2023-11-04 15:26:58
The 27th Viernes Flamencos cycle of the Barakaldo Theater will offer its eighth and last meeting next Friday the 11th with the dancer Eva Yerbabuena showing an anthological overview of her choreographies in the large room. On that same great stage, yesterday Friday, in the seventh and penultimate performance, the monumental and also anthological album ‘Three blows’ (Lovemonk / El Volcán, 2022) was displayed, produced by Raül Refree (Rosalía, Niño de Elche, Silvia Pérez Cruz, Rocío Márquez, Josele Santiago, Las Migas…) and starring the Utrerano gypsy singer Perrate, who has poured four years of work into this deservedly renowned opus.
Perrate premiered ‘Three blows’ in Euskadi as a quartet and revised it almost completely. 11 songs were played in 71 surreptitiously decreasing minutes (from very good to good, eh?), and before the encore there was an attempt at mutiny by a spectator in row 5, who asked him to sing soleás, and at the same time Not being pleased, he began to protest: “I didn’t come to hear this, I didn’t pay for this, I’m not coming back here,” while his embarrassed companion tried to calm him down. The fact is that the Barakaldo Theater advertised this concert as ‘Three Strikes’, meaning there is no reason for complaint.
In fact, Tomás de Perrate (Utrera, Seville, 59 years old) presented his proposal like this before the fourth piece: «I am very happy to be in this country again and I come with a work based on ‘protoflamenco’, on the basics. that originated flamenco, whose birth dates back to 1850 although I like to place it in 1600. It has to do with the slavery promoted by the Catholic Monarchs (we already started) and with the encounter between slaves and gypsies in Seville. I put myself in the shoes of a stevedore who loaded sacks onto ships that came loaded with gold (especially silver, Perrate). I imagined myself as a gypsy who sang his tonás, seguiriyas and bulerías, and who also, like everyone else, adapts to what is heard around him: the folía, the jácara… And we come to sing this to you with all the honesty in the world, and with all the heart”.
Serene and dominating
Perrate began with a capital letter, atavistic to the point of being telluric, a cult from beyond the grave, serene and dominating, chewing the words with pause in his cavernous mouth. He came in a quartet, with percussion (somewhat Morantian), keyboards and the guitar of Paco de Amparo who in turn began sober, radical and jondo although he lost presence throughout the repertoire. And also Perrate, in the last third, lost tension in more popular or festive styles (bulerías, the memory of his countryman Bambino via the tango ‘La Última Curda’ by Piazzolla and the Polaco Goyeneche), and he also relaxed somewhat in the he sang knowing that he had won the audience, a quarter of the large Teatro Barakaldo room, almost 200 souls that would not have fit in the basement amphitheater.
Grave and somber Perrate began with the seguiriyas of ‘If Some Day’, and then liturgical to the point of exorcism he attacked ‘The Dark Night’, a toná by Jacinto Almadén in whose epilogue he resembled the voices that tormented Pascual Duarte before killing. “We’re going to sing by rights, gypsy style,” one of the audience asked him, Perrate replied “we’ll try,” and with the slow guitar and the spirit of yesteryear he reeled off the Sephardic romance ‘Melisenda insomne’, before explaining to us in the aforementioned speech the busilis of the album ‘Three blows’ and to reel off some more festive seguidillas (which are not seguiriyas, as he himself specified), those of ‘Cupid’s house burns’, and to present the 17th century jácara ‘There is no need to say el primor’ as “a tribute to the Basque woman, who has so many balls.”
In the encore singing ‘Three blows’ the percussionist Antonio Moreno, the singer Perrate, the guitarist Paco de Amparo and the keyboardist and bassist Pepe Fernández. Oscar Cubillo
Perrate made an exit during a jazzy and improvised Monk-style instrumental hand in hand between the percussion of Antonio Moreno and the keyboard of his nephew Pepe Fernández (who also played bass at times), and when he reappeared he reached another milestone in the folía ‘ I am madness’, solemn like Leonard Cohen. And already in the aforementioned last third he showed a high level but the party prevailed over the artistic, the cultured, and he sang with less concentration or determination: the tango ‘La Última Curda’ that he sang imagining how his friend Bambino would do it (who according to Perrate, he never covered it because he did not know this Piazzolla-Goyeneche classic), then the bulerías (also with sections in the vein of Bambino), the “chacona of blacks and gypsies” that opens the album released this Friday in Euskadi, now encore mode, after the explosion of irritation from the spectator in row 5, an a cappella song with the four in front of the stage: ‘Three blows’, a street fandango with an air of a proclamation that pulled one’s back.
#Perrate #chewing #protoflamingo #mail