“Flamenco has but one school: you either communicate or you don’t”

José Monge Cruz, 1988

Few flamenco fans haven’t seen this interview with the young singer from La Isla, recorded on a small farm in La Línea, where he speaks these words. The stylistic changes that made their way into flamenco in the 1970s were expansive and powerful. Not everyone is old enough to remember that musical tsunami that swept through Madrid, Andalusia, and then the rest of the country, transforming the austerity of the Antonio Mairena style into the sweetly painful Camarón style that set the standard from then on. Al verte las flores lloran is the name of the recording released in 1969, which marked the beginning of this new line of expression born from the collaboration between Camarón and Paco de Lucía. I remember the first time I heard the up-and-coming singer. I was at a friend’s house, and he said, “Listen to this and tell me what you think”. Right away, I was struck by the feel of Paco’s guitar (along with his brother Ramón). There was a fresh modernism shaking off the dust, modifying the identity of the art-form. Then came Camarón’s voice:

Sit in the corner where the mosquitoes don’t bite,

I don’t answer to anyone

You sweet girl, God help me, my companion

My sweet girl

And the friend said, “He sounds like an older man, doesn’t he? But he’s very young, barely twenty years old”. The tone of his voice was a fundamental element of the attraction. I also remember thinking that this young man must have been tuning in to the Arabic stations whose music reached the southernmost part of Spain from the other side of the strait, delivering seductive Maghrebi sounds to José’s ear which also indulged in a nomad gypsy sound. Neither Mairena nor Caracol had ver been heard to sing a “nayno” chorus.

People usually cite La Leyenda del Tiempo from 1979 as the great opening that Camarón and his people enabled for us. Living at the time between Morón, Utrera, and Madrid, I don’t remember it that way. In 1976, when flamenco was in the midst of renewal, I walked into the record section of El Corte Inglés in Seville’s Plaza del Duque one day to see what new recordings were available. A large sign hung from above, TOP OF THE POPS MUSIC SALES, dominated by the stars of the time: Camilo Sesto, Lolita, Jarcha, etc. Near the top of the list was Camarón de la Isla, a flamenco singer, with tangos. I mentioned the “mistake” to a salesgirl, who went to tell her supervisor, but she soon returned to inform me that the list was correct. A popular new song by a composer was labeled as tangos, though it wasn’t in any way a tango from the habitual flamenco repertoire. For me, that felt like the acceleration of the renewal process. The song was the popular Rosa María written by Camarón and Paco. I remember that Miguel Acal, an admired journalist and flamenco scholar of the time whose radio program I listened to every evening, criticized the inclusion of the song in the flamenco repertoire: “Never in a million years can a song composed yesterday to the rhythm of tangos be a legitimate inclusion in the flamenco repertoire” he declared. How things have changed since then.Final del formulario

José Manuel Gamboa from the Spanish Society of Authors once told me that Enrique Morente was the first flamenco singer not to mention the traditional forms (palos) on his recordings, a small yet dramatic change when you think about it. Today, we all welcome songs of almost any type into the flamenco repertoire, as long as the accompanying music has that flamenco feel derived from the rhythm, a flamenco style, and a familiar musical mode. It’s been a subtle modification, one of many, that shifted the tectonic plates of the art of flamenco.