in 1961 — a two-peseta (three cents) thin booklet  that was full of the usual misinformation that characterized the material of that epoch.Here is a ten-part translation of the booklet that accompanied the original six-LP set.  Some sections reflect my indebtedness to Brad Blanchard, whose translation appeared in Jaleo magazines in 1981.There are some fascinating assumptions at work here.  First, the concentration on the Gypsy “race” as the source of many key forms of flamenco, including the central “cante jondo” or deep song forms.  This entails a wide range of stereotypes.  (While that underlying attitude is under intensive questioning, and does not enjoy extensive documentary support, this does not necessarily make it erroneous.)Another unusual factor is the emphasis on seeking out some non-professionals, who are implicitly viewed as having a kind of authenticity that some professionals may lack.  This is similar to the assumption that characterized the important but not really successful Granada Concurso de Flamenco of 1922, in which cultured figures like de Falla and Lorca and Segovia actually disqualified professionals in their search for a “truer” folk expression that could only emerge from the non-professional realm.  The results were interesting, but not optimal — flamenco is not an art that should not disqualify those who become professionalHere goes:PART I – INTRODUCTION – PREPARATIONS

This document is intended simply as an informative guide for the listener, a sort of literary complement to the recordings that constitute this “Archivo del Cante Flamenco”.  We wanted to offer a living chronicle of the work behind the project.  In a way, we have wrapped our own information about the complex moral and material world of flamenco in a sort of travel journal, paying special attention to the experiences that marked our search for sources and the actual recording sessions.

Clearly — and even granting due CREDIT  to some partial, praiseworthy efforts achieved to date — the task of collecting and ordering the diverse and widely dispersed gamut of cante flamenco still remains ahead.  Despite the growing bibliography produced in the last few years, and the enthusiastic attention of a varied public, flamenco remains a music that is fragmented and not deeply known.  There is no doubt that the most effective and complete recorded archive is yet to be created, and that this would be the truest and best way to fix the purity of the older forms, accurately conserving the greatest known examples of cante so that they could become known with confident precision.

We realized that our particular task presented a number of serious obstacles.  From the beginning, there was the ticklish problem of finding credible sources in the native zones of the specific cantes; in addition, there was the stumbling block presented by the increasing degree of professionalism on the part of today’s singers.  The character of our archive could not stray from the fundamental idea of finding non-professional interpreters, in many cases anonymous and in others only known in the restricted area of their birthplaces.  Once the general approach was established, it was necessary to carry out an advance exploration of the ambiente — the context of the performances.  Our personal experience, or that of third parties, guided us through a careful and detailed sweep of the area that runs from Seville to Cadiz and that constitutes the region where flamenco developed.

In these initial trips, we were able to prove something that we already suspected: the increasing absence of the cantaores in their native zones.  Little by little, the social foundation of the cante has been undergoing a series of predictable transformations, resulting from the normal changes in the life style of the singer and the growing influence of professionalism.  Flamenco, which began as an intimate way of expressing countless episodes of hunger and persecution that are atavistically buried in the memory of Andalusia’s Gypsies, has been altered by the passage of time into a few initiated repetitions of those primordial experience, now very different in both their causes and their effects.

The singer of a century ago limited himself to narrating his own personal and painful history; he was the interpreter ofhis own life, and could rarely transmute his art into a commercial phenomenon.  But it would be absurd to suppose that in the immutability of these communicative formulas, rooted in the material and spiritual misery of the culture, offered the only possibility for true greatness in the cante.  Today’s perspectives are simply not the same, and the singer has typically become a professional, linked to other spheres.  He is no longer the protagonist of that touching intimacy that flamenco manifests; rather he transmits an expressive heritage latent in certain corners of Andalucia.  We are speaking, of course, in general terms and only with the intention of illustrating the different circumstances of our work.  It is hardly necessary to state that now almost all of the good interpreters of flamenco are professionally linked to certain companies, or regularly perform within certain troupes that present flamenco “spectacles” around the world.  To track down and arrange to record a worthy selection of these indispensable professional singers, we naturally experienced a number of complications and readjustments that disrupted our original plans.

Once we had rejected the idea of recording songs outside of their natural regions, we found it necessary to make repeated visits to Andalucia.  After extensive reconnaisance, we went to the following locales in flamenco’s fundamental orbit:  Sevilla, Alcalá de Guadaira, Mairena del Alcor, Puebla de Cazalla, Morón de la frontera, Osuna, Arcos, Lebrija, Jerez, Sanúucar de Barrameda, Puerto de Santa María, Puerto Real, San Fernando and Cadiz.  We also considered other Andalucian localities, detouring from our planned route when circumstances made it advisable.  In each of the mentioned places, we had already located the cantaores who would be part of the archive.  The final cycle of taping took part in Madrid, due to the customary residence there of some professionals who could hardly be omitted.  In all, we gathered material that included more than two hundred different versions of cantes.  After the detailed task of contrasting the quality and ordering the styles, approximately a third would be included in the contents of these records.

All of the recordings carried out during our journeys to Andalucia — and also those that had to be made in Madrid — took place in characteristic surroundings.  From the first, it seemed vital that we not subject the interpreters — the majority of whom were non-professionals — to the unpleasant and possibly threatening experience of a recording studio.  We knew that without the normal atmosphere in which the singer usually performs, we would not have been able to achieve the authenticity that was part of our essential objective.  Indeed, we often found it so difficult to convince some non-professionals to participate that it would clearly have

been all but impossible to induce them into a sterile studio; and naturally, the results would have been quite different.

As expected, the successive setting up of the recording equipment in locations with unusual acoustic conditions gave us plenty of headaches.  We had to keep the equipment working properly without interrupting the flow of the gathering.  On some occasions, we did not begin recording until nearly dawn, despite the fact that the rite of the fiesta flamenca had begun around midnight.  The imponderables in these cases were as frequent as the surprises:  One never knew which moment would produce a sudden outburst of brilliance and which would create hopeless frustration.  The true cante, that which grabs us and fills us with awe, that “obscure root of the cry” of which Lorca spoke — can arrive suddenly, like lightning, or it can never arrive at all.  At times the cante shuts itself in and becomes something impossible to express, and there are some who will fight desperately with it while others simply give up without trying.  There does not exist — there cannot exist — any in-betweens in an art like flamenco whose secret of communcation lies in surpassing its own limitations.

In the first review of the collected material, we were faced with two key problems: background sounds that were sometimes quite noisy and distracting, and the difficulty of choosing from a long series of styles of a specific cante those three or four that would be most appropriate for our archive.  How to eliminate the anecdotal comments that could be disturbing; and how to tie together and give the guitar adequate continuity when extracting a few examples from among a group of closely-linked cantes?  Aside from some well-known technical solutions, we have stayed true to the goal of avoiding the familiar character of sound that is associated with studio recordings.  The term “archive” is sufficiently self-explanatory in this respect.  It means filing all of this living and expressive documentation of flamenco as found in its original habitat, and taking advantage of unusual moments and occasions.  One true fragment of cante or an isolated moment of brilliance standing out from the usual confusion of the fiesta — these were especially valuable for our purposes.  It would have been preposterous to try to carefully plan the performances or to select the guitarists — very bad in some instances — who would best serve to support each cante.  From the moment we began, we were primarily concerned with the truthfulness and the impact of the material we would record.  From this standpoint, we contend that this archive includes the most traditional repertoire of cantes that can still be found in theri native setting:  In a tavern in Triana or Jerez, in a home in Puerto de Santa Maria or Mairena del Alcor, in a roadside tavern in Cadiz or Alcala de Guadaira, in a small restaurant in Arcos or Utrera, or a courtyard in Moron or Lebrija…

It should not be necessary to allude to the fact that the huge undertaking of grouping all the cantes, each of the many known variants of flamenco, would have made our ambitious project practically impossible.  With the hundreds and hundreds of styles of cante that could be classified in Andalucia — not to mention Extremadura, La Mancha and Murcia — and the countless individual styles and distinctions made by each interpreter, the huge task of recording this flood of divisions and subdivisions of flamenco would have demanded means far in excess of what this private venture permitted.  Our archive is intended as nothing more nor less than a basic panorama of the most genuine cantes that have survived to our time, authenticated by tradition and by the reliability of the artists we have chosen.  But we insist that this labor of compilation would not have attained its validity without the insistence on recording within the zone of flamenco’s birth, and in the natural climate in which it thrives and is performed.  We wanted to make a useful and necessary contribution to support this popular culture, to create an archive with genuine integrity that would preserve the most authentic expressions of flamenco.

END OF PART I

Here’s the second installment of the notes for the Archive flamenco, written by J.M. Caballero Bonald to tell the story of that important anthology released in 1968.  (As an aside, note the reference here to Triana as “open on other sides to the great pastures of the Betica plain or toward the endless rice fields in the marshes of Aznalcazar.”  No wonder I could recall flooding in that area during one long-ago rainy season.)  Again, thanks to Brad Blanchard for his original 1981 translation that has helped this effort:PART II — SEVILLA

Our first trips were necessarily to Sevilla, and we’d return there many times as it offered the most reliable center of operations.  We had already realized that the cante, sociologically speaking, is a reality that is virtually archaeological.  We are not referring to its presumed corruption with the passage of time, but rather to its transplantation from its native areas to various other regions — a change which entails the loss of its original societal foundations.  One cannot deny that, due to the gradual popularization of flamenco, the art is today much better known — and, of course, more thoroughly mastered by some interpreters — than at any other stage of its development.  But this generalized progress involves turning its back on the historic and geographic nucleus from which it emerged.  Does this manifest uprooting imply some immediate danger?  It is difficult to venture an objective reply, but there is no doubt that, where its social involvement is concerned, the cante in its present form retains only

isolated connections with the primitive cante.  That original, miserable and painful and intimate expression — originally sealed within a few anonymous Gypsy families — has today overflowed into the most far-flung arenas of fame.

Triana was, with Jerez, the most important and definitive site from which the cante sprang.  We now know that around the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, the hidden seeds of flamenco expression began to filter out from this domestic concealment towards its first public debut.  And this occurred in Triana, the very neighborhood of Seville where the city’s obscure Gypsy communities were located.  The absolute lack of documentation prevents us from reconstruction with any certainty the family-hearth atmosphere in which the hidden seed of the cante flourished initially.  Therefore, let us enter into the folk atmosphere of Triana.  After crossing the river from Sevilla proper to this opposite bank of the Guadalquivir, the urban landscape seems to change its character.  Triana is like a village pushed up against Sevilla, yet open on other sides to the great pastures of the Betica plain or toward the endless rice fields in the marshes of Aznalcazar.  The river also separates Triana in a way that is more than simply physical.  Triana may not appear to have any special distinction, but it nonetheless forms a unique nucleus that includes Gypsy, morisco and country folk.  Triana’s humble yet powerful personality is not external, but comes from the human interior of this neighborhood.

We walked through Triana both day and night.  We lost ourselves in the deep, light alleys of La Cava, of el Altozano, of el Arco de la Pureza.  Right here in some of these poor tenement houses, at the end of the eighteenth century, lived in anonymous misery some of those illustrious Gypsy families who were the only repositories of the heritage of the cante.  In this poor and unstable cradle, the dazzling artistic reality of flamenco was born.  Triana must not have been very different from what it is like now.  We know very little about the lives of those first interpreters of the cante — el Planeta, el Fillo, Frasco el Colorao, Juan Encueros, los Caganchos, los Pelaos — although we claim to know something of their styles of tonas and siguiriyas.  Although distantly linked to their long history of persecutions and with unclear relation to the Moors of the region, it is still not clear why these Gypsies were the ones who were entrusted with carrying out that fusion of elements of intensely oriental Andalusian music that would come to be called flamenco.  The oldest known verses of these cantes invariably speak of misfortunes and outrages, of prison and death.  It reflects, indeed it was, the life of the Gypsies, who are often viewed as non-human zeroes among the world’s wandering peoples.  From the beginning, the central theme of flamenco gathers together all that desolate flood of

experiences, adapted in each case to individual sufferers; and with no relation to the usual themes of popular Andalusian song.

And what remains of that moral and material landscape of the Triana of 1800?  Only some vague trace is seen in the surroundings; the rest has been diluted, as society changed its outlines during the known histroy of the cante.  There is no doubt that the condition of life, and the daily ups and downs of the flamenco artist, have radically altered the ingredients of the art.  The present-day interpreters are removed from those special human conditions which made possible the genesis of flamenco.  The majority of today’s cantaoresappear to be associated, actively and competitively, with the many opportunities that are offered by the growing international popularity of the cante.  The productive allure of professionalism — or the new ways of life — have practically caused thecantaor to vanish from the land of his birth.During our various explorations of the flamenco scene of Sevilla, we counted extensively on the indispensable help of Antonio Mariena — the best living professional cantaor — and on Amós Rodríguez, a conscientious expert on flamenco and an excellent, though sporadic, interpreter.  The orientation and direct collaboration of these irreplaceable advisors was essential to our work.

Mairena has an exceptional knowledge of the history of flamenco.  He speaks to us of the old cantaores that he met when he was a child, of the unforeseen artistic baggage that they carried on their shoulders, of the miseries and the great moments of their ways of being.  Mairena himself is responsible for the rescue and the personal re-elaboration of many forgotten styles, and his lonely example has imposed, beyond any doubt, a demanding standard of performance on the dense professional payroll list of the cante.  His eagerness to revitalize a degraded heritage makes Mairena an essential point of reference for any examination of the sources of flamenco.  Amós Rodríguez, for his part, represents an important sector of non-professional cantaoreswho blend solid investigation with personal interpretive ability – a rare combination.  His points of view are somewhat different than Mairena’s, and define a different attitude in relation to the expressive canons of the cante.We had very interesting conversations with Amós Rodríguez and Antonio Mairena during our walks through Sevilla and our ramblings through Utrera, Alcala de Guadaira, Dos Hermanas and Mairena del Alcor.  We met many times in Sevilla, in the bar of Pepe Pinto, whose wife, la Niña de los Peines, always attended in silence, the exhausted symbol of another epoch, listening to the discussions of that historical period of the cante on which she imprinted her own indelible stamp.  La Niña de los Peines today offers no opinons, and she can no longer sing.  But suddenly we feel that through this

narrow bar of Pepe Pinto there circulates, now fragmented, an enormous current of history of the cante…

Mairena believes in personal styles as the only possibility for enrichment of the cante.  Purity is therefore measured by the importance we give to the oral tradition; that which follows the old flamenco tradition is pure.  Amós Rodríguez, on the other hand, believes that creations attributed to individual cantaores must always be suspect, since they will be adapted and deformed by those who interpret and transmit them.  The amount of truth in the cante corresponds to the amount of truth in the person communciating it.

The abilities of the cantaor should be subordinate to his power to captivate; he will communicate pain to others only as he feels pain inside himself.  And this can only be achieved if the cante is adapted to his life…  Flamenco could turn out to be inoperative  if the modern interpreter were to reproduce in his cante structures that no longer have anything to do with the world in which he lives.  The most logical thing would be for the cantaor to adjust his themes and expressive intention to the repertoire of his own experience.  It has already been said many times that no art – popular or otherwise — can lose touch with its history.  And flamenco was engendered by human junctures and social circumstances that no longer exist.In Sevilla, on different occasions, Amós Rodríguez, Tomás Torre, Luis Caballero and Antonio Calzones were recorded.  We scheduled the meetings in the best and most natural surroundings: in a tavern in Triana, in a venta or roadside inn outside of Sevilla, in a home on the outskirts of Alameda de Hercules (a legendary site for flamenco until about 25 years ago).  Sometimes thecante came quickly, before midnight; on other nights, it was slow in arriving, as if it were struggling helplessly against its own destruction until dawn.  The inner ritual of the cante depends on the degree of abandon of the interpreter – something we never forgot during our work.  The majority of non-professional singers on this archive are people who haven’t tried, for one reason or another, to earn a living from their art.  In a way, some of them are the last representatives of that almost legendary caste of cantaores who limit themselves to narrating the dramatic burden of their lives.  We really believe that before long, when these illustrious figures in the history of flamenco have disappeared, they will take with them the possibility of directly experiencing that tragic chapter of flamenco history which is already changing to adapt to present conditions.  There is no doubt that the usual method of contracting and then recording the artist in the studio, in some set order and at a predetermined time, would have squeezed out of this archive its most essential characteristic — the authentic and spontaneous documentary value of cantes gathered from their own sources in the most authentic surroundings.

It was hard for us to convince Amós Rodríguez to participate in this archive. He only sings on special occasions, and in this instance he sang unexpectedly, when the gathering had reached its climactic moment and its maximum communicative level.  For this unpredictable artist, not even the mediocrity of the guitar — we had to settle on this occasion for the only available player — diminished the validity of Amós’s gushing expressive passion.

The lone ascendancy of Tomás Torre now confers on him special validity as an interpreter.  Son of Manuel Torre — one of the most impassioned artists in flamenco history — this humble and now elderly Gypsy is now considered to be not so much a cantaor as a transmitter of memories of the old styles of Jerez, learned from the Torre family dynasty that culminated in his father.

It doesn’t really matter that Tomás’s abilities are somewhat limited.  The broken, dark voice, the tonal stridency, the lack of power, have nothing to do with the supreme truth of the cante.  It is something very similar to what happens in jazz, especially with the kind of exultation represented by Louis Armstrong.  In both cases, perhaps the only truly indespensable attribute is a spontaneous emotion, usually buried but brought to the surface by the rhythm — the compás of the music.Flamenco, in large measure, is a matter of compás.  Rarely can its light shine through if the singer is not intimately attuned to that demanding norm which marks the luminous unfolding, the spiritual jolts, of the cante.  Tomás Torre knows the secret of the compás, and the secret of the truest Gypsy depths of flamenco.  What better documentary guarantee could we offer?  Tomás speaks of his father as a mythical figure. The life of Manuel Torre offers a model of the difficult and enigmatic personalities of the Gypsies who forged flamenco.Tomás confirms many of the anecdotes concerning the proud, impenetrable and masterly flamenco creator that was Manuel Torre.  When he sings, Tomás’s dark eyes become moist and from his throat leaps the hoarse trembling of his own exposed memories.  He says that he, like his father, sometimes has to sing poorly — that it is impossible to always sing well, and that those who always sing well have become mere trained canaries.  Tomas only feels a true expressive impulse when he remembers the chills of his family experiences.

The siguiriyas and the soleares that he sang for us that night were worth all that he hasn’t been able — or hasn’t wanted — to sing in his unstable and difficult life.  In Tomás’s struggle with dark shadows of his voice, in the desperate root of each one of his broken laments, in the tragic Gypsy echoes, resides the deepest truth of the cante: its furious social meekness.

An apparent contradiction, yes.  But flamenco is only a cry without rebellion; a resigned protest.  Tomás Torre may not know it, but all of this is heartrendingly implicit in his exemplary sense of the cante.

Luís Caballero, for his part, is just the opposite of a flamenco professional.  Belonging to the petit-bourgeousie of Sevilla, without contacts beyond the daily happenings of the cante, he has nonetheless remained close to his artistic circle.  In Sevilla, as in any other southern Spanish locality, the average Andalusian never considers flamenco to be a popular music that identifies with his own preferences, his own taste, his own traditions.  It is viewed instead as a logical phenomenon, produced by the independent genesis of flamenco within a particular minority group and defined by the unusual, semi-clandestine paths of its development.  There is no doubt that these historical circumstances provoked an evident lack of interest and, at times, even a certain disdain for flamenco on the part of most Andalusians.  For many this music was suspiciously linked to a dark background, and conveyed a dark and strange meaning.  Generally, the popularity of the true flamenco song resulted only through its alliances with other kinds of popular regional folklore.

We allude to this because Luís Caballero represents, with some special characteristics, that slavish attraction for flamenco that sometimes arises in people who are far removed from the atmosphere in which it was born.  Despite his personal distance from the tight professional world of the cante, Luis Caballero generously agreed to participate in this archive.   Lucid and passionate at the same time, his ample stylistic command revealed extensive knowledge and a profound calling.

The case of Antonio Calzones is quite peculiar.  Still a young man, not subject to the burdens of professionalism, his cante is a textual response to that previously mentioned way of seeing it as an expressive necessity.  We couldn’t pin down exactly what circumstances were causing certain difficulties as we prepared to hear this introverted, fervent and almost anonymous singer.  We recalled that same morning, when we went looking for him and when, unasked and without a guitar on hand, he burst into a long, trembling siguiriyas.  The surroundings were hardly appropriate — a merciless sun fell on the patio, there were distracting bustlings around us, people were shouting right nearby.  But suddenly, Calzones’ cry tore through the patio like an unexpected meteor, hushing and depopulating it.  It was only an announcement, a momentary test of power and integrity indelibly implanted in our memory.  But it wasn’t then possible to take advantage of that promising communicative gust; we had to wait for the quiet of early morning, in a venta on the highway to Jerez.  We were able to find a good guitarist — Antonio Sanlúcar — who still drags his noble old

age through some of the little-known flamenco haunts in Sevilla.  Two fine scholars accompanied us: Fernando Quiñones, whose direct collaboration would prove quite valuable, and José Caba Povedano, who knows more than almost anyone about the heart of flamenco in Sevilla.  That night, Calzones sang a wide range of styles: siguiriyas, soleares, tangos, tientos, bulerías, cantiñas gaditanas, fandangos, taranto and petenera.  The singer groped and stubbornly struggled in his desperate efforts to overcome the hidden obstacles to his art.  Surrounded by a perfect climate in the blackness of night, Calzones felt more rigid than he had in the noise and the dissolving sunlight of that morning.  We have already alluded to the unpredictability of the cante:  either it annuls and cancels itself, without any evident reason, or it surges suddenly out of its own ashes.  “In flamenco”, Calzones tells us, “the only thing worthwhile is the flood of emotion that hurts you from within; to sing better or worse, according to the abilities of each person, isn’t so important. Antonio Mairena, for example, always sings so well that he no longer pleases.”  Calzones is, clearly, a typical cantaor buffeted by fate; in his own exhausting strivings, the shining honesty of his cante is clearly visible.END OF PART 2

Here’s the third installment of this translation of the booklet by J.M. Caballero Bonald, on the inside story of creating the Archivo Flamenco, released in 1968; (acknowledgement to Brad Blanchard for his 1981 translation that ran in the American flamenco publication Jaleo.)PART III – ALCALA DE GUADAIRA

Alcalá de Guadaira, situated not many kilometers from Sevilla, is a pueblo of deep and powerful personality that has been a decisive site for many key chapters in the history of the cante.  Naturally, we had to enter its twisting streets often.  Here, as elsewhere, it is not easy to discover the roots of flamenco on first glance.  Since the Eighteenth Century, the Gypsy section of Alcala has been on the hillside below the old castle that, like a proud memory, dominates the open setting of the pueblo.  We walked through this section many times.  A disorderly cluster of wide hovels, unsanitary and excavated partly from the living rock, are half barracks and half cave.

Between the labyrinth of small paths, the weeds grow, water runs, and life passes in miserable conditions.  Here lived Joaquín el de la Paula and Agustín Talega and la Roezna — great creators of the cante of the last century — and here today live their humble descendants, almost unknown, who are the transmitters of that monumental Gypsy inheritance.  The cantes of Alcalá — like those of all flamenco regions — were born and defined in the intimacy of a few Gypsy families, in this case the Talega and

the Paula families whose last great representatives are Juan Talega — now almost 80, and the son of Agustín — and Manolito el de María, nephew of Joaquín el de la Paula, who died just a few months after singing a few exemplary soleares and bulerias for this archive.

Juan Talega currently lives in Dos Hermanas, a neighboring pueblo of Alcalá.  We therefore limited ourselves to seeking out Manolito el de la María in the houses of the Aguila neighborhood.  In our first journeys to Alcalá we failed to find him — he was clipping sheep on a farm in El Arahal.  Later, after asking in the venta de Platilla in front of the bridge that crosses the Guadaira at the entrance to town, we were told where he lived.  It was late when we arrived, and he was already in bed, but he quickly dressed and accompanied us, trying to overcome his exhaustion with an affable, somewhat forced show of vitality.  There was not a trace of bitterness in this elderly man who rose from his wretched family bed to join us.  As Alcalá slept, we descended the slope facing the fertile breath of the river, close to the rich pine groves of la Oromana.

It was already morning when the fiesta commenced, in a room on the upper floor of the venta de Platilla, a memorable site of many great flamenco sessions at the end of the last century.  We also made an appointment with two other anonymous singers from Sevilla — Jose Tragapanes and one called Ciego de San Roman — of whom we had been given somewhat contradictory reports about their possible involvement in the archive.  We had not met them before.  Tragapanes is a Gypsy, getting on in years, cordial and faltering, who earns a living singing in the ventas on the outskirts of Sevilla.  He possesses a strong-willed expressive passion — but it’s a monotonous passion, as though learned as a professional obligation.

Ciego de San Roman, for his part, earns a poor living by hoping for something to turn up in the flamenco venues of Sevilla.  His own darkness (he is blind) has logically sharpened his sense of hearing.  But his cante is a clear example of that poor, artificial manner of interpreting it according to dictates that are foreign to the creative core of flamenco.  Neither he nor Tragapanes were able to offer a valid contribution that met the specific requirements of this archive.

Manolito de la María’s memories of the cante were vague and random, as so often happens.  Rarely will a cantaor agree with another when speaking to us about his flamenco experiences.  The usual thing is that, after weighing and contrasting judgements, we find ourselves awash in indecision.  Manolito supported his ideas about the cante with recollections from his own life.  He always alluded to the journeys he had to make through these

fertile lands of poor farmers where he worked, as God had made him realize he should, in humble and sporadic occupations.  Outside of his own specific environment, his knowledge of the cante was very incomplete.  He spoke to us more of singers than of songs — most of all, about his uncle Joaquín el de la Paula, who had also lived in the caves on the castle’s slope.  Joaquín created his own exemplary style of soleares, elaborated with fragments of other local cantes and enriched with that impressive artistic intuition that Gypsies possess.  Flamenco, for Manolito el de la María, was like a way of being, like a commandment of his race.  It’s not important to sing the cante “to the letter”.  Rather, one must feel a “pellizco” — a chill — inside, and cry out, calling to one’s own self.  The cante of the non-Gypsies is something else; the non-Gypsy sings by ear.  The Gypsy creates for his own kind, unearthing his personal experience, transmitting from parent to child the secret of an expression that used to belong to just a few families and that is now available to everyone.  Flamenco used to flow in specific, private ceremonies, but now it has been converted into a public spectacle.  Manolito el de la Maria spoke incoherently about this, losing himself in strange arguments.  It may be only logical that he wouldn’t know the exact roots of his art, but he did know why he sang and when he felt the necessity to do so.Probably, while harvesting wheat or clipping sheep, Manolito sang for himself, calmly or passionately.  He sang because “he remembered what he had lived”, and sometimes he sang to seek relief, unconsciously, from a long history of afflictions.  There is no doubt that the cante of the Gypsies is, like its creators, an independent phenomenon, marginally and confusedly digested by a liberated inner intoxication and also, at times, offering a kind of catharsis.

Manolito’s name never left these restricted flamenco circles.  He did perform in some flamenco festivals in the area, but was scarecely recognized as an artist; it’s as if he himself preferred to remain in the background.  He said, “Sometimes, I knowingly sing poorly”.  He died as he had lived — poor and unknown.  And he was one of the cleanest, purest singers with whom we dealt.  He never had the slightest interest in turning his cante into a way of making a living.  We are convinced that everything he sang on that memorable night in Alcalá was a rigorously correct and unrepeatable example of his true creative capacity.  He remembered what he had lived, and perhaps he intuited that his life would not go on much longer.

In another of our visits to Alcala, we made contact with the children of Joaquín el de la Paula — Enrique and Merced — and with a well-known Gypsy called Juan Barcelona.  Amós Rodríguez Rey accompanied us, as he would on other occasions in his spare time, as a sort of castle-keeper for that now ruined fortress that is native flamenco.  Enrique also lives in

the neighborhood of shacks that mine the castle slope over the gorge of the Guadaira.  With that resignation — at times irritating because of its serenity — that marks a long-subjugated people, this son of Joaquín el de la Paula exhibited his miserable life as would someone who had been temporarily deprived of his possessions.  He displayed a certain pride — that imprecise pride of the Gypsies that consists half of studied disdain and half of dense in the face humiliation — that serves to hide, like a delicate curtain, so much human poverty.  Enrique el de la Paula is stuffed with his family into an unwelcoming cubbyhole, but he doesn’t complain.  He limits himself to understanding that he has chosen these impoverished conditions rather than submit himself to the rampart of absurdities that mark non-Gypsy life.  It is, without doubt, the reactionary resignation of the Gypsy before a society that has refused to integrate him.  But isn’t the cante, in the end, like an intimate protest that has accepted beforehand its own conformity?

Enrique el de la Paula speaks in dark flashes of memory about the life and miracles of his father, of the people who made pilgrimages to his cave to hear him — then in the last years of his sickly, wandering life — this embodiment of of the famous flamenco stock of Alcalá.  Enrique knows the cante of his father — the purest and most genuine local style — but he cannot express it; his voice seizes up in a painful and ineffective effort that  barely reveals the deteriorating outline of the prodigious soleares of Joaquin.  It’s almost the opposite of what has happened to his sister Merced, who possesses an undeniable expressive capacity but who has forgotten the noble and incomparable Gypsy lesson of Alcalá.End of Part 3

Here’s the fourth part of the booklet that accompanied the Archivo del Flamenco, released in 1968:PART IV — UTRERA

Utrera is an eminently Andalusian pueblo.  By itself, though, this attribute may not mean very much.  It is widely understood that Andalusia is not a country, but rather a complex unity of countries, all differentiated by very evident physical and spiritual characteristics.  The Andalucía of Utrera is, of course, that which finds its most definitive representation in Sevilla. It does not seem to fit the concept of a tragic Andalucía, but there is something in its cheerful outward appearance that bespeaks a large dose of hidden pathos.  Utrera, like these other pueblos, is rich in land and livestock — generous to a few, and miserly to many.

The local cantes — the ones re-elaborated so masterfully by La Serneta and Juanique, by El Pinini and Rosario la del Colorao — were born, as is the norm, in those miserable Gypsy communities that blanketed the fertile landscape of Sevilla, mixing themselves initially with Moors and landless  country folk.  Geographically, as well as historically in flamenco terms, Utrera is situated on a crossroads.  It is, and was, influenced by the cantes of Triana and Jerez, of Alcalá and Lebrija and — in a curious way — by some styles of cantiñas and bulerias of Cadiz.  The flamenco forms of Utrera – above all, its prodigious soleares — have incorporated all the pure, solemn and emotional intensity of the primitive cante.  Its creative dynamism has been, in this respect, exemplary.We came to this fortress of flamenco twice after our first reconaissance visit.  Our purpose was to select those examples that could best represent flamenco’s two branches — the professional and the more-or-less anonymous.

For that purpose we were counting on Fernanda and Bernarda de Utrera, cantaoras who are well-known outside of the local area;  on Miguel el de las Angustias, a butcher by trade and quite removed from professionalism; and el Perrate, an itinerant laborer.  After much coming and going, we accomplished the first meeting in a mill outside of Utrera.  We were in the middle of deep olive orchards, exuberant orange groves and the endless pastures.  There was an unspoken ceremonial atmosphere in this mill which had been converted into an improvised and unexpected stage, thanks to the warm disposition and flamenco aficion of its owner.  The preparation for the fiesta was rather difficult, and it was already early morning when the first signs of real cante were heard.  Manuel el de Angustias and El Perrate were with us.Manuel is a middle-aged Gypsy, dark-skinned, neat and well-integrated into the society of Utrera in spite of conserving his racial purity.  He lives freely and sings only for his friends.  He is one of the organizers of the so-called “Potaje”, a type of annual celebration, like a ritual examination, where the best — and hardest to find — group of local cantaores gather.  The long series of soleares that Manuel el de Angustias sang unexpectedly served to link the styles of Alcalá and Triana, though unmodified by the local colorings.  He did not know, of course, how to define the boundaries in the succession of these songs.  One might even say that it’s impossible to draw clear boundaries — though one could differentiate the styles in terms of their respective essential profiles — between the soleares of Triana and Jerez, Cadiz and Utrera, Lebrija and Alcala.  In the first place, we are not even sure which were the first primitive soleares of Triana.  Manuel thinks that each Gypsy sings what he heard in his own circles, and that if the cante carries truth within itself, nothing else matters.  It’s possible that by the middle of the last century, due

to the competition and the creative stimulus generated by the cafés cantantes, an intertwining or blending was produced in the diverse styles of soleares that were then known.  The variants of Jerez, Triana, Utrera, and Alcalá must have influenced one another through the mouths of their interpreters, who may have mixed some of their most characteristic attributes.  Today we know, for example, which were the soleares of la Serneta — bound to Triana because that’s where this great singer lived — and which were those of Joaquín el de la Paula, from Alcala.  We know this in the same way that we recognize the siguiriyas of Diego el Marrurro — from Jerez, like the singer himself — or those of Enrique el Mellizo, from Cadiz.  Regarding the many branches of these songs, perhaps it is proper to speak of personal styles rather than “local” styles.  Each cantaor must have created a form based on an original nucleus-form of flamenco.  It’s clear that when these were created they had to first be reduced to a basic modality, and later divided and subdivided according to the virtue of the versions expressed by any given interpreter.El Perrate de Utrera is a worthy exponent of the local cantes.  In his examples of soleares there are no specific distinctions, but in them one can hear the faithfully reproduced aire of a style that has not yet been deformed by public adaptations.  El Perrate is a Gypsy with legitimate flamenco credentials.  His grandfather was a poor but great cantaor who was not known to many, and El Perrate is married to a daughter of Manuel Torre.  His sister – La Perrata, mother of Juan el Lebrijano — is a very interesting singer from Lebrija.  These are the only things that seem to matter to him as we ask him about his views on flamenco.  He has grown up in this atmosphere; he sings because he knows how to sing.  When a man is missing that which is most necessary, the cante becomes an intimate form of expressing that necessity.  It is like the treacherous and evasive old saying, “cantando la pena, la pena se olvida” (“In singing of suffering, the suffering is forgotten”).Without knowing how to explain it, El Perrate makes us understand that flamenco was born when the Gypsy was trying to free himself from the anguish of his difficult tasks and hurdles, and his long experience of injustice.  Flamenco has never been a work song; rather it has been an anguished means of outward expression, springing up from the harshly punished heart of the race.  El Perrate seems to intuit that if flamenco did not exist, the Gypsies would have to invent something similar to let loose that knot of human unease that boils inside them.  Perhaps for this it was born.

We again returned to Utrera, for an arranged meeting with Fernanda and Bernarda, professionals whose participation we considered indispensable for the archive.  Fernanda is one of the purest and most qualified contemporary artists in the cante por soleares.  Her sister Bernarda

is a cantaora in a lighter flamenco vein, but here her cantes “por fiestas” and her bulerias with the flavor of Utrera were also perfect examples of compás and expressive emotion.  Both have performed outside of Spain, and they have been able to buy a house with their savings.  Of their travels they retain only the diffuse and picturesque memories common to all Gypsies who have traveled abroad — that is, the deformed and rudimentary notion of a world seen with an inborn capacity for understanding and assimilating it.  Fernanda and Bernarda have attained, in the meantime, what they wanted most: their own house in their own pueblo.  It is moving to see these two Gypsies, who only recently left their poor family circles, now showing with clear and overflowing pride the secure, legal evidence of their property.  The distance between the original style of life in which flamenco developed and its latest conquests are radical also from a material point of view.  It is understandable, and desirable, that this has happened.Fernanda and Bernarda were waiting for us in their house, where they had organized a small party.  They were going to Paris the next day.  We arrived at midnight, after picking up the guitarist Eduardo de la Malena in Sevilla.  The whole family had gathered, waiting for us: the elderly mother (who recently died); an aunt, María Peña, who sang without a guitar and without power some old cantiñas of Rosario la del Colorao, half jota gaditana (jota de Cadiz) and half soleá bailable(danceable solea); and an abundant group of discrete relatives and annoying “animadores profesionales“, or professional enthusiasts.  The party, slow at first, soon produced that unforeseeable, intertwined magic that marks an intimate Gypsy gathering.  We had thought that the simple act of installing the recording equipment might have disturbed that atmosphere which was so appropriate.  Indeed, some people did seem a bit bothered by the activities of the sound technician who was trying to set up the recording apparatus in a back room of the house — perhaps he seemed suspicious to them.Fernanda has inherited from her elders all of the primitive purity of flamenco.  Her soleares are truly unsurpassable.  No one in our time has so admirably reworked and enriched the shining local tradition as Fernanda has.  The old styles of Utrera — mixed, at times, with those of Alcalá and Triana – blend admirably in Fernanda’s noble, sobbing and profound expression.  We believe that more than a century ago, her family must have produced one of those characteristic Gypsy focal points where flamenco was shaped by its communicative formulas into that which we know today.  Fernanda and Bernarda – grandchildren of El Pinini — speak of the cante “de los suyos” (of their own people), of the gatherings in which the Gypsy girls of Utrera have participated, of the almost religious encounters with great cantaores who were still alive.  Fernanda captures with a masterful “cultura de la sangre“ (“culture of the blood”) the tragic and rich root of that legacy, while Bernarda can generate the most authentic “festera” outpouring.  In one way or another, all human feeling and artistic

temperament of local flamenco history are powerfully integrated in the expressive fervor of these two optimal cantaoras.Fernanda and Bernarda’s mother loved to offer information about flamenco to her daughters.  She alluded with intense emotion to Merced la Serneta and to Jauniquí — born respectively in Jerez and Lebrija, but who lived and forged their flamenco styles in Utrera; to el Pinini and to Rosario la del Colorao; to the cantaores of “the household”, who disdained and rejected celebrity; and to the ostentatious Gypsy rituals of the end of the last century.  Uncle Jauniquí lived in a shack, far from the pueblos, like a hermit.  Those were very different times, when the inveterate poverty of the flamenco creators could still be wielded with deliberate dignity against the false, tinseled promise of fame.  “You now see,” said this old and agreeable Gypsy woman, ”those who are starting to listen to the radio.  And later, it is as if they are bored when they sing.  To sing the truth, it is necessary to live that truth beforehand.”

And she was right.  Her opinion is closely linked to the already-mentioned essential difference between a cantaor who narrates his own life and another who limits himself to to repeating themes and concepts foreign to his experience.  We insist that the creator of the cante is one thing and the transmitter of it is another.  And that has nothing to do with the fact that today’s cante may be stylistically better than ever, despite its having become distanced from its social nurturing so that it runs the risk of changing into a falsified product that is strictly for exportation and sale.End of Part 4 — thanks to Brad Blanchard for his earlier translation, (and Paco Sevilla and Juana de Alva of Jaleo, where it ran in 1981).Here’s the latest installment in J.M. Caballero Bonald’s account of making the Archivo del Cante Flamenco record, issued in 1968.  My translation uses Brad Blanchard’s 1981 translation as a referee…PART V – JEREZ DE LA FRONTERA

Jerez was — along with Triana — the most fertile and decisive founding nucleus of flamenco.  The proof of its importance is found by simply enumerating the city’s great cantaores.  Since Tío Luís el de la Juliana – who lived in the late 1700′s, and whose name is the first known in the history of the cante — the list of renowned Jerez artists includes Manuel Molina, Merced la Serneta, Paco la Luz, Salvaorillo, El Loco Mateo, Deigo el Marrurro, Carito, Joaquín La Cherna, María La Jaca, El Chato, Manuel Torre, Antonio Frijones, El Puli, Antonio Chacón, Tío José de Paula, Juan Junquera, El Gloria, La Pompi, Juanito Mojama, Tía Anica la Piriñaca, etc.  All of them represent to perfection the most fertile, creative contributions in the realm of cante since the middle of the last century.

Two principal barrios, Santiago and San Miguel, were until quite recently the sites of frequent family fiestas and spontaneous gatherings in the taverns, where one could still hear the anonymous, fervent brilliance of a cante performed virtually by instinct alone, modestly and truthfully taken from the ineradicable memory of the people.  Today, as in many other places, these sudden improvisations on the streets have almost completely disappeared.  It is inevitable.  The same changes of vital perspectives have altered the tastes and the aficiones of the people, displacing the would-be cultivators of the cante from their restricted narrative horizons.  The majority of the new artists have a very inaccurate idea of the embryonic fundamdentals of the canteand of its historic reason for being.  Of course, it is not necessary for artists to know this, and it may be unfair to demand that they do.  But the present widespread diffusion of flamence has in many cases confused the reasoning and the values of today’s artists.For years, we’ve heard about an authentic case of conservation of the old styles of cante and of the special way of life of the great cantaores of the first public-performance era of flamenco.  We’re referring to Tía Anica la Piriñaca.  This exemplary Gypsy woman [translator's note from BZ: La Pirinaca was evidently not Gypsy -- or not completely Gypsy -- by birth, though she spent her life in the Gypsy world of Jerez], now almost eighty, has always been a kind of walking carrier of the best and purest essence of the cante.  She has never appeared outside of a small circle of aficionados.  We’ve seen her many times in the streets of Jerez, in some dingy tavern, practically begging for a few coins in exchange for an improvised version of soleares or bulerias.  Tía Anica la Piriñaca defines, beyond a doubt, the truest survival of the old social and stylistic context of the cante.  She learned from her fellow Jerezanos – from Manuel Torre, from Antonio Frijones, from Tío José de Paula — until she became a prodigious cantaora with vast knowledge of virtually forgotten styles.  She could have been an unsurpassable source of learning; rarely has she considered herself to be what she really is — an unknown yet prodigious example of human truth, and of the dramatic expressiveness of the cante.Tía Anica la Pirñaca lives in the Jerez barrio of Santiago, close to the gardens of Tempul, in the heart of one of the most famous birthplaces of cante.  When we visited her home, we were accompanied by the man who knows the most about the history of flamenco in Jerez: Juan de la Plata, the director of the Catedra de Flamencología, an enterprising conservatory of Gypsy-Andalusian art.  A worn-out entranceway, a noisy and flower-bedecked communal patio, a small and tidy bedroom — a simple place for a poor woman.  Tía Anica la Piriñaca — Ana Soto, whose last name is the same as that of Manuel Torre — is small and rotund, a simple and vivacious old woman with a kind, smiling face.  She is dressed in black from head to toe.  We explain, as best we can, our objectives.  But she resists, with a

touching sense of humility and disenchantment, as if she viewed her art as something that had been allowed to accompany her, without her having done anything to deserve possession.  Finally, she seems to relent a bit and we agree to return for her in mid-afternoon.We wanted to take a random walk through the barrio — along streets like the Calle Nueva, Las Animas, La Sangre — perhaps the most quintessentially Gypsy redoubt in lower Andalucía.  We later approached the spreading barrio of San Miguel, less well-defined than Santiago from a flamenco standpoint, but still the site of many important episodes in the development of the art.  On the wall of one of the decaying houses — Calle Alamos, 22 — there is a plaque:  ”On the fifth of December of 1878, Manuel Soto y Loreto, the artist known as Manuel “Torre”, was born here.”  It would be strange to tell that enigmatic and brilliant guardian of the deepest and purest secrets of the cante that someday the city government, which essentially ignored him while he lived, would dedicate this fervently admiring remembrance to him.

We are completely surrounded by an air of miserable paralysis, as if abandoned by the rush of time.  We can’t help thinking of the odd connection between the popular decorations and the social demolition of some of the most authentic aspects of the cante.  Flamenco was born in places like these, surrounded by a specific physical and spiritual climate, existing precariously as part of some almost impenetrable social mannerisms, and never identifying itself with the traditions and preferences of the surrounding Andalusian culture.  Only when the cantaor was able to choose another, less deprived way of life could he also adapt the cante to these new public expectations and demands.  But the basic germ of truth in flamenco could not – and will not — ever disappear as long as just one person exists within whom it is preserved.  In this sense, Manuel Torre is a vital link with the original integrity of the cante and its most uncontaminated historical development.  No one knew as well as he how to gather the secrets of the flamenco legacy together with such deep intuition and illumination.The case of another Jerez singer of that same era, Antonio Chacón, is very illustrative in comparison to that of Torre.  Chacón followed, to a considerable extent, the path marked out by Silverio Franconetti, another non-Gypsy, by taking the cante outside of its role as a torturous expression of the feelings of a minority, and adapting it to the ever-changing level of popular, general understanding.  Silverio was a key figure in flamenco, and he deserved credit for some exceptional sylistic re-elaborations; but to what point did the hero-worship of Chacón — so conditioned by the taste of the era — disturb a most pure way of being and of singing that could not be properly subordinated to the demands of the public?

Tía Anica la Piriñaca sang for our archive in the basement of an old café in Jerez.  We recorded while it was still daylight, after slow preparation of the setting.  We’re convinced that it would be difficult on another occasion to capture such impressive examples of her martinetes,siguiriyas, soleares and bulerías.  All the human flow of passion emerges from this elderly and exceptional cantaora like a terrible flower revealing each of her burning laments.  For us, the untouchable root of flamenco is represented perfectly in each of these heart-felt and humble yet overwhelming cries, extracted from the darkest racial memory.  There are no traces of the artificial, or any ornamental deformations; it is simply the anguished recounting of the history of the Andalusian Gypsy, the pure bursting-forth of painful human experience.Tía Anica la Pirñaca doesn’t know, of course, the origins of her cante; neither has it ever mattered to her whence came that expressive fountain, or where it is going.  The cante, for her, was born in some of the Gypsy houses on Calle Nueva and Calle Cantarería.  Later the first professional venues, the cafes cantantes, appeared.  She remembers some that prospered in that area, offering certain Gypsies an escape from poverty.  But she never took part in those initial steps toward professionalism.  She preferred to keep to her own anonymous life and the happenstance of the cante.  We asked her to sing a tona.  She didn’t know what we were talking about.  Neither could she distinguish the particular variant called the debla, though she recognized that it was a type of martinete created by Tomas Pavon.  “It’s in the blood”, she insists.  “Each person sings the cantes of his pueblo in his own way.”La Piriñaca, like Juan Talega or Manolito el de María or Tomás Torre — to name a few other old singers who took part in this archive — sings as though she were revealing all of her intimate feelings in a sob, a cry of grief. She doesn’t understand how one could express in any other way that which comes from within.  She hands herself over to the cante with intuitive mouthfuls of liberation, as if opening bit by bit her muzzled spirit.  “When I’m singing like I want to, my mouth tastes of blood”, she says.  The themes of her cantes are experiences she has lived, or adapted to make her own.

What we gathered from this exemplary cantaora was the purest balance of the cante of Jerez — that is, one of the most integral survivals in the history of Gypsy-Andalusian song.  Tía Anica la Piriñaca is, in relation to the flamenco world of Jerez, what Manolito el de María is with respect to Alcalá — the last remaining voice of an era now only glimpsed through a few rare examples.  With her, this priceless memory will disappear.On our second visit to Jerez we got in touch with two other local cantaores; Juan Romero Pantoja, nicknamed “el Guapo” (Handsome), and Manuel Borrico (Donkey, Burro).  Both are Gypsies from the Barrio

Santiago, neither is a professional cantaor, and they can serve to represent, to a certain extent, the present state of the flamenco tradition in Jerez.  We found Manuel Borrico in a venta on the outskirts of town where he usually ends up at night, looking for the thankless work of singing for a possible fiesta which can provide some economic reward.  The atmosphere was depressing.  The venta was virtually empty, and Manuel Borrico was dozing at a table next to a good young guitarist, Parilla, with whom we’d already connected on our previous trip so he could accompany la Piriñaca.  This tedious and deserted night spot seemed a bit like the visible image of a chapter of flamenco that had come to an end.  The afición for the cante — seen only in certain isolated social sectors of Andalucia — has gradually been converted into a style for the masses, after being uprooted from its poor original environment and installed in the ambiguous realm of the big-city tablaos or flamenco night clubs.Manuel Borrico seems to struggle helplessly between the two extremes.  He is a cantaor of noble fiber but diminished faculties, subject at times to an expressive mode that has fallen into the routine, but which can suddenly show the inextinguishable echo of his race.  Juan Romero Pantoja belongs to a very representative Gypsy family of Jerez, one that has given some illustrious names to the song and the dance.  He sings only every now and then, though he enjoys a consistent renown as an interpreter of saetas andsiguiriyas.  We found him through Juan de la Plata, who had arranged a meeting in the patio of the Cátedra de Flamencología in the ancient Alcázar section of Jerez where Moors and Christians long vied for control of the city.  Juan Romero’s song is closely tied to the flamenco history of the Barrio de Santiago.  His saetas andmartinetes, his siguiriyas and bulerías, are like a kind of crucible in which have been melted some unmistakable and distinct elements of the cantes of Paco la Luz, Manuel Torre, Tío José de Paula, Paco la Mele, and El Gloria.  Even without a well-defined creative personality of his own, this young Gypsy is a good exponent of that way of living and singing that is closely linked to the special human and artistic traits of the barrio where he was born.End of Part 5.

Here’s part 6 of the translation of the booklet for the Archivo del Cante Flamenco.PART VI – MAIRENA DEL ALCOR

Mairena del Alcor is a small, shining pueblo surrounded by olive and orange groves.  The plaza resembles a patio with its baseboards painted pink and indigo and a central garden filled with fragrant flowers.  The name “Mairena” suggests a phonetic evocation of sea and sand [mar y arena] but in fact we are in the heart of the plains in the Andalusian basin.  Mairena del Alcor is proud to have been mentioned by Cervantes in his novel “El

Coloquio de los Perros”, as witnessed by a plaque that quotes the book: “And before daybreak I was in Mairena, which is a place four leagues from Sevilla”.It was Antonio Mairena who took us to his pueblo.  He is, expectedly, the favorite son of Mairena.  His broad renown as a singer could only have been generated in a place like this, largely inhabited by a single, extensive family and where even daily life is like a simple, communal expression.  In more populous places, one is never a great singer for the many, but rather for the relatively small nucleus of aficionados — always a minority.  But in this pueblo, Antonio Mairena is known to all as a symbol of artistic lucidity and a source of pride.  It is impressive, when one isn’t used to it, to see him cross these wide, flowered streets accompanied by the respect and admiration of everyone.  We believe that this scene is virtually unique to Mairena del Alcor.

Before arriving, we had made a special call in Dos Hermanas, just outside of Sevilla on the way to Utrera.  Juan Talega was waiting for us in a modest bar near the plaza.  Although he now lives in this agricultural zone bordering the marshes of the Guadalquivir, the cante and life of Talega are linked to Alcalá de Guadaira.  Dos Hermanas, despite its location in the geographic cradle of flamenco, really belongs to other expressive realms.  Juan Talega, now almost in his eighties, is the son of Agustín Fernández, a great but anonymous cantaor of the past century, and a nephew — as was Manolito el de María — of Joaquín el de la Paula, the unforgettable craftsman of the soleares which bear his name.  Heavily built and proud, with noble Gypsy bearing, Talega represents to perfection the so-often-mentioned but almost lost group of great cantaores who can be found in their native regions.  Juan Talega is in this sense an exceptional example.  Faithful preserver of the old styles of Alcalá and Triana, of Jerez and Utrera, he is one of the two or three greatest present-day exponents of the cante — when considered according to its truest and most rigorous historical roots.  Talega is an ultimate example of dramatic clear-sightedness and expressive wisdom.  Each of his cantes constitutes a supreme lesson in sobriety, in pathos, in the exact measuring of the compás, and in emotive tension.  No one today cvould give us more direct and precise human and artistic data than that which was offered to us by this faultless heir of the most illustrious branch of the Gypsy creators of Alcalá — that of the “houses” of the Talegas and the Paulas.  His cante is the expression of his life.  When the day comes that he can no longer sing, a whole important chapter of the history of flamenco will have been closed.Juan Talega accompanied us to Mairena del Alcor.  With us, too, was Tomás Torre, the son of Manuel, whose cantes we had already taped; the guitarist Eduardo de la Malena; and José María Velazquez, an intelligent flamenco chronicler.  We met in a kind of small club, empty at the time,

after having managed to avoid the influx of friends, aficionados and the merely curious.  Antonio Mairena had found his brother Francisco [sometimes known as Curro Mairena] — who, though hardly more than anonymous, is a good cantaor of soleares and siguiriyas, as is Manolo, the youngest of the three brothers.  We could not include either Antonio or Manolo in this archive, because of pre-existing exclusive recording contracts.  Francisco is a mature gentleman, of graceful Gypsy-Andalusian stance, very influenced by the serious and uncompromising flamenco approach of his brother Antonio.  His cantes have a great deal of spontaneous personal fervor and some glimpses of extraneous influence, but they are always true.  Francisco sings only for his friends (and only occasionally), and he especially welcomed this opportunity.The fiesta in the small club of Mairena was long and fruitful, and continued in a venta close to Alcalá de Guadaira on the way back to Sevilla.  Most of these recordings had considerable documentary interest for us, as well as an irreplaceable expressive value.  The simple fact of having gathered the cantes of Juan Talega presupposes — as with some other admirable cases of older cantaores who contributed to this project — the fertile and definitive fixing and preservation of a whole extraordinary range of flamenco creations.End of Part 6

Here is Part 7 of the booklet that accompanied the field-recorded Archivo del Cante Flamenco, released in 1968.  Incidentally, from this point on I don’t have the issues of Jaleo that carried Brad Blanchard’s 1981 translation — so there will be bunches of those bobbles, bloopers and blunders that so indelibly mark my unaided efforts.  In fact, this part begins by describing the target town as “humilde y recoleto, como agazapado en algun recodo de sus inmensas extensiones de dehesas y monocultivos”, whatever that means…PART VII – PUEBLA DE CAZALLA

Puebla de Cazalla is a humble pueblo, seemingly squatting on some bend in this immense region of pastures and crop-fields.  Rising above an ancient Roman town, the present-day hamlet really doesn’t date back much past the Eighteenth Century.  Its personality links it directly to the many schemes directed at the intractable agrarian problems of Andalucia.  It seems to be humiliated by the surrounding labyrinths that lend it a part of its borrowed richness.  Many of its inhabitants — called “moriscos“, which would seem to deserve explanation — have left.  It’s the usual story in these poor, workaday sites.  Most of them have gone to work in Germany and, more recently, they’ve gone to work on Ibiza as construction workers despite their inexperience in this field.  Francisco Moreno Galván — in our view, the person who has most intensely grasped the historical truth of the cante —

served as our guide to the social reality and the flamenco climate of this town and, later, of Morón.Puebla de Cazalla has been the cradle of some good anonymous singers.  A few years ago, Alvarez Triguero died here — the great conserver of one of the most interesting blends of flamenco with liturgical music of Byzantine origin.  We are referring to the “pregones sagrados” or sacred announcement-cries, a variant of the primitivetonás that were sung for ages (though no longer) in La Puebla’s parish church on the morning of Holy Thursday.  The “pregón” — we prefer the term “toná litúrgica” — is a song of very special expressive force, sober and solemn as few others are, and posing serious interpretive difficulties.  After Alvarez Triguero, nobody here dared to attempt it in public.  The tradition is being lost.  We were particularly interesting in finding someone who would at least attempt to recreate the noble grandeur of these dazzling “pregones“.  After much coming and going, we found a worker named Montesino, from a family of good flamenco aficionados called the “Lobos”.  Montesino has rarely sung, even in private fiestas.  He refused to agree to our pleas, while we drank in a tavern.  The “pregón“, like the saeta of la Puebla — another obvious descendant of the old d___ – demands faculties and a tonal command of exceptional strength.  Montesino didn’t think he had them, and also said that he hadn’t sung for quite a while.  Only his good will led him to record for the archive, after our friendly, good-faith explanations and reassurances.In la Puebla de Cazalla, as in many other sites, the presumptive singers of real interest are either increasingly scarce or no longer live in the pueblo.  The flamenco heritage simply runs out, or is diluted, under pressure from other necessities or attractions.  We heard about a Gypsy named Rafael, who was known as a singer of solearesand a festero — a fiesta-type singer — but he had left for Marchena, weeded out by circumstance.  The only great singer living in la Puebla — who is also one of the two or three finest representatives of the latest generation – is José Menese, whom we would record in Madrid where he has lived for two or three years.Montesino el Lobo is a humble, quiet man, thin as a vine.  He speaks of his knowledge of the “pregón” and of the saeta of la Puebla as if recalling a forgotten story that still lies dormant in certain realms of the popular memory.  He learned them as a child, although he thinks it would be useless to try and reproduce its full expressive scope.  How could he sing in the church, before the townspeople, after the death of Alvaro Triguero?  Montesino el Lobo is a faithful aficionado of flamenco, but he doesn’t really grasp some of its most basic contingencies.  He only knows the genuine local tradition of this immediate region.  He says there were four “pregones” — of Judas, of Pilate, of the Garden, and of the Angel.  We suspect that these examples of liturgical songs were actually nothing but regional versions — non-Gypsy versions — of the antique group of songs known as tonás.  Each “pregón” consists of perhaps fifty verses, and is rendered

during Holy Week, demanding  a huge effort that is compounded by the extreme difficulty of the cante.  Montesino el Lobo — a “morisco” of la Puebla and perhaps by descent as well, given the link between the Moors and the Gypsies — interpreted a fragment of the “pregón” of Pilate and a local saeta.  Despite his evident lack of experience, both examples seem to conform beautifully to the objectives of the archive.PART VIII – MORON DE LA FRONTERA

From Puebla de Cazalla to Morón de la Frontera, it’s just a few scenic kilometers over a terrible road.  Morón is a lofty and prosperous town, dominated by the Moorish castle of that name, beneath which sprout humble houses and some grand mansions.  Like Alcalá, Jerez and Utrera — and like Sevilla’s barrio de Triana — Morón is one of the indisputable cradles of the cante.  As one example, remember that around 1850 Diego Bermudez “El Tenazas” was born here — an exceptional singer of soleá [and winner of the 1922 Concurso de Cante Jondo of Granada]; and here, too, Silverio Franconetti, born in Sevilla in 1831, lived most of his life.  This singer, of enormous personality, who emigrated for a while to Argentina and who returned to his homeland bearing a new expressive register to introduce a new social dimension of the cante.  Silverio was the first to try and place flamenco within the reach of a broad public, partly freeing it from its legendary minoritory roots.  Silverio was not Gypsy, and neither was his cante: but if something was lost in its concealed racial naturalness, something else was gained in accessibility and wide diffusion.  This contribution to determining the future of the cante was Silverio’s major legacy.  The old musical survivals among Gypsy families, the hidden transmission of styles, the deep ritual of some forms of expression that rarely went beyond their racial boundaries — all became fair game, to be presented as a public spectacle.  The drama of a subjugated people was now offered, with complex moral and material implications, in a public representation. From that point, we entered the diffuse but fertile epoch of the Cafes Cantantes.  Silverio himself owned one in Sevilla, where one could see the most famous singers of the second half the the Nineteenth Century.In Morón, we were particularly interested in one singer — Luis Torres — and one guitarist — Diego el del Gastor.  Luís Torres is a middle-aged Gypsy, from a family that gave flamenco some important artists including Joselero de Morón, from whom Luís inherited both his nickname and his knowledge of the cante.  Diego del Gastor is a guitarist who is little less than legendary.  His fame has filtered into all the realms of flamenco, illuminated with a kind of halo of unique characteristics.  More than a “tocaor” (guitar player) in the normal sense, Diego is a maestro — teacher and master — of guitarists.  His melodic falsetas and variations have become celebrated.  And his creative power, linked to a tumultuous folk intuition and an evident

delicacy of obscure origin, is truly admirable.  Diego — an elderly Gypsy with the air of an elderly professor — has rarely left Morón.  He flees from professionalism, and has refused many tempting contracts.  Now he supplements his income by giving guitar classes.Though mutual friends — Francisco Moreno Galván, Fernando Quiñones, Alberto García Ulecia — we got together with Diego el del Gastor and Luís Torres “Joselero” in a tavern in Morón.  But we could not get the isolation we needed there, so we went to place near the castle where a student of Diego’s had some rooms.  The student, though American by birth, did not work on the nearby U.S. air base.  He only wanted to take guitar classes, and participate in the local goings-on with evident fervor.  It never ceases to astonish, this strange kind of impassioned dedication to flamenco that strikes some foreigners, causing them to leave their normal way of life and come to the most fertile flamenco territory.  This American apprentice guitarist, who barely knew how to speak Spanish, is but one example among many.  He identified with the truth of the cante, and the climate from which it springs.  It almost seemed that he had molded himself to fit the anarchic lifestyle of the Gypies with whom he lived.

The fiesta began late.  Diego played incessantly.  His improvisations, his gorgeous dissonances, reveal an unmistakable personality.  Nonetheless, this is not a Gypsy guitar in the sense of the emphatic bass line and clawing melodic depth usually implied by the term.  Diego’s toque, as we’ve indicated, contains an abundant dose of virtuosity; sometimes, a chord or a refined rhythmic concept lend it a certain classical flavor.  Perhaps Diego is a guitarist who joins an astonishing technique to a majestically authoritative sense of the inspired roots of flamenco — that is, he is cultured thanks to his unique folk/popular intuition.

Luís Torres Joselero interpreted, right through to dawn, a varied array of cantes: siguiriyas,soleares, tangos, cantiñas, alegrías, bulerías andalboreás.  The quality of these different interpretations was highly variable.  Sometimes, his voice got away from him, revealing a disordered storehouse of memories; at other moments, he produced cantes that were rigorously measured and incorruptibly serious.  We think that the most interesting aspect of his contribution was a few of the several soleares that he sang.  Specifically, we’re referring to those he attributed to Juan Amaya, a non-professional Gypsy singer of the beginning of the century, the father of Diego, who was a cattle trader in the Sierra de Ronda.  While these soleares incorporate a distinctive aspect, they may definitively represent what is today considered to be the purest — and lost — nucleus of the old soleares de Triana.Luís Torres is Diego’s brother-in-law.  These Gypsies from Morón, Osuna, Puebla de Cazalla and Marchena form a tightly closed, characteristic clan. 

Within it, traditions are conserved with an obvious accumulation of intensely emotional atavisms.  Luís Torres, for example, said he could not to sing the alboreas under any circumstances — a song customarily viewed by the Gypsies as prohibited outside of their intimate wedding ceremonies — claiming he didn’t know it.  We didn’t want to insist, and it was Diego himself who referred to the custom of secrecy with a dismissively joking annoyance.  This free-spirited confrontation of traditional criteria never ceased to surprise us.  The private code of behavior of the Gypsies, while apparently inflexible, somehow manages to adapt itself to the demands of the specific occasion.   Some Gypsies are proud to have overcome many superstitions or anachronistic cultural dead weights; others defend these as if dealing with a proud and solemn matter of principle.  Luís Torres finally did interpret thealboreás; at least, its most common expressive form, somewhere halfway between the buleríasand the danceable soleá.One of Luís Torres’ children, named el Andorrano, sang a series of festive bulerías as light came up over the noble hamlet of Morón.  His harsh and impersonal rendition made us suspect that the great lineage of Morón singers, defined by the shadows of Silverio and Tenazas, had been interrupted with the new generation.  El Andorrano expressed his bulerías in a way that seemed artificial and perturbed, as if adapting them to certain strains of modern rhythms.  Although these songs had no place in our archive, other impromptu festive songs performed by unexpected drop-bys might have been deemed worthy, since they perfectly represented the true and intimate way of singing that marks Gypsies who are not cantaores in the exact sense of the word.PART IX – CASTILLEJA DE LA CUESTA

In one of our many rounds of Sevilla, we approached nearby Castilleja de la Cuesta, just a few steps from Triana.  We were particularly interested in collecting any data about the flamenco scene in this luminous pueblo so near to Sevilla and, at the same time, so distant from it in terms of the history of the cante.  Castilleja resembles Dos Hermanas, and in both towns the houses sticking out of the marshes of the Guadalquivir make for a picturesque stopping-place during the religious procession known as the Romería del Rocío.  And its flamenco habits, due to the sentimental preferences of the locals, belong to the orbit of Huelva.  The proximity of Castilleja to Triana has not had the slightest influence on the making of its music.  Castilleja instead has adapted to the horsemen and the carts of the Rocío, and seems to be enveloped in anticipation of the procession’s typical sevillanas and fandangos de Huelva.And here we established contact with two young singers of the sevillanas rocieras: Rafael Ruíz and Antonio Romero; and with an old tamborine player: Rafael Jiménez, from Paterna del Campo, which is in the county.  It seemed important in creating this archive that we not suppress this particular

variety of flamenco-ized popular folksong.  The sevillanas have evolved very significantly over the years, perhaps driven by their own growing popularity.  That which was originally best viewed as a local derivation — growing in the Andalucía of Sevilla and Huelva — of the ancient seguidillas manchegas from La Mancha, kept branching out toward other modern innovations.  Today, the sevillanas rocieras seem to incorporate much of the choral song of the countryside, while lyrically they draw upon the atmosphere of the marisma, or marshlands — such as some forms of the fandango de Huelva — fitted to the tastes of the listening public.  Nowadays one often hears them sung by two singers, with complementary voices in different registers.  There can be no doubt that this characteristic alone serves to remove the sevillanas — even if their own expressive world of concerns didn’t suffice in this regard — from the pure ambience of flamenco.  Yet this is not to deny that they have worth and flavor of their own.  In their aspect as verses created to accompany the dance that bears their name — whose occasional qualifier “de palillos” or “with castanets” indicates their folkloric countryside origin, far from the realm of flamenco and especially from the influence of the Gypsy — the sevillanas perfectly define the rich repertoire of Andalucía’s popular songbook, which has allowed a certain flamenco influence and which has generated the most enthusiastic and fervent support of the general public.  For the archive, Rafael Ruíz and Antonio Romero sang several sets of sevillanas rocieras accompanied by the guitar of Antonio Maravilla and by the flute and tamborine — so reminiscent of Castille — of Rafael Jiménez.  For these young singers, flamenco has ceased to be a question of esoteric and deep manifestations of intimate expression, and has become a simple matter of using catchy melodies to renew the vitality of an Andalusian custom.PART X – ARCOS DE LA FRONTERA

Arcos de la Frontera has an unusual significance in the history of flamenco.  Its geographic situation puts it between the between the expressive intensity found in Jerez or Triana, and the rough, gruff songs of the mountain ranges of the Sierras.  In Arcos was born one of the most vital figures of flamenco, Tomás el Nitri, remembered as a paradigm of creativity.  Little is actually known of his life, though many claim to know something of his cante.  This chapter in the book of flamenco styles — those great singers whose fame has come down to us — can be very tricky and slippery.  How did the tonás and the siguiriyas of these primitive creators of flamenco really sound?  Could they really have been the same as the versions that have come down to us?  Oral transmission is, in this sense, quite confusing and sometimes it hardly offers any guarantee of credibility.  It’s quite possible that this question about the authenticity of these personal creations entails a whole series of re-elaborations and adaptations.  The styles now attributed to

singers of long ago could only have been transmitted through others who sang them in their own particular way.  But there is no way to be sure of the accuracy of these versions.  And perhaps it is not worthwhile to try and rigorously attribute to certain individuals something which belongs in it its totality to a specific group within the Gypsy-Andalusian population.  Each singer interprets the flamenco legacy in his or her own way.  Indeed, without the addition of this expressive personality, everything would turn into a mere mummified replica.  The first useful recordings — offering immediate proof — only began in the time of Manuel Torre, Chacon, Juan Breva, Tenazas and El Gloria.  Before the era of recordings, we have nothing but suppositions.