By Ervin Somogyi

Paco de Lucia, born as Francisco Sanchez Gomez, died recently. For those who don’t know who he was, he was a stellar presence in the world of modern flamenco, and of the modern guitar in general. He played with dazzling brilliance, composed new pieces and melodies, introduced new playing techniques, devised breathtaking variations on traditional rhythms, and raised the bar for anyone aspiring to give their own voice to this lovely and complex musical form. And, because he was a pioneer in many ways, he was controversial. Any time someone does any of the former, you get the latter; it’s just how things work.

I received an email from a friend, Michael Smith, that addressed this. He wrote: “I’ve heard several memorial tributes to [Paco] over the past few weeks — the gist being: “many say he revived and transformed flamenco, while others feel he besmirched a once-pure musical tradition, yadda yadda and an additional yadda.” And I found myself thinking, I wonder what Ervin thinks…”

My answer to him was [a shorter version of] the following:

Hi, Michael:

Hmmmmm. Yes indeed . . . Paco and all that. I think that they’re all correct: Paco did advance flamenco; for a long time he played it brilliantly. He also moved away from it into a form of flamenco-ized jazz. But I don’t think that he destroyed a “pure” art form; regardless of what he did or didn’t do, there are plenty of people who still play the “old” flamenco, so it’s not (yet) destroyed. The worst that can be said about Paco is that he helped to bastardize flamenco into something largely unrecognizable to traditionalists. However, as there are fewer and fewer of these around as time passes, I don’t know who there will be here twenty years from now to miss the older forms. On the other hand there are plenty of people who will tell you that Paco made significant contributions toward bringing what was formerly an ethnic music that sometimes toured into the international mainstream, and that this is a transformation that represents a bona-fide coming-of-age or coming-out party.

It is an interesting question to grapple with, largely because it occurs at the crossroads of one of the oldest discussions in the history of civilization: namely, the nature of change and transformation. I think it goes beyond the mere question of who likes the new flamenco and who doesn’t — although, for sure, there’s plenty of material to discuss at that level of the matter. If we’re talking about . . . how should I put it . . . the rupture of a tradition, then it might be useful to take a look at exactly what a tradition is. Etymologically, the word comes from the Latin “traditio”, which means a passing on, a releasing of something older to something newer, a handing over, a heritage, a continuing. Extradite, from the same root, means a bringing back. But “tradition” also signifies a giving up, as in a betrayal. In fact, tradition and betrayal have the same root. The ancients had a sense that these are children of the same mother, as it were . . . and that we can distinguish one from the other mainly through the values we project onto each.

Anyway, to give you a better idea of exactly what Paco de Lucia did or didn’t do to or for flamenco, I should give you a bit of background. Paco grew up in a family that was steeped in flamenco and he most certainly was exposed to its rhythms even while still in his mother’s womb. Those rhythms are very special, by the way: they’re rooted in ancient Arabic, Roman, Jewish, and Andalusian folk cultures and they are absolutely unique, emphatic, expressive, complex, and compelling – and Paco mastered them brilliantly. He was a recognized talent at age 14 (he played guitar like an adult of many years’ experience!) and he would go on to become a giant in the emergent flamenco world. To add some perspective to this, when I was fourteen I could just about manage to chew gum and walk in a straight line while doing so.

The “authentic” flamenco was ethnic in every sense of the word: very cultish, clannish, and restricted. These are negative words in our culture, but I’m just describing the music of an isolated and out-of-the-way population (and one that, moreover, had centuries-long history of been overrun by conquering armies). Flamenco was by gypsies, for gypsies, and about gypsies – appropriated earlier on, of course, from local forms and remade to their own rhythms. The principal thing to keep in mind, however, is that if old flamenco was clannish and culturally restricted it was at the same time decidedly bursting with life and juice.

A word about the gypsy community: the gypsies lived in villages, in the countryside, and in their own sections of whichever towns they called home – not at all different, in that regard, from today’s Oakland, California (my home base) which has its Korean section, its Chinatown, it’s Vietnamese section, its Mexican neighborhood, its upscale and gentrified (mostly Caucasian) areas, its Afro-American neighborhoods, etc. The Andalusian flamencos themselves were mostly unschooled and illiterate, and they would by modern standards have been considered to be urban principally insofar as they lived inside of buildings rather than in tents or caravans (although some did that too). Like any disadvantaged minority, the gypsies lived and survived in any way that they could: they were laborers, farmers, small tradesmen, butchers, bakers, horse-traders, fast-talkers and con-men, etc. Not a one of them went to college, got a degree, became an engineer or a doctor or a teacher, ran a successful business enterprise, had a successful military or legal or civil service career, became an artist or writer, was a city councilman or politico or a policeman or fireman or a craftsman or a manager . . . or a trained and skilled technician, or a photographer or draftsman or architect, or scientist, or anyone who was trusted with money, or had anything named after him, or was the subject of a biography.

From the point of view of the mainstream society, these were the throw-aways. (NOTE: Under dictator Franco’s repression, the gitanos were prohibited from higher education, although they had to go to regular school like everyone else – even if they didn’t stay there long enough to learn much.) Toss in a lack of social services, electricity, running water, dental care and basic sanitation and you’ve pretty much got the picture: not unlike being a poor black in the historical American South. It’s not by accident that flamenco has been called gypsy Blues. And, like the best of the original Blues, flamenco occurred in private surroundings that included friends and neighbors . . . who ENJOYED IT DEEPLY. In many ways it was a “cosa nuestra” – “our thing” – and it was difficult for non-gypsies to gain access into these circles.

I think that a large part of the POWER of traditional flamenco – the guitar parts of which were much simpler than the complexly contrapuntal and technically flashy examples one hears today – came expressly from the fact that it was personal. As I said, it was “by us, for us, and about us”, and it participated in the community life of the participants. As such, the music and the song were essential: not overcomplicated, but heartfelt and directly understood. No one could read music; it was all done by ear and by feel; and the guitar playing itself was perfectly adequate to supporting the feeling without calling attention to itself. I think this must have a lot to do with the “purity” that is spoken of (today the guitar is often The Star, which sort of messes up the balance of things). And to top it all off, flamenco would have been kept local and informal by the fact that it was almost impossible to make a living with it. Consequently, the “original” flamencos did not tour, travel, rehearse, record, or anything like that. They played for themselves because it pleased them, because those other outlets weren’t available to them, and because even if there had been there was no wider market or audience for this music.

But in the 1930s (a time of great trouble in Spain) some of the more ambitious gypsies formed groups that traveled and put on shows in other cities and countries; these travelers gave the world its first taste of flamenco, and in doing so they created a wider audience. Flamenco on tour was also, necessarily, a somewhat artificial product that was quite at variance with the GREATLY IN-THE-MOMENT nature of the “old” stuff. I mean, let’s face it: these were stage performances – an entirely new phenomenon with ticket sales, a starting time, a program of set pieces, flashy costumes, and a showy finale at the end (gasp!).

In fact, this was the whole nine yards about change, right then and there: something had been created that entertained, that gave some people a livelihood and reputation that they wouldn’t have had previously, and that was at the same time essentially a prostitution of the social function that that music had served before. Prostitution might be too harsh, actually; let’s instead say eclipsed, or outgrew, or aimed at a different target. These are better words because the new flamenco was simply NOT APPROPRIATE to the uses and purposes of the old flamenco. And I mean exactly that: the old flamenco wasn’t ever something that started at eight p.m. on Thursday the twenty-second and ended ninety minutes later.

Incidentally, the “coming out” of flamenco began at about the same time that Andres Segovia was touring the world and for the first time exposing listeners to the classical guitar and its music. Hardly anyone would know what the classical guitar and its musical possibilities are today if it hadn’t been for him – as well as the invention of nylon, which eventually became the material of choice for guitar strings, by the DuPont company in 1930. [A BRIEF BUT COOL HISTORICAL DETOUR: Nylon was in fact discovered accidentally; the DuPont people, at first, had no idea what to do with this new synthetic substance that could be stretched into very thin but very strong filaments; they tried various things (including nylon hosiery) and eventually discovered that they could market this product as fishing line. Interestingly, it was the fishermen/musicians of the seaports of Southern Spain (i.e., the flamencos) who first thought to put fishing line on their guitars: it was cheaper and lasted longer than the gut strings that had been the only option until then. So: we owe it to the flamencos – and, later, to the Augustine string company, which first popularized nylon strings through Andres Segovia’s endorsement of them – that the modern Spanish guitar has become established the extent that it has. Basically, nylon made playing the guitar affordable.]

In any event, Segovia took a germinal musical form and made it grow, very much in the same way that the first touring flamenco troupes gave their own germinal musical form wider exposure. The difference between Segovia and the flamencos is that the flamencos already had a community of adherents, while Segovia was pretty much creating a new musical form from the ground up (there really had not been any such thing as “music for the guitar” before then) and creating its adherents as he went. This was, and is, no mean accomplishment. And it speaks to how successfully Segovia steered this new music toward respectability and away from the disreputable and alcohol-lubricated informality of the guitar’s folk roots, that one can speak of their respective and respected icons as “Segovia” (formal last name) and “Paco” (casual first name; but not even that: it’s only a nickname!) without blinking an eye. It’s a phenomenon that’s right up there with Cher, Beyoncé, and Madonna.

But, getting back to Paco de Lucia: he carried the thrust to make flamenco respectable two steps further than his predecessors had. First, he made flamenco respectable by insisting that it be included in and with more “formal” musical programs (i.e., that were more in line with the musical tastes of the middle class) and that the flamenco artists be paid the same as the other performers. This was unprecedented. Yet Paco managed it because he was well enough known by then to have such clout. And second, he made flamenco international by melding it with jazz. He created Fusion Flamenco: jazzy, modern, flashy, dazzling, stylistically impeccable, etc. This is a musical form that is barely recognizable as anything resembling traditional flamenco: the old rhythms, sensibilities, and melodies are stretched out of recognition, and the guitar is now accompanied by drum (or cajón), electric bass, accordion, flute, piano, and sometimes brass instruments and an orchestra. Altogether, it’s edging the “original” flamenco into disappearance in the sense that this is more and more what people think of flamenco as being.

Aside from the new instrumentation, a main difference between traditional flamenco and stage flamenco is also captured in the fact that the latter builds up toward a flashy finale; in the traditional flamenco get-togethers the party starts with the fast and flashy stuff and builds toward the more feelingful material that is slower, deeper, and sometimes devastatingly cathartic. The most expressive forms from this deeper level of the traditional flamenco repertoire – the seguiriyas, tientos, mineras, rondeñas, tarantas and the soleares – are entirely absent from the repertoire of Fusion Flamenco, as are some of the traditional lighter repertoire (such as the sevillanas and the farruca). Just as significantly, in much of Paco’s and the new generation’s illustrious recording careers, the Song – so much at the center of the old form – is optional.

And so are the dancers that the guitarist formerly accompanied. The motions, color, and physical movement are gone. Instead, Fusion Flamenco offers the visual stasis typical of a jazz group. These are all basic changes that cannot all be Paco’s fault . . . but the result is a complex in which elements and personalities are hard to separate out.

At least, that’s my perception. I think that the tradeoff speaks to the pressures and pace of the modern world, more so than it speaks to any conscious intent to harm or abandon something that was previously useful. I think that the old flamenco has essentially served its purpose and is not viable, because the concerns and conditions of the modern world have changed and don’t support such musical uses any longer. What I mean by this latest statement is that, in general, CLOSENESS AND INTIMACY in many forms are . . . well . . . so . . . uh . . . nineteenth century; today’s world likes to embrace PRIVACY AND DISTANCE. Accordingly, the new flamenco is all kinds of things, but intimate isn’t one of them. Paco’s music is publicly, not privately, accessible. It is so on many levels. And I don’t think that it is something that is ENJOYED AS DEEPLY as the old stuff was. It is not . . . how should I say it . . . intended to be that kind of thing.

But I wouldn’t rush to condemn Paco for having done this. He did do it, of course; but he had lots of help. He had help from the other young bucks, the greater recording industry, the music biz, the media, modern society with its hunger for new entertainments, the pressures of the modern world, the lure of money and success and, not least, a world in which more and more (food, business, music, clothing, etc.) is “connected”, available on demand, and international. But, as I said, I’m inclined to believe that what is lost is a way for a few people to have ENJOYED SOMETHING DEEPLY AND AT THEIR OWN PACE. In its place is something more streamlined and packaged and sold commercially . . . that dazzles momentarily at its best . . . but that seems to have less aftertaste in satisfaction. You cannot buy authenticity in a cd, or scheduled-at-showtime form, or when you turn your mp3 player on; you get a simulacrum.

Is this a gain, or is this a loss? Oh hell, yes.

Finally, I want to point out that everything I’ve just said – and will be saying below – is a generalization: true as far as I know, but undoubtedly subject to exceptions and other interpretations.

You might remember having studied about Harry Harlow back in college.  Harlow was a Harvard psychologist who experimented with young monkeys.  He subjected them to stresses, and showed that monkeys in their cages would have a preference for a terry-cloth surrogate mother monkey instead of a cold, hard, metal one.  The monkeys obviously felt safer and more nourished by the softer of the two mother-replicas.  This was considered a breakthrough discovery.  

[EDITORIAL NOTE FOR SOME WIDER CONTEXT: I don’t know about other species of monkeys, but chimpanzees spend the first five years of their lives basically clinging to their mothers and subsisting on mother’s milk.  The first five years!!!  That kind of creature comfort is VERY important to the developmental life of chimps.  And people too.]

Harlow was severely criticized a generation late, for brutalizing his test subjects, by people who had sympathy for other-than-human mammalian life forms.  He of course had done exactly that — and in so doing irreparably ruined his young monkeys’ lives.  

But rather few people thought in these modern terms at the time.  In fact, Harlow was specifically attempting to show people that young life forms need love and nurturing connection, at a time when a good portion of the American psychological establishment — and especially followers of the Behaviorist theories of John B. Watson (1878-1958) and B.F. Skinner (1904-1990) — did not possess that concept.  

You may also have read about Mr. Watson; he was chairman of the psychology department at Johns Hopkins University.  Skinner’s own illustrious academic history includes having taught at Minnesota University; after that he was chairman of the psychology department at Indiana University; and after that he joined the teaching staff at Harvard.  

Behaviorism believes in stimuli and observable behaviors — essentially, Pavlov’s classical conditioning — but not in anything else.  Certainly not in attempts to understand thoughts, perceptions, needs, and feelings.  Indeed, it makes no allowance for emotions, introspection, the life of the mind or the soul, or anything that cannot be directly observed and measured.  According to the Behaviorists if it cannot be measured it isn’t “real”; only observable behaviors are considered “real”.  Consequently all the things that make life worth living — the life of the spirit, the mind, the soul, the imagination, sympathy, creativity, empathy, beauty, love, and the intuition — are not real and not worth our serious attention.  Neither are feelings of uncertainty, fear, anger, confusion, inspiration, attraction, revulsion, moral repugnance, admiration, respect, playfulness, and gratitude real.  It’s perfectly all right to ignore these entirely.

It’s like the mindset of the society depicted by George Orwell in 1984, the tale of a dystopian futuristic society in which all but the most basic words necessary for communication had been deleted from the language.  Entire categories of human concepts and possibilities disappeared.  The entirety of moral, ethical, emotional, and both meditative and interpersonal human thought were basically eliminated and replaced with basic pragmatic thought. Everything was reduced to the meager and superficial spectrum of: 

  “double-plus good”, 

    “plus good”, 

      “good”, 

        “ungood”, 

          “plus ungood”, and 

              “double-plus ungood”.   Can you imagine theatre, literature, poetry, fiction, biography, etc. using such words?  Or even any intimate, honest, and intelligent conversation?  Any meaningful sense of emotional thought, ethical thought, critical thought, rational thought, or even just plain old human drama will have ceased to exist.

NOTE: George Orwell was British and evidently prescient.  He also wrote Animal Farm (in 1943-44), which is a tale about a very rigid and authoritarian society in which all animals were equal but some were more equal than others.  He was actually writing about the Soviet Union back in those days; he saw it for the brutal dictatorship, cult of personality, and reign of terror that it was . . . at a time when the British intelligentsia held Stalin in high esteem.  Well, Orwell had the clearer vision.  And his timing was good: this book gained popularity because it was published just as the Cold War began and everyone began to dislike and fear the Russians.

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But we were talking about Behaviorism.  In its heyday (and specifically as regarded the rearing of young people) Behaviorism suggested a casual and businesslike relationship between mother and child that was predicated on “technologies of behavior” — precisely the rewarding of desired behaviors and giving negative reinforcement for undesirable ones — exactly as one does with laboratory rats and monkeys — instead of supporting parental attitudes and behaviors of attachment, warmth, love, kindness, moral sense, and affection.  Watson is known for having promoted the idea that picking up a crying baby and attending to its needs was a bad thing to do; the infant “needed” to be conditioned to behave like a reasonable adult.  

Skinner himself was heavily influenced by Watson, and held attitudes in opposition to those of humanistic psychology during his entire career.  Putting it in a nutshell, Skinner thought of behavior as a function of environmental histories of one’s having had reinforcing consequences (you know, what we’d call programming, conditioning, and reinforcing) and nothing more.  His thinking denied that people possessed freedom and dignity and, like Watson, he instead promoted “behavioral engineering” through which people were — and needed to be — controlled through the systematic allocation of external rewards.  Basically, Skinner didn’t see that people were any different from rats or trained seals.  No, I’m not kidding.  

EDITORIAL NOTE: Can you imagine someone being “trained” to be a cook whose food is worth seeking out?  Or to be an artist whose stuff is worth buying?  Or to think mathematically, like any of the mathematicians who come to mind?  Or to be a writer whose stuff is worth reading?  Or to be a good mother or father?  Or to be a good teacher?  Or to be a good athlete?  Or to have a good sense of humor?  I mean, you can train people to be Republicans, or good consumers of goods,  soldiers, C.E.O.s, etc. . . . but none of these are exactly creative occupations.  They’re managers of sorts, who problem-solve on the level of the things that they have been assigned to manage.  “Operant conditioning” does not recognize the world or imagination, nor the world of authentic feelings.

Both Watson and Skinner were influenced by the “operant conditioning” work of Ivan Pavlov — the man who got dogs to salivate upon hearing the sound of a bell.  More than Pavlov, however, Watson and Skinner influenced a great deal of the psychological thinking of the mid-twentieth century, and particularly as it applied to the rearing of children.  These men did incalculable harm to millions of people . . . many of whom, incidentally, are now running our institutions and our country.

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While Skinner lived out his life as a tenured professor at Harvard, Watson capped his career by taking his expertise at classical conditioning away from the pursuit of trying to control children’s development via a “scientifically approved” system of rewards and punishments, and into the world of manipulating adult behaviors — through advertising.  Watson went to work for the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, where he eventually became wealthy from persuading (i.e., classically conditioning) consumers to buy Pond’s cold cream, Maxwell House coffee, and other such products.  

As far as marketing coffee is concerned, Watson is credited with having invented the coffee break: our reason for buying and drinking lots of coffee.  Right: you drink as much coffee as you do, and Starbucks is as successful as it is, because of John Watson.  But his legacy — as well Skinner’s — also includes being responsible for untold numbers of mothers of that generation buying into being impersonal toward their infants, under the pernicious fantasy that abandoning their children emotionally is good for them; or, at least, that a child’s feelings about being abandoned are irrelevant to anything and should be dismissed.  As I said, these men did incalculable harm to millions of people.  I hope they’re in a place where they need 2,500-power sunblock.

I’m not making any of this up.  If you think I might be, please read up on Watson, Skinner, and Behaviorism – if only on Wikipedia.  But getting back to Harry Harlow, this is a lot of what he was trying to offset, disprove, and counteract in his work.  Parenthetically, from what I’ve read, both Watson and Skinner had shitty childhoods that featured quite a bit of abandonment.  Neither one of them ever examined their own emotional roots, but instead simply ran with how they themselves had been conditioned . . . aided by the boost that they received from being respected and prominent academicians — and, in Watson’s case, a successful businessman.  Talk about reward and reinforcement!!!  It brings to mind former vice-president Dick Cheney’s habit of ONLY listening to Fox news and forbidding liberal journalists from joining his entourages.  I mean, who needs to listen to both sides of a question, right?  

Finally, Harlow wasn’t exactly a paragon of sensitivity either; from what I’ve read, he was a gruff, abusive, and extraordinarily unpleasant person to be around.  Go figure.  It seems to me that, given the dominant modes of thought about parenting that were universally acted out in those generations, no one was brought up feeling appreciated as though they were valuable by themselves (I know that my own parents weren’t brought up like that . . . and because of that neither was I).  For anyone interested in an account of society’s parenting styles of those generations — and of how Skinner, Watson, and Harlow were undoubtedly parented — sit down and read For Your Own Good,  The Drama of the Gifted Child,  and/or Thou Shalt Not Be Aware  by psychoanalyst Alice Miller.

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More later.

I’ve been writing about the pivotal role Paco de Lucia had in the development of modern flamenco. In his defense, I don’t want to leave him as a two-dimensional person whose main contribution was to have a huge impact on flamenco – which is, furthermore, if you’ll pardon my saying so, a musical form that most audiences have no real understanding of; they cannot; it is literally foreign to them – fully as much as Ulan Bator and Beijing are foreign to us even though we may have seen a PBS travelogue about them and spent a week or two in each. Anyway, I’d like to take a minute to fill in some of the blanks here.

Paco was, in a sound-byte, simply without equal. He played the guitar with more verve and impeccable technique than anyone else ever had before, and I don’t think he has an equal among his contemporaries. He did make significant contributions toward bringing flamenco out of its provincial closet and onto the world stage, from where it has won many admirers and adherents the from all around the globe. He did this, as I’ve mentioned, through his introduction of new rhythms and melodies, inventive syncopation and counterpoint, his willingness to allow his flamenco to absorb and express other musical influences, and of course his flawless technique. In the process, I think Paco — and the entire flamenco music/ recording/film/touring culture that was with him and behind him — did change something essential about flamenco that is forever lost. What is gained in its stead is a new sensibility, a new sound and look that have value within a different context, and ever so much more commercial clout. To me, personally, the loss of something authentic and unique outweighs the gain of yet one more thing that is zippy and exciting and commercially viable. However, I say again: I think that flamenco’s birth pains and transformation into something other than what it started out as were inevitable the moment anyone started to play for paying audiences rather than for friends and family.

As it happens, in Paco’s case, it is important to note that those audiences pressured him to dazzle them with his technique and to stop wasting his time in accompaniment of song. I quote from D.E. Pohren’s book Paco de Lucia and Family: The Master Plan (ISBN: 0-933224-62-1, pp. 70-71): “Accompanying was not destined to be Paco’s role in flamenco. Even when he still wanted to participate in the festivals as an accompanist, the public would not permit it, for Paco had grown too big for an accompanying role. As I have written elsewhere, the last time I saw Paco accompany, he was doing a beautiful job bringing out the best in the singer Fosforito when the audience began getting impatient; the public at first timidly began suggesting (out loud) that Paco play something spectacular, then soon began demanding it in a most raucous manner, drowning out both Fosforito and Paco. So Paco had to open up with an impossible picado, some far-out chording, some complex counterpoint, all of which drove the audience wild with approbation and killed beyond repair the inspiration of Fosforito’s cante. Paco was hopelessly embarrassed, Fosforito managed a thin smile, and the insensitive masses thought it was all great.”

Speaking of the song and the singing, it was as I mentioned above CENTRAL to the old flamenco – whose gatherings were, essentially, singand-tap-and-clap-and-cheer-alongs. Everyone knew the songs, everyone knew the compas (the rhythms) and everyone joined in the revelry. And it was that ACTIVE PARTICIPATION that made it an INTIMATE experience. (Let me ask you: when is the last time you got together with friends and sang and danced?) It is also important to note that authentic flamenco is sung in Calo´, the gypsy language, and not Spanish. As soon as the flamencos toured outside of Andalusia, non-gypsy audiences wouldn’t have understood the words being sung (I speak Spanish and I can’t understand half the sung words, even after years of listening to recordings). More importantly, the new audiences wouldn’t have known the songs anyway; their experience would have been every bit like your attending the opera and seeing some actors in flashy costumes sing incomprehensible things loudly in another language. I mean, isn’t that what seeing your last flamenco performance was essentially like for you??? Modern flamenco is sung in Spanish, of course, but a bit of the original sensibility has been lost and flamenco has become something else in the greater transition. The bridge for this seems to have been guitar itself, as part of the entertainmentvalue of rhythmic musical performance. Whether or not anyone can understand or be moved by the sung words, pretty much any audience could and can relate to guitar playing. As a matter of fact, this circumstance speaks to the most visible tectonic shift in flamenco: originally the guitar’s function was to accompany the singer, but in a lot of the new stagey flamenco everything is there to accompany the guitar . . . and the various instruments often take center stage and riff off each other.

Despite pressures to dazzle his audiences guitaristically Paco de Lucia actually did have a long career in being an accompanist to, and collaborator with, singer Camarón de la Isla; they were close friends for many years and they made many fine recordings of flamenco song and guitar. However, Paco experienced his own tectonic shift when Camarón died of a drug overdose some years ago. The drug use itself was an artifact of how many flamenco artists were now traveling in a modern and dangerous fast lane of a type that hadn’t existed before. The effect of this loss of a close friend on Paco was that he was pushed into a deep grief for a year, during which time he hardly touched the guitar. When he came out of it, his music was more of the modern-band-type that I mentioned eight paragraphs ago.

Let me say another thing about flamenco music itself. I’d stated at the beginning of this writing that the old flamenco was by gypsies, for gypsies, and about gypsies, and that the very best of it occurred in private surroundings that included friends and neighbors . . . who ENJOYED IT DEEPLY. I first encountered this music many years ago through recordings, which are never as compelling as a live performance; and even now I listen to recordings much more than I go to live sessions. But even so, the MUSIC itself was, from the beginning, a grabber for me. It made me happy to listen to it. I fell in love with the rhythms, the sensibility and flow of the chording, and the depth and texture of musical expression of this exotic and out-of-the-way music that, frankly, was somehow accessible. And I’m far from the only person to have had this reaction; something about flamenco had this power . . . under which spell I still listen and play guitar today (I play flamenco). When I say “live sessions” I really do mean that: that music is ALIVE. The rhythms themselves are the heartbeat that one can tap one’s foot and clap one’s hands to. I think that this must be the “purity” that people speak about and that I mentioned before. And, for me, this is what has been lost in flamenco’s modern guise: the new flamenco is complex and flashy, and even amazing, but it’s not compelling to me. It lacks emotive power. It’s lost the steady, rhythmic heartbeat. Instead, it stands outside my door and bangs on it with technique, speed, and novel introduction/juxtaposition of instrumentation – but I don’t sense that it has any real interest in entering my space and saying anything personally significant to me. I do think that a lot of it is about the recording obligations and performance careers of the artists – which, quite honestly, aren’t the reason I buy the tickets.

Since we’re speaking of change, you have probably heard the cliché about how there’s change and then there’s change. Flamenco grew out of the life conditions of its early adherents that I described earlier and it was, in fact, CONTINGENT on them – exactly as everything (including ourselves and everyone we know) are dependent on conditions and context. And these are tricky quantities: change one thing and other things change too. I’ll give you an example of what I mean: One of the most famous of all flamencos was Diego del Gastor, who lived in the town of Moron de la Frontera, and who died in 1973 of a heart attack. Diego was a giant of “authentic” flamenco who had influenced many musicians before he died, as well as a whole new generation that has come since. Diego had been having fainting spells for a while; as it turned out in retrospect these were symptoms of cardiac insufficiency, but there was no doctor available in Moron to diagnose him and possibly forestall his death (there was a nurse/midwife, but she did not have anything like the training needed to deal with cardiac problems). So, to everyone’s shock and regret, Diego died. But had there been a good doctor in town . . . or two or three or four . . . then sooner or later there would probably have been a hospital. If there had been a hospital then there would have been an ambulance. If there had been an ambulance there would have needed to be streets wide enough for that sized vehicle . . . and telephone service to call for it. If there had been streets wide enough for such vehicles there would have been more cars. If there had been more traffic there would have been traffic lights . . . and an electrical grid. If there had been traffic lights and electricity there would have been more inhabitants. If there had been more inhabitants then the town would have needed a greater economic base. With a greater economic base . . . well, you get the idea; any little thing can be significant enough to be the thin edge of the wedge, as in the aphorism about how the kingdom was lost for want of a nail. And, in the matter under discussion, as the city/town grew and life conditions changed, the flamenco gatherings – which were never, from the beginning, about anything other than life conditions – would have changed with it.

(NOTE: I mentioned, above, that Diego del Gastor was a giant of “authentic” flamenco. He was . . . but I want to put this into perspective without diminishing him or his brilliance. In reality old flamenco was not one entity with one epicenter; it was a regional mix of Cadiz-flavor flamenco, Sevilla-flavor flamenco, Ronda-flavor flamenco, Lebrija-flavor flamenco, Huelva-flavor flamenco, Jerez-flavor flamenco, Algeciras-flavor flamenco, of course Moron-flavor flamenco, and so on. I say “flavor” rather than “style” because the differences were often matters of nuance, accent, and sensibility rather than something more categorical. Nonetheless, Moron-“style” flamenco got better press – at least in the English-speaking world – as you’ll get some insight into if you read and/or Google the references I cite further below.)

A PERSONAL NOTE

I wish to add that, aside from my long-term involvement in and love of flamenco, a lot of what I’ve just written is from personal experience, thinking, reading, conversations and hearsay, musings, general life experience, having been into and around flamenco since High School, and a Summer in Madrid and Granada studying flamenco. I never met Paco de Lucia and I don’t claim to know him; my most direct experience of him, aside from listening to his recordings, is to have seen him on stage, as a member of an audience. But he did manage to cast his spell over me nonetheless. Part of this spell is that, in his later photographs, he did not look happy as a person. I am guessing that this might have had something to do with the history I’ve been writing about and the pressures of the life style he lived under.

If you are interested in a fuller account of this remarkable music, I recommend that you (1) obtain a copy of D.E. Pohen’s The Art of Flamenco and (2) Google Steve Kahn’s The Flamenco Project, as well as Carl Nagin’s article on “The Ballad of Gypsy Davy”. And if any of you reading this should want to listen to re-releases of old flamenco recordings in cd form, you should know that the originals were recorded on 78 rpm records, which all had a short running time. The performers consequently had been instructed to speed the music and singing up so that the recording could be squeezed into the time allotment.

AN EPILOGUE TOUCHING ON PACO AND FLAMENCO

A week or so after I sent my friend Michael my response about Paco’s impact on flamenco, he responded with the following email:

“As you probably know, the UN has included flamenco in its “Proclamation of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.” When I first read about this “proclamation” of the “intangible,” I thought it was hilarious. I still think that, but now it occurs to me that, in its own bumbling, bureaucratic way, the UN was trying to articulate its version of your argument.

“From the get-go, the UN was all about preserving cultural expression. That, I guess, is what UNESCO was supposed to do. But, maybe a little like our own National Endowment for the Arts, UNESCO seemed to prefer the fossil over the facile – praising the opera house while ignoring the street musicians just outside.

“But in 2001, word got out that a commercial venture was planning to “develop” the celebrated Jemaa’ el-Fnaa Square in Marrakesh. (That’s the place that showed up in every other movie for decades, from “Around the World in Eighty Days” to Indiana Jones.) Everyone knew the Square was the center of the region’s cultural life – but it was constantly changing. Juicevendors, storytellers, puppeteers, singers, drummers, musicians, snakecharmers, dancers, prancers, vixens, etc.

“When advocates for saving the Square approached the UN for support, everyone realized they needed a whole new category. Even the usual catchall phrase – “oral tradition” – didn’t cover it. (What about all of those musicians who played without anything written down, just . . . fully present with their instruments and ENJOYING IT DEEPLY?)

“Someone came up with the phrase “oral and intangible heritage” to describe all of the other ways in which people give meaning and texture and depth to their lives, without necessarily involving a commodity. So Jemaa’ el-Fnaa Square was the inspiration for the first “Proclamation of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity” in November 2001. By 2009, one hundred sixty-six “elements” were designated as oral/ intangible masterpieces.

“And one of them was flamenco.

“I wonder if there’s some sort of cultural Heisenberg principle at work here: there may be things we can’t observe without changing them. And the harder we try to locate them, the less we know about where they’re headed. Just naming them whisks them beyond our reach. Oral . . . intangible . . .”

Amen to that.