A quite interesting phenomenon is taking place in the Spanish music scene: there is a vindication of the roots. Of the flamenco If we attend to the proposals of C. tangana, Rosalía, Guitarricadelafuente, Silvia Perez Cruz, Derby Motorcycles Burrito Kachimba, Caliphate ¾,The Gardener, Fahmi Alqhai, Now Malikian, Maria Jose Llergo, My brother and I, dani llamas, the crumbs, Maria Pelae, fuel fandango, the small square or even, long before, The planets, we see how almost massively different genres resort to taking elements of jondo: indie, electronic, trap, rock, pop… This upward trend, which generates the ramification of styles and the differentiation of Spanish sound abroad, has an old history. The formulas are not copied, but attributes are incorporated: clapping, rhythms, bars, complaints, verses… And history, as usual, repeats itself.
Much has been written about the influence that other cultures have had on the origin and development of flamenco up to the present day; It is, without going any further, in the first definition that we could read on Wikipedia. However, the impact of flamenco, as well as Andalusian culture, on other scenes has not yet been thoroughly studied. Camarón, Lola Flores or El Torta are today trap icons. This point has not been reached quickly. And everything turns, basically, to a somewhat hackneyed sentence already attributed to Picasso: “Bad artists imitate, geniuses steal.”
During the Romance A similar trend took place, which is why Bizet set the characters in ‘Carmen’ to walk through the Santa Cruz neighborhood. Hence, also so much painting, literature and music impressed by the exoticism of the South during the 19th century.
Another precedent would be music nationalism starring Manuel de Falla, Isaac Albéniz, especially through ‘Iberia’, Joaquín Turina, Granados and many other composers between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. In Turina’s ‘Procession of the Virgin’, for example, we hear the melody of the garrotín. But it is that from abroad, in addition, Debussy he was composing ‘La puerta del vino’ while corresponding with Falla. RavelEnthusiastic with the rhythm of the soleá and other styles, with the Phrygian mode of Andalusian popular music, he produced pieces like ‘Alborada del gracios’ or the popular bolero.
Just as the flamencos were looking towards America, to the Cuban son, the bosanova, jazz…, they were being looked at from other vertices during the past century. late 50’s Miles Davis He left a performance of singing, dancing and guitar in Barcelona half crazy and went straight to a record store to buy one of the Hispavox anthologies. Later I created ‘Flamenco sketches’, which closes the mythical ‘Kind of blue’, one of the most influential jazz albums, and later his definitive ‘Sketches of Spain’, which includes ‘Saeta’ and ‘Soleá’, a piece that Grateful Dead They have covered multiple times. In other words, before flamenco came to jazz, jazz came to flamenco. And in the wake of those first steps we should cite Chick Corea, Pet Metheny and other musicians linked, in most cases, to paco de lucia.
Grace Slickvocalist of Jefferson Airplanes, confessed his predilection for this music. That’s why he recorded the strange and progressive ‘Manhole’ on his own, a hymn to freedom that he found on this peninsula that includes verses in Spanish. Hence, too, those turns in the voice that lead us to Mediterranean music and that inspired, in part, the singer of The Cranberries: Dolores O’Riordan. The melisma!
On the other hand, those decades of the 60s and 70s, rock with roots, which went down in history with the Andalusian rock label, came to do the same from homeland. Triana’s ‘Open the door’ has a seguirilla compás. But it is that the records of Smash, Silvio, Gualberto, Alameda, Imán Califato Independiente, Cai, Pata Negra or Guadalquivir could be understood as a precedent for what is happening today. The artist resorts to the past to find himself. And today’s contemporaneity, more than ever and leaving behind the sterile debate on cultural appropriation, likes polka dots, batas de colas and other attributes associated with flamenco: even the accent!