You people reading this right now\u2026you all love flamenco, every one of you.\u00a0 So it\u2019s sad to communicate hurtful words that will make you want to sucker-punch the author of same.<\/p>\n
I read an article about the singer Rosal\u00eda, pointing out her extraordinary ability to attract audiences, such as recently at the Primavera Sound event, and C\u00f3rdoba\u2019s Noche Blanca a few days ago that stirred so much controversy.\u00a0 But that\u2019s fine, artists need to perform, and people need to go out and enjoy themselves.<\/p>\n
However, I\u2019m still licking my wounds from two short sentences an admirer of the Catalonian singer wrote in praise of one performance. Having (apparently) decided that Rosal\u00eda is a flamenco singer (even when great and specialized minds are out back slugging it out on that), the fan makes the following observation about what he (apparently) considers to be the looming and inevitable demise of classic flamenco:\u00a0\u00abFinally, the eclipse is passing. Finally it is dawn after a long dark night\u00bb.<\/p>\n
Jeesh, sounds like the opening words of a Terminator movie.\u00a0 So doing the math, I\u2019ve been in flamenco since 1960, that\u2019s 59 years which we\u2019ll call 60.\u00a0 Is that the totality of the \u201clong dark night\u201d?\u00a0 And if so, does that mean all the passion and sacrifice of six decades, the sweat and tears, the thousands of miles traveled, the sleep deprivation, the minuscule salaries that sometimes weren\u2019t even forthcoming\u2026 was it all just a bad dream in that \u201clong dark night\u201d?<\/p>\n
Could\u2019ve fooled me.\u00a0There we were, so many well-meaning artists in that darkness, dispensing what we humbly or arrogantly thought was authentic emotion, night after night, not always getting it right, year after year, and it was all for naught, mere psychic indigestion destined eventually to pass with a bit of bicarbonate in a glass of water.\u00a0 Or a song of Rosal\u00eda\u2019s.<\/p>\n
And while we\u2019re debunking, how on earth did poor Antonio Mairena get such bad press?\u00a0 He had his ideas just as any other person might (and flamenco people tend to be highly opinionated!).\u00a0 Perhaps it was what historians would call a \u201cbloodless coup\u201d.\u00a0Mairena came into town, glanced sideways at flamenco fans who fell to their knees, heads bowed in capitulation.\u00a0Hmm\u2026no\u2026that doesn\u2019t sound plausible.\u00a0I think we need to accept the likelihood that the time was right for his singing and overall philosophy to be embraced. That perhaps the fandango era had run its course, and followers of flamenco were ready to shift gears.<\/p>\n
Mairena certainly had the support of Fosforito who, though younger, had greater prestige and was, at the time, higher on the name-recognition scale.\u00a0 As a result of the C\u00f3rdoba contest of 1956, Antonio Fern\u00e1ndez D\u00edaz was wildly popular when I was young, and was a great admirer of Antonio Mairena whose reputation he helped promote with the famous and controversial Llave de Oro del Cante, the Golden Key of Flamenco Singing in 1962.\u00a0In the words of Fosforito: \u201cpeople were Fosforeros before there were Maireneros\u201d.<\/p>\n
Mairena takes a lot of flak for his strongly gypsy slant.\u00a0 But Lorca was probably just as much to blame with his romantic notions of knife-fights by the light of the moon and wild-eyed passion that had an irrational attraction which is stronger today than ever, just ask any non-Spaniard. The world over, Granada, Lorca\u2019s birthplace, is more closely associated with gypsies and flamenco than any place on earth, even as the genre struggles to lose those stereotypes.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
However, I\u2019m still licking my wounds from two short sentences a reviewer wrote in praise of one performance. \u00abFinally, the eclipse is passing. Finally it is dawn after a long dark night\u00bb.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":13261,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[1462,140],"class_list":["post-13266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-estela-flamenca","tag-antonio-mairena-en","tag-rosalia-en"],"yoast_head":"\n