Protest movement into art
Raymond Carr
IN SEARCH OF THE FIREDANCE by James Woodall Sinclair-Stevenson, £16.95, pp. 333 By a curious concatenation of acciden- tal circumstances my wife and I spent the first evening of our honeymoon in a broth- el. It was there in 1950 that I first heard cante in its purest form — the unaccompa- nied, tortured utterance of a gypsy cantaor. Andalusian cante is clean outside the West- ern musical tradition. A century or so before George Borrow found it 'uncouth', ear-grating stuff. So did we.
Cante began as the protest song of the Andalusian gypsies. Its musical pedigree is dubious. Its history is not that of a musical form like the sonata but, as Woodall's dis- cursive book makes clear, is to be found in the memories of the great performers. They emerged from the obscurity of poverty-stricken Andalusia in the early 19th century — illiterate gypsies who sang at inns and weddings. The first singer to make a living out of a voice given its raucous edge by brandy, was El Fillo in the 1840s.
El Fillo's professional career is signifi- cant because it marks the beginning of flamenco as part of the 19th-century entertainment industry. To the solo song were added the dance and guitar accompa- niment. In the cafés of the 1840s flamenco came indoors from the dusty roads of the south; an 'untutored rural idiom' became `an urban spectacle'. This gave the gypsies their first commercial break. But it was Antonio Chacon (d.1929), perhaps the greatest cantaor of all time, who transformed a folk ritual into a theatrical performance, earning the wages of an opera star and a performance before Alfonso XIII in the process.
Flamenco was now taken up by intellec- tuals and musicians. It was the composer de Falla and his friend, the poet Garcia Lorca, who between them organised the 1922 cante festival in Granada. It put flamenco as a serious art form on the cultural map.
The star performer at the festival was a 60-year-old gypsy who had made her name in Paris. As so often with Spanish artists, acclaim abroad was the necessary prelude to adulation at home. Flamenco was becoming international show business, with the companies of famous singers and dancers touring the world from Buenos Aires to Leningrad. La Argentinita put on a show at the New York Metropolitan with sets by Dali and poems by Lorca. The greatest dancer of them all, the explosive Carmen Amaya, performed before F. D. Roosevelt in the White House. It was all a long way from the founding fathers, like the tubercular El Nitri who wandered homeless about Andalusia for 30 years, dying choked on his own blood during a wrenching siquiriya.
These international stars were great artists, even though their theatricality dis- pleased purists to whom flamenco was cante hondo or nothing. Woodall is not a pedantic purist: flamenco must live with the times to survive. Alas it survived in a degenerate form in the tatty night-clubs of the 1950s and in the pathetic performances put on to give the tourists of the Costas a taste of the 'real Spain'. La Chunga, according to Woodall once an electrifying barefoot dancer was, when I saw her, a commercialised disaster. And there was the abominable showman of the flamenco guitar — Manitas de Plata.
Nevertheless, it was against this dismal blackcloth that flamenco emerged as a genuine art form without losing its popularity. Camaron, an erratic gypsy singer, could not stand the strain of pop status; he ended up a drug addict incapable of stringing two words together. But it was his former accompanist, Paco de Lucia, who came from the world of flamenco to become one of the world's greatest musi- cians as solo guitarist. Antonio Mairena, a scholarly gypsy who collected and rescued old songs from oblivion, made splendid records of cante in the 1970s. It was a sign of the new seriousness that the Japanese, once the silent clients of flamenco night- clubs, now took dance lessons from La Tati. They wanted to take the genuine article back to Tokyo.
What is the secret of flamenco's longevity? In the 1830s Richard Ford wrote that Andalusian popular songs owed 'little to harmony, the end being rather to affect'. In the hands of musicians like Paco de
Lucia or the dancer Antonio Gades, flamenco has been transmuted into high art. But its power to affect persists. It remains 'electrifying'. As far as words can do it, Woodall's rambling prose conveys some of that electricity.
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