Flamenco Festival USA – Enrique Morente & Tomatito

Text: Mona Molarsky

A strange and disturbing coldness

«Flamenco has come a long way in New York,» marveled
a guitarist friend of mine, as he stood in the center of Carnegie
Hall, looking up at its gold and white balconies that were packed
with people.

For generations, it's been every musician's dream to play Carnegie
Hall. But filling those 2,800 seats isn't so easy. On Saturday night,
the combined reputations of singer Enrique Morente and guitarist
Tomatito accomplished what few flamenco musicians–and certainly
no flamenco singers–had done in New York before. They packed that
19th-century jewel box to the brim.

It was the big night local flamencos and aficionados had been waiting
for. Even those who hadn't attended other events at the Flamenco
Festival made sure they were there to hear Morente and Tomatito
play on the big stage. They poured into the auditorium in their
Saturday night finery, kissing friends and calling across the aisles
in excitement, «Have you seen Tomatito yet?» «Yes!
He's backstage now!»

There are those who swear by Morente’s
visionary, groundbreaking genius, and those who think he's put flamenco
on the fast train to hell

Tomatito is well loved in New York. As a guitarist who can both
play brilliant, cutting-edge solos and accompany in the traditional
style, with great sensitivity, he has wide appeal. Of course, it
doesn't hurt that for 17 years this handsome, flowing-haired Gypsy
was the accompanist and bosom-buddy of superstar singer, Camarón
de la Isla. More recently, he has composed the soundtracks for several
movies, recorded a number one hit with Neneh Cherry, and won the
first flamenco Grammy in history for flamenco guitar. Through all
this, Tomatito, who hails from Almería, has stayed true to
his roots, honoring his family, friends and community. Maybe for
this reason, as much as any other, the New York flamencos adore
him.

As
for Enrique Morente, the most well-established and controversial
flamenco singer in the world today is impossible to ignore. There
are those who swear by his visionary, groundbreaking genius, and
those who think he's put flamenco on the fast train to hell. No
matter what you think of him, one thing is indisputable. Morente
knows flamenco inside and out, backwards and forwards. By the age
of sixteen, «El Ronco del Albaicín» (The Hoase-voiced
One from the Albaicín, as he was called in his hometown,
Granada) had mastered the canon of flamenco song styles. By eighteen,
he was off to Madrid to make the scene in the capital. After proving,
in his early recordings of the 1960s, that he had mastered the flamenco
tradition, he went on to expand–some would say destroy–its
boundaries, experimenting with tonalities and patterns heretofore
unknown in the communal language of southern Spain. Love him or
hate him, Morente is a force to be reckoned with. And so New York's
flamencos and aficionados of every stripe turned out on Saturday
night to pay tribute and bear witness.

But it wasn't just New York's flamenco world that filled Carnegie
Hall to overflowing. Music lovers and concert goers of many persuasions:
socialites, and fashionistas, star-struck tourists, adventurous
office workers and earnest teenagers from Brooklyn, all crowded
into the auditorium to hear–did they actually realize what it would
mostly be? –flamenco singing!

Mercifully, for the uninitiated, the program began with Tomatito's
first guitar solo, a warm and graceful taranta that seemed
to evoke the freewheeling spirit of southern Spain. The tarantas
is a flamenco form that began as a mining song. Today many artists
have reinterpreted it for guitar, infusing it with their own distinct
personalities. In this taranta, Tomatito's sunny, Andalusian
spirit seemed to vibrate through the fine wood of his instrument
and there was little trace of the dark, loneliness that must have
once characterized the traditional song. It was a wise way to introduce
a broad New York audience to flamenco. Tomatito took us by the hand
and walked us slowly into the warm, shallow waters of the Mediterranean.
There, we could float and paddle around for a while, before pushing
off for the distant shores.

He followed up with a lighthearted alegrías in
D major, accompanied by Angel Gabarre and Antonio Carbonell doing
palmas (clapping) and Lucky Losada playing percussion on
cajón. With its strong, rhythmic compás
and quicksilver gaiety, the alegrías was at once more traditional
and more flamenco than the taranta. It seemed to me that
Tomatito's Gypsy heritage was beginning to come through in his playing
and, as far as I was concerned, that was a good thing!

Then he and his percussive friends launched into rapid-fire bulerías.
I wanted to hold onto my seat, as they barreled along, faster than
a train tearing down a mountain. Taken at a clip that was at once
awe-inspiring and inimical to emotion, it was a bulerías
for the new and urban age.

Tomatito took us by the hand and walked
us slowly into the warm, shallow waters of the Mediterranean

Remembering how the most compelling and soulful bulerías
I've heard seemed to sprout straight out of the earth of the little
Spanish towns, like Lebrija, where they were born, I wondered whether
the fast-paced, workaholic world of Manhattan might have inspired
Tomatito to compose this piece as a sort of ironic homage. A Bulerías
for the A Train, perhaps? No. No New York-style irony was intended,
I was assured by veterans who've watched Tomotito since his teenage
years in Málaga. They'd heard him play much of the same Paco
de Lucía-inspired material long ago in Spain.

Next, the stage went dark and Enrique Morente and three men appeared
center stage in a faint pool of light, clapping out staccato rhythms.
In the gloom, Morente's red shirt suggested the glowing embers of
a forge and the clapping seemed a distant echo of smithies, hammering
iron. Acapella, Morente sang his own, very special version of a
toná, one of the oldest and most elemental of flamenco
forms. And in his hoarse, gravelly voice, you felt the harsh and
lonely life of a man who worked day in and day out, from dawn until
midnight. His comrades took turns singing verses and urging him
on with guttural jaleo.

This was followed by a lyrical caña, accompanied
to perfection by Tomatito's traditional guitar. There was no flashy
finger work here. And you had to admire a guitarist of such stature
who was willing to submerge himself so entirely in the singer and
the song. Morente's caña, with its mournfully descending
«aye! aye! aye! ayes!» seemed to wrap the audience
in a blanket of gentle melancholy. It is said that the caña
has its roots in medieval Arabic religious songs. And if the lights
had been a little dimmer and the performers had disappeared, we
probably would have sat there in meditative silence for a long time.

Instead, it was followed by Morente's very modern takes on alegrías,
tangos, bulerías and…possibly…mirabrá.
Aficionados were scratching their heads after the show, trying to
figure out exactly, which forms–if any–Morente was working in
much of the time. «Remember the old days when you could actually
recognize what flamenco forms were being performed?» one knowledgeable
wag teased the next day, as the internet buzzed with quizzical voices,
doing post-mortems of the show.

At one point in the evening, an African-sounding cajón solo
by Lucky Losada, featuring a cornucopia of electronic effects and
lots of «reverb,» led into what may have been alegrías.
Then again, maybe it was cabales. Nobody I talked to could decide.
What can be said is that a couple of Morente's seguiriyas were more
traditional than some of the moon walks he's taken in previous years.
I–for one–was grateful for that. Tomatito's accompaniment of them
was fluid, subtle and respectful. It was a pleasure to listen to.

Compared to great Gypsy singing, the
erudition of an artist like Morente pales like a candle flame next
to a blazing torch.

And yet, especially in the seguiriyas, which comprised
some of Morente's finest work of the evening, there was a strange
and disturbing coldness. Possibly, many in the New York audience
didn't notice. Because, if you haven't had the privilege of hearing
truly great seguiriyas sung by some of the twentieth century's
finest Gypsy artists–men like Agujetas and Chocolate–you wouldn't
know the passion that this most Gypsy of all song forms can contain.

Morente, of course, is no Gypsy. Born in Granada, he did grow up
in the old quarter of the Albaicín, immersed in flamenco
and Gypsy culture. Whatever innovations he's made and triumphs he's
won, he owes his biggest debt to those people who gave Spain the
flamenco we know today, as surely as African Americans gave the
New World blues and jazz. Yet, though Morente absorbed the forms
and techniques of the flamenco tradition like a sponge drinks water,
it seems there is one essential quality he never gained. Heat.

When you strip away the structures, the complex rhythms and eastern
tonalities, where do you find flamenco's unique and utterly compelling
soul? It lies in an emotional approach: a devil-may-care, quicksilver
gaiety and an ability to express intense suffering, while remaining
hot-blooded and human at the same time. It is in this emotional
arena that so many Gypsies have excelled as flamenco artists. And
once you have experienced truly great Gypsy singing of this sort,
the erudition of an artist like Morente pales like a candle flame
next to a blazing torch.

No one can doubt that Morente deserves a respected place in today's
flamenco pantheon. But, with so many other fine singers out there
who can raise the temperature, should he really be king of the mountain?
And, now that we're asking questions, who put him there to begin
with? Is it possible that the music establishment–both in Spain
and the U.S.–simply finds him less threatening and easier to work
with than other important singers?

There are some who believe that Gypsy artists are slowly but surely
being squeezed out of the flamenco business, to be replaced by less
brilliant but possibly more «comfortable» Spaniards. And
while, at first glance this idea may sound absurd and even impossible,
it's worth looking at the trend in the festival line-ups on both
sides of the Atlantic. At this year's Flamenco Festival New York,
only two out of fifteen headlined artists were Gypsy. To put this
in perspective, if Americans mounted a jazz festival headlining
such a tiny percentage of black musicians, it would–rightly–cause
a scandal. At the very least, these numbers should give us pause.

By most measures, Enrique Morente and Tomatito's concert at Carnegie
Hall was a huge success. The seats were filled. The audience gave
them a standing ovation. And it is to be hoped that on Saturday
night, at least a few more New Yorkers were bitten by the flamenco
bug and may even search out flamenco singing in the future.
As for the promoters, let's hope those filled seats will translate
into more money for more flamenco next year. But the question of
how flamenco will be defined and which artists will be chosen to
represent it, remains a cloud, hovering at the horizon.

For his final encore on Saturday, Enrique Morente sang one of his
experimental numbers in which verses of corny, non-flamenco canciones
were interspersed with bulerías rhythms and other
assorted elements. Then, somewhere out of the sonic mish-mash an
unmistakably American song emerged, «Summertime….and
the living's easy!«

Everyone laughed, of course. But the truth is that easy living
has never been what flamenco was about. And if it should become
that in future…would we really want to bother with it?

by Mona Molarsky © 2005. All rights reserved..

Photos by Rafael Manjavacas