Paco de Lucia (1947-2015) was the most influential flamenco guitarist of his or any other era. The singer is a cantaor (male) or cantaora (female), the dancer a bailaor (male) or bailaora (female). The Gitano language describes the key elements of flamenco. It can be exquisitely deep and passionate, yearning, communal, filled with anguish, jealousy, desire and despair. Some have been derived from contemporary or long-existing folk and religious music. Cante chico represents a class of generally joyful songs often easily recognized as flamenco. Cante can be chico (light) or jondo (deep) but it is the planet about which all forms of flamenco orbit. Of the three, cante is the most dominate and compelling component. It is about joy and pain, life and death, love and loss, and is presented individually or in combination through three major elements: cante (song), baile (dance), and toque (guitar). The exactness of flamenco’s past is controversial for it has always represented different things to different groups, but for Gitano’s it has been and is an organic force running below the surface of popular culture, less a form of entertainment than an unyielding extension of nature.įlamenco’s roots rest in cities and pueblos like Sevilla, Triana, Cadiz, Ronda, Utrera, Moron de la Frontera, Cordoba, Granada, all areas heavily populated by Gitano’s, all echoing daily lives marred by prejudice and abandonment, yet bound by deep friendships and accepted rules of formality-fertile emotional ground that nourished this refined folk art now known throughout the world.įlamenco is both festive and sorrowful. Although its origins are claimed by Andalucía, it is also said that its most impassioned interpretation is expressed by Gitano’s, a marginalized people, historically sequestered, landless, jobless, sometimes outside the law, usually illiterate, always oppressed. While thought of as Spanish by those unfamiliar with its history and lore, it is important to understand that flamenco evolved in Andalucía, the southern region of Spain, and owes its creation to an amalgamation of ethnic groups that settled in that area over hundreds of years-Moorish, Jewish, Christian, Iberian, Gitano.
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