It’s not easy to find La Carboneria. It’s on a side street in Seville’s old district, one of those Spanish stone streets so narrow that even tiny European cars can barely squeeze through. And the only sign is a black painting on a pale blue wall, the club’s name in small letters below a moon and two palm trees.
It’s called La Carboneria because it was once the neighborhood’s coal house, but now the small red door opens onto a sloping room decorated with antiques which leads to a second, even larger room with a small wooden riser along the far wall facing long banquet tables and benches. On that stage one can find the heart of flamenco. Here Spain’s signature music stripped down to its essentials: one guitarist, one singer and one dancer.
I was allegedly on vacation with my wife, but a true music lover can’t help but sniff around for local performers when one travels. I had been warned to avoid the tablaos, the over-priced tourist traps. So I had gone to Seville’s Museo Baile Flamenco, and had been directed to La Carboneria. There I found a powerful living tradition, a scene of all-acoustic performers improvising new twists on a long history that they knew well. This wasn’t the picaresque notion of flamenco as the music of carefree romance; this was a music so torn by desire and so wounded by denial that it was almost frightening.
On May 31 at La Carboneria, Antonio Heredia, a beefy young man in a black T-shirt, sat cross-legged on a small wooden chair, his nylon-string guitar, the tocaore, resting on his right thigh. He began playing flamenco’s distinctive 12/4 patterns, measures that can be subdivided into two groups of three notes followed by three groups of two notes or similar combinations, to create a sense of duplet time vying with triplet time. Heredia alternated chords and single-note runs, while the one-named singer Farina and the one-named dancer Katy clapped out the push-and-pull rhythms from their chairs.
Farina, an older man with a salt-and-pepper beard and curly hair, added his baritone melody to the guitar’s harmony and the hand claps’ percussion. The tune was simple, not unlike an American blues, but it hinted at some grand desire and some equally powerful frustration. The singer in the unbuttoned cuffs and blue jeans kept repeating the basic melody but with slight variation in phrasing each time. These improvisations forced the guitarist to respond with variations of his own, to which the singer had to answer.
Till I was sitting right by the stage, studying Heredia and Farina as they glanced at each other for cues, I had never realized how improvisational flamenco was. This wasn’t jazz improvisation with substitute chords and an implied pulse; this was more like blues or string-band improvisation where the subtle displacement of a note, where the rushing or holding back of a phrase can make all the difference. Back and forth, the guitarist and singer went, building the tension till Katy suddenly stood up from her chair and took three steps to the front of the stage.
Blonde, long and lanky in a dark red dress ending in ruffles at the floor, Katy began to reinforce the hand-clap beats with her hard, wooden heels. As Heredia and Farina egged her on, she began to writhe, twist and spin, all the while stomping out the rhythm. As the energy on stage reached a crescendo, Farina shouted the affirmation, “Ole,” with the accent on the first syllable, so the word sounded as much like “Allah” as the traditional bullfight cry.
This was, after all, Andalusia, where even the Inquisition had not been able to stamp out the intermixture of Muslim, Christian and Jewish cultures, and all three had gone into flamenco. There’s much debate about the music’s origins, and the most obvious source is the Roma (aka Gitano or Gypsy) culture that migrated out of Asia into Spain in the 15th century. But the Islamic influence is obvious in Farina’s guttural quartertones and in the oud-like phrasing of Heredia’s guitar.
My wife and I had gotten to La Carboneria early, essential if you want an unobstructed, front-row view of the dancer’s feet. We ordered a pitcher of sangria, a bowl of olives and wax-paper sheets spread with sliced tomatoes, sliced salami and manchego cheese. There were a lot of other foreigners in the room, but nothing was watered down for them. There was no English, no amplification, no backdrop, no props, no introductions, just three performers doing what flamenco artists have done for centuries. There are three different performers at the club each night, drawn from Seville’s lively scene; we returned the next night and the singer, guitarist and dancer were good but not as good as Heredia, Farina and Katy.
The very best of that local scene gets to perform at the Museo Baile Flamenco. This non-profit arts organization is housed in an old urban mansion less than 10 blocks from La Carboneria, and the building’s original courtyard has now been glassed over with a permanent stage built against one row of columns and arches. The ticket price ($25) is hefty for the 90-minute show, but there’s none of the show-biz flash and gimmickry one finds at the even more expensive tablaos.
Of the six flamenco shows we saw in Spain, the first night at La Carboneria was the most intimate and emotional and the night at the Museo was the astonishing aesthetically. As we waited to go in, I struck up a conversation with a local flamenquista who possessed a little English—more than almost anyone else in the scene had—and he said, “If you don’t love this dancer, you need to see a doctor.”
That dancer, Zaira Santos, wore a black blouse and white shawl; her pink scarf, pink skirt and long pink train were all spotted with big, black polka dots. She joined the male dancer, el bailaor, and the female singer, la cantaor, in clapping out the complicated rhythms suggested by the male guitarist. There was none of the tentative feeling around that one witnessed at some flamenco performances; all four musicians attacked the songs with confidence. There was improvisation here too, but never at any cost to the tremendous momentum.
No one seemed more assured than Santos, who kicked the wooden stage with a rat-a-tat-tat of heels like automatic-weapon fire and who threw her body across the stage as if racked by a violent hunger. She never broke her steady gaze upon the audience, looking as if she might eat us alive—in either the sexual or predatory sense of that phrase. When I walked out, I told the flamenquista, “I don’t need a doctor.”
When I travel abroad, one of my favorite pastimes is to spend several hours at a decent record store with at least one knowledgeable clerk who knows a little English. It’s getting harder and harder to do, now that such stores are disappearing as rapidly overseas as they are here at home, but in Seville, the FNAC department store across from the cathedral had an extensive CD collection and two bearded, hipster clerks. They also had these little gray machines that could scan the UPC barcode on a sealed CD and then play the entire contents of the CD through the attached earphones.
I found a young Italian woman hovering over the flamenco shelves. This wasn’t a surprise, because flamenco attracts as many foreign fans and performers as jazz or blues. At the end of the Museo show, a Japanese woman, Santos’ student, climbed up on stage to dance a flamenco in her street clothes—and a Japanese movie crew filmed her every move. I took a stack of the Roman woman’s recommendations over to the listening dock and was struck by the virtuosity of guitarist Vicente Amigo and by the inventiveness of the flamenco-rock singer Kiko Veneno. I bought the former’s breakthrough recording, Vivencias Imaginadas, and the latter’s Esta Muy Bien Eso del Carino, which included a flamenco arrangement of Bob Dylan’s “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again.”
I’ve learned that when you ask foreign record clerks for suggestions, you have to be very clear about what you’re looking for, or they’ll steer you to the most obvious pop hits. You have to say, “Who is the Spanish Bob Dylan?” “Who is the Spanish Bruce Springsteen?” “Who is the Spanish Fairport Convention?” Once I made myself clear, I listened to a new stack and ended up buying records by the garage-rock veterans Los Hombres, by the Leonard Cohen-like Joaquin Sabina, by the Tom Petty-ish Pereza, by the Gaslight Anthem-like Melendi and by the Soft Boys-like Los Planetas. For the most part I was able to avoid the very high Eurozone prices for new CDs by buying budget-priced compilations and reissues.
We took the train from Seville to Granada, and the next night I bought tickets for the midnight show at Le Chien Andalou, which hosts two shows every night. I walked down the stairs into the basement club, a long, narrow room with whitewashed bricks forming the barrel vault just above our heads. This was even more intimate than La Carboneria, though the format was the same: a male guitarist, male singer and female dancer sitting in chairs against the back wall. Again I scored front-row seats to see the dancer’s feet.
These three performers were better than those at our second night at La Carboneria but not as good as the first night. The most interesting of the three was the vocalist El Rudi, who wasn’t much of a clapper but who seemed more interested in melody than the other singers we heard, who preferred to emphasize rhythm and timbre. And unlike other flamenco singers who seem to be in an emotional crisis at all times, El Rudi was able to sound conversational at times, so when his self-control did crumble, his anguish had more impact.
I asked the Spanish newlyweds sitting next to me what the lyrics meant. “He’s saying, ‘I love you and I’d be with you if I weren’t already married,’” the woman said. On the next song she added, “Now he’s saying, ‘Call the doctor, because I’m sick with love.’” That’s all I needed to know, because El Rudi’s big, handsome voice seemed to be pushing an elephant of desire through a keyhole of hope.
The next day we flew from Granada to Barcelona and began our exploration of the Catalan capital’s treasures of Modernista architecture (the local variation on the late-19th century, early-20th century international art nouveau movement). Antoni Gaudi is the most famous of those architects—justifiably so—but nearly as gifted were Josep Puig i Cadafalch and Lluis Domenech i Montaner. It was the latter who designed the Palau de la Musica Catalana, a concert hall masquerading as a pleasure palace—or perhaps as a hallucinatory cathedral.
In any case, our excuse to get inside and gape at the stained-glass windows and skylight, the glass-jar balustrades, the mosaic-tiled pillars and tilted chandeliers was a show called Gran Gala Flamenco. The décor inside was so spectacular that it almost didn’t matter if the show was any good. The concert didn’t get off to a good start as it began with tightly scripted and stiffly choreographed numbers that impress tourists and dismay true flamenquistas. There were two male guitarists, two male singers, one female singer, one male percussionist, one male dancer and two female dancers.
After a few bloated numbers, however, the show began to give each guitarist, singer and dancer a solo spot where they could improvise a bit. That’s when you realized just how talented the cast was—especially Eli Ayala, a female dancer in a black dress with red flowers. Her heel clicks were a blur of 16th notes, and she tossed around the long train of her dress as if it were a weapon.
We should have saved the first flamenco show we saw in Spain for last, since it pointed to the future. One of the greatest challenges in any genre of music is to take a longstanding tradition and do something new with it without losing a connection to the past. In Madrid, at Clamores, a basement jazz club, the El Amir Flamenco Sextet hit that sweet spot between continuity and innovation.
El Amir (aka John Haddad) is a guitarist (who also plays the oud), so he emphasizes the instrumental aspect of flamenco over the singing and dancing. He had a female vocalist and male dancer on stage with him, but they played secondary, often percussive roles to the core instrumental quartet of acoustic guitar, violin, electric bass and drums. The push-and-pull tension in flamenco gave these musicians plenty to improvise upon, and they sometimes used a jazz vocabulary to do so. The result was a more varied, more sophisticated show than the traditional flamenco shows, though not necessarily as moving.
El Amir’s new album, 9 Guitarras, relies on the gimmick of playing each of the nine tunes on a different nylon-string guitar, each with its own personality. The supporting cast is also different on each track, though the violinist, bassist and drummer from the Clamores show do make appearances. What’s most impressive are the strong melodic themes of El Amir’s compositions and the balance of electric and acoustic instruments that provides some muscle to the arrangements but still allows the nylon strings to cut through.
Another newly released album is The Rough Guide to Flamenco, which unfortunately has the exact same title as a 2007 album with entirely different selections, released by the same label, Rough Guides/World Music. The earlier recording is stronger, showcasing such powerful singers as El Camaron de la Isla, La Macanita and Estrella Morente. The 2013 disc is more interested in the different fusions flamenco is creating with other genres. Lenacy does it with hip-hop, Son de la Frontera with Caribbean music, Yasmin Levy with Sephardic Jewish music, Jorge Pardo with American jazz, and Martiro with Latin American music. The new album comes with a free bonus disc of nine songs from Al Toque, a flamenco band based in Buenos Aires.
Also new is La Noche Mas Larga, the latest album from Buika, a singer born and raised in Spain by West African parents, though she moved to Miami in 2011. Flamenco is only part of her music, but when she brings that foundation of her sound from the background into the foreground, as on “La Nave del Olvido” or “No lo Se” (featuring guest guitarist Pat Metheny), the flamenco explains the low-register, push-and-pull, aching quality of her dark, husky voice. When she applies her astonishing instrument to songs recorded by Billie Holiday (“Don’t Explain”), Abbey Lincoln (“Throw It Away”) and Nina Simone (“Ne Me Quitte Pas”), she makes explicit the implied connection between American blues and flamenco, the Spanish blues.