Verdes Carne, Pelo Negro . . .

The Black Atlantic¹ graces the opening of Carlos Suara’s 2010 film (although just recently shown here in NYC) Flamenco, Flamenco on contemporary flamenco — not at all his first film on the music.  The camera, in the hands of cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, at times behaves with the finesse, wit and intervention of a musician itself.  Yet the film presents without commentary musical performance straight up and unadorned, with plenty of visual invention in terms of sets and lighting, shot indoors, often as if on a theatrical stage, among facades of paintings or posters recognizing, portraying and celebrating flamenco practitioners from previous centuries.  The variety of settings and camera angles is just enough to keep the visual component from turning dry or tedious, but never so much as to deemphasize the musicians or the music, an aptly complementary rapport, each frame carefully composed with painterly intensity.  The intimacy and communality of musicking could hardly be portrayed more sympathetically, this even further intensified by the comportment of the gaze to gaze participants themselves, often facing each other in semi circles, relaxed, informal, generous, convivial and totally intent.

The opening 20 minutes or so particularly emphasize flamenco’s hot coals over the more celebratory and candied with distinctive funk and spark that cadences at the penetrating saeta (passion week religious song), a cante a palo seco (“dry style” song customarily delivered a cappella),  sung by María  Bala.  Yet, even amid such exceptional guitarists and vocalists (along with pianists Dorantes and Diego  Amado in duo), dancers Sara Bara and Eva  la  Yerbabuena perpetuate the most vividly.  These masters are pushing the envelope in a way evident even to witnesses who are not all that up on the idiom or with what’s been happening in it.  A daredevil brinksmanship incorporates within a defiant virtuosity of invention as well as execution: costume, posture, timing, body language and unforgiving crossrhythms drummed against the music’s compás (time lines, or reference beats) with the feet fast edging the break at the brink of silence, a dramatic sharpness — almost more important than the sounds themselves — so important to flamenco construction.

From the patron queen of the conquistadors, Isabel the Catholic, through Franco, a component of Spain’s population has long attempted to force violently a purity that baldly contradicts the multicultural miscegenation that’s been the real human experience of the Iberian peninsula, and some there likely still pine for such improbable uniformity.  Paco de Lucia², native to Algeciras and one of the leading exponents of nuevo flamenco at least since the liberating burst of the 1980s that celebrated the end of fascism in Spain, appears later in the film with a crew, all younger generation. Nuevo flamenco unfurled the music’s cosmopolitan readiness, aware of music around the world and self aware, able to incorporate and dialogue with other musics without at all abandoning its own identity, yet another healthy instance of globalization minus the balls and chains of the hegemonic whether they be cultural, corporate or pop.  De Lucia modeled for younger musicians this generous synthesis of deep confidence, openness and willingness to experiment.

My Gumboamerican ear also happened to catch something just a little closer to home than the parallel kinships of this Andalusian music with Pan-African practices, the compás-referenced rhythmic constructions being so analogous to relating invention to clave or repeated riffs or the unapologetic way that flamenco artists can get down.  And this is to add nothing more about the Arab-Andalusian-North African family of nasal inflected vocal techniques that stretch all the way south to Senegal or the percussive guitar aesthetic that recalls not only the oud, but the Gnawan guimbri-sintir-hajhouj just across the Strait of Gibraltar from Algeciras and Tarifa.

Following some absolutely nasty tabla (or, if not, some Spanish instrument I don’t know about that can imply that sound — either way, it immediately made me think of Nirankar Khalsa, the great Chicago-LA drummer, vocalist and percussionist (including tabla) who’s lived in Madrid since ’92 and has collaborated with many flamenco and flamenco related configurations since, including his seminal contributions to Radio Tarifa) plays across a compás as the opening credits roll while the camera saunters among some painted lore of flamenco performance, the first performance setting opens with the word rumba, a term and concept that had already long traversed from Kongo to Cuba before boating its way to Barcelona or Cádiz.

Apparently, Spanish musicians couldn’t really hang with Afro-Cuban complexity, so they evolved a more “refined” (that is, refined in the way that white flour is, with all the heavier, more nutritious stuff filtered out) simplification of the patterns and dance while still retaining the Kongolese designator.  Spanish Roma (aka “gypsies”) took this on in the 50s, adding back in some sauce as rumba gitano.  Paco de Lucia and Camarón de la Isla further cultivated this into the loosely wicked groove especially emblematic of nuevo flamenco — definitely its own thing, but at times evoking a low key, cool lake above fire that can recall in some attitudinal way what Al Green liked to sing with or the deceptively lax gentleness that many brasileiros can cook up.  It may seem pretty, but that glimmer is much more deeply informed.  It’s not superficial, and it’s definitely not decorative.

Back to that opening scene: singers Carlos  García and Maria Ángeles Fernández, accompanied by guitarist Josemi  with Manolo  Nieto,  bass viol, and percussionist Rafael  Hermoso,  revisit Manzanita’s adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Lorca’s poem Romance Sonámbulo as the rumba flamenco song Verde, que te quiero verde, that had also closed Saura’s earlier 1995 film, Flamenco.

Carlos Garcia accomplishes in his delivery of the song an able synthesis of the Afro-American with the gitano. He sings here in flamenco’s voz afilla’ , a deliberately rough, cracked or split vocal tone.  Blues singers adopt similar strategies, and in this instance, Garcia joins his sound with that of his maybe not all that distant cousins after all, assimilating it as an enrichment of already established flamenco vocabulary.  The melismas (melodic running along a single syllable) at times very subtly slide adrift from the Arab-Hebraic into the Black Church signaling his awareness, acknowledgement and admiration of that other deep music from across the pond.  His compatriot Maria Ángeles Fernández likewise hints at R&B delivery in the way she rolls and lingers on repeated “How I want you greens.”  But the blue sound comes through most where Garcia rises to a “Yo” on the blue 7th as he falls from there through “te quiero verde.”  Rearranging the language in contrast with previous models, his flexible and supple phrasing stands out alongside his willingness to cascade a word (“Ella Ella, Ella … ”) the way a gospel singer and so many others (including John Coltrane) would.

Now, this isn’t to say that flamenco vocalists don’t already do such things in their own right on their own terms (well, except for the blue tonality).  We’re talking about a subtle crisscrossing of differences and similarities between musical languages. Garcia can be heard doing this like no other vocalist in this filmic exhibition. And, if it weren’t for the existence of the Gumboamerican sound spectrum, his singing wouldn’t sound exactly the way it actually does.  I heard his as an honest and genuinely soulful performance.  We already know about Sketches of Spain.

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for the women guitarists.