Flamenco at the Crossroads
About an hour south of Sevilla in a rural Spanish pueblo called Morón de la Frontera are the remains of a Moorish citadel, a cathedral and a rather gawky monument to a gamecock. Little else there attracts outsiders, unless you happen to be a fan of traditional Gypsy flamenco. For nearly five decades, Morón has been a flamenco mecca for a group of devoted Northern California performers and aficionados, whose musical pilgrimage has helped establish the Bay Area as one of the most active flamenco scenes outside of Spain, and, in turn, helped disseminate one of the art form's most original guitar styles, toque de Morón.
Historically, Morón was a haven for outcasts and marginal elements of Spanish society: bandits, smugglers and the Gypsies or gitanos of Andalusia, the region where flamenco was born. There, during centuries of frontier-like isolation, the more settled Andaluz gitanos, called caseros, evolved a shtetl-like culture of their own, much of it centered on flamenco. A local proverb: mata el rey y vete a Morón (kill the king and go hide in Morón) underscores its historical remoteness from the Spanish monarchy, which had ruled Spain from Madrid since 1561. A crossroads for traders between the provincial capital Sevilla, the perched village of Ronda and Spain's southern-most Mediterranean coast, Morón was notorious at the turn of the century for its brothels, dozens of which lined a street near the cemetery called Pozo Loco (Street of the Crazy Well). Its earthy, down-home character flavored the flamenco that developed there, and no figure embodied it more than the Gypsy guitar maestro Diego del Gastor (1908-1973).
Diego made few recordings and rarely toured, disdaining the artificiality of studios and the world of staged performances and nightclubs, which he considered sterile environments for the art form. Instead, he preferred creating flamenco live, in the spontaneous atmosphere of fiestas, Gypsy weddings and baptisms, and in the ambience of his favorite cantina, Casa Pepe.
Diego had gained a reputation as a master accompanist of cante flamenco. His idiosyncratic playing with its clearly marked compás (accented beat patterns and rhythmic pulse of the flamenco song and dance forms) and signature single-line and single-string melodies called falsetas attracted some of his generation's greatest singers, including La Fernanda de Utrera. It was an unadorned, minimalist and highly expressive approach to the guitar that was admired as one of the most original of flamenco's several regional styles in Andalusia.
A bohemian at heart, who recited Federico Garcia Lorca's poems and wove snatches of Bach and Beethoven into his music, Diego, wearing his Andaluz-style cap, held court in Casa Pepe. There, to express his contempt for the Franco dictatorship (he was imprisoned, briefly, after the Spanish Civil War), he was fond of playing the Marseillaise on the guitar, turning the bar into a scene from the movie "Casablanca."
Diego survived from private fiestas organized by señoritos (a sometimes disparaging term for upper class Spaniards) and the lessons he and his guitarist nephews gave to foreigners. One of those was Berkeley-born guitarist David Serva, who arrived at 21 in Morón in the summer of 1962 and became Diego's most accomplished American disciple. Serva first introduced Diego's music to Bay Area audiences at the flamenco room of the old Spaghetti Factory in North Beach, graduating to pursue a successful performing career in Madrid, where today he is a much sought after accompanist of traditional cante flamenco.
Serva had come to Morón at the suggestion of an American expatriate and flamenco aficionado named Donn Pohren, who had briefly lived in San Francisco. The author of several books on flamenco, Pohren had given Serva some tapes of Diego and raved about Morón's authentic music scene. He introduced Serva to the maestro at Casa Pepe. A number of Gypsy artists had gathered there, including Manolito el de la Maria, a singer and sheep shearer who lived in a cave and one of Diego's relatives, the singer Luis Joselero. After playing for a bit, Diego handed the guitar to Serva and asked him to take a turn accompanying Manolito.
"Nobody seemed particularly pissed off at me," Serva recalled. "I kept the rhythm, and they liked how I played. I had already absorbed a lot of Diego from the tapes Pohren had given me."
Diego was impressed by the sylph-like, blond-haired guitarist from California. How was it possible that a foreigner could play soleá and other flamenco songs so convincingly? To resolve the problem to his friends, Diego pointed to Serva's fingers.
"He's an American Gypsy," Diego proclaimed. "You know how I can tell? Because the skin beneath his fingernails is reddish, not white."
It was not the last of the often strange multicultural exchanges and mistaken identities in Morón. Few of Casa Pepe's flamenco eminences cared that David Serva was really David Jones, the son of a UC Berkeley political science professor. His lineage was white Alabama, not Gypsy. A graduate of Berkeley High, Jones left home at 15 to pursue his destiny as a guitarist. He played blues with local legend K.C. Douglas in a San Pablo Avenue garage and then switched to flamenco.
And like many flamencos, he adopted his stage name from a place.
"It was obvious that Jones wouldn't work in Spanish," Serva said. "For one thing, it has an obscene connotation. Since Serva was the Gypsy word for Sevilla, I thought that would be a cool to have a last name in caló. So I adopted it sometime in my late teens. But it had nothing to do with anything, and when I found out how ridiculous I could be, I decided to keep it to remind myself how stupid it was."
"Diego was such a guru, man," Serva says of his teacher, "such a charismatic figure and so accessible. You know, the whole thing - with all his dignity and patriarchal heritage. He was so friendly and cultured and well-mannered."
But it was the quality and intention of the music that most impressed Serva during his first and subsequent visits to Diego's pueblo.
"In Morón," he recalls, "you were dealing with music that was not oriented toward theater or public performances. It was made by people who did it for themselves. Others were allowed to participate by listening, but it wasn't done to impress them, it was done to impress the people who performed.
"For me, the Morón sound is about a certain aesthetic. It's the opposite of what modern flamenco does where you use rubato to schmaltz it up [rubato is a rhythmic manipulation used to stretch or contract a musical phrase]. The toque de Morón involves a different concept of rhythm. Diego had perfect, metronome-like rhythm. It's straight and precise, with every half beat in the middle. Everything has to fit in. The modern style is more lyrical. They slow down. They speed up. That's very un-Morón."
Diego impressed another future Bay Area flamenco, the dancer La Tanya, who spent much of her early childhood in Morón. She moved there in 1965 when her grandmother, an expatriate American painter named Judith Deim, purchased an old finca outside of town that hosted many of the fiestas where Diego played. La Tanya's mother later danced in a flamenco troupe in Sevilla started by one of Diego's nephews, and her uncle, guitarist Benjamin Flores, who teaches and performs in San Francisco, studied with Diego himself.
"It was the first flamenco I heard, and it had an enormous impact," La Tanya recalls. "As a child, when I was just beginning to dance, Diego and his family always encouraged me to be myself, and that's what I associate with Diego, this idea of uniqueness, of being true to yourself as a performer. That's what puro means - realness, authenticity, being who you really are."
The Spaghetti Factory connection
After his encounter with Diego, Serva returned to the Bay Area to resume his gig with Los Flamencos de la Bodega, in the highly successful music room of San Francisco's old Spaghetti Factory. He'd been a regular there from the time sculptor Richard Whalen opened it on Pearl Harbor Day in 1958. Whalen filled the barnlike structure with Victoriana, fringed-beaded lampshades and kitschy furniture that made the old pasta factory resemble a 19th century bordello. Back then, Serva would hitchhike over to North Beach from Berkeley, and he and guitarist Freddie Mejia helped set it up, finding crates from Chinatown to support the stage, painting the walls, hanging bottles and lanterns to decorate the place. Bolinas sculptor Ron Garrigues hung chairs from the ceiling.
Whalen, whose grandmother had been a vaudeville queen on the RKO Orpheum circuit, had an instinctive flair for show business, and throughout its 26-year run, Los Flamencos de la Bodega remained one of North Beach's most popular scenes. Serva called his friend Whalen the "Father Flanigan" of the Bay Area flamenco scene. He employed, counseled and befriended a host of aspiring flamenco artists, some of them street kids and runaways, in how to behave, dress and play to the crowd. A flamboyant New York-born artist and political activist in liberal causes, Whalen was the in loco parentis ("emphasis on loco," Whalen quips) to the burgeoning Bay Area flamenco scene.
"I like a good show," said Whalen, "but not psychodrama and, for me, you've failed if everybody doesn't want to f- you after a performance. When I think of great entertainers, I think of Presley or Ike and Tina Turner. At the old Spaghetti Factory, quite frankly, the personalities were far more interesting than flamenco itself. In the same way, I love opera singers but I hate opera. And cuadro flamenco (stage flamenco with singers and dancers) is a bit like a small opera, only mercifully brief. Modern flamenco loses a great deal in big concert hall settings. It gets diluted. It loses the intimacy and sense of immediacy. And that's what I wanted to get across in our shows."
Whalen's showmanship brought flamenco to the streets of North Beach with a flamencomobile full of dancers and singers performing on a truck bed. The old Spaghetti Factory was a staging ground for a number of Bay Area flamencos who spent time in Morón and its neighboring pueblos; many of them still teach and perform in the local flamenco scene, among them guitarist Kenny Parker, a.k.a. Keni el Lebrijano.
"Serva is the Godfather of the Berkeley scene," says Parker, who has played at Sevilla's Bienal de Arte Flamenco - the most distinguished international flamenco gathering. "David was one of the absolute pioneers, and I respect him because he did this over 40 years ago when it wasn't easy, under Franco, when the bathrooms in Spain were dirty, and it wasn't so attractive to tourists. It's a tremendous accomplishment. David is an artist who respects flamenco more than he likes himself."
A Legacy Revived
The inspiration of Morón and Diego's music runs deep among Bay Area flamencos who have maintained their ties with Diego's clan and many of the singers and dancers that they came to know in his pueblo. Serva has brought several of them over for concerts in recent years, and the cross-pollination has been sustained also by several of his nephews who have performed and taught master classes here: singer-guitarist Augustín Ríos Amaya, who moved here in 1974 and now teaches flamenco in his Oakland studio, and Juan del Gastor, who visits regularly from Sevilla for concerts and master classes.
The concert that has generated the most buzz for Bay Area flamencos happens Saturday at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, where one of Spain's hottest and most innovative new flamenco ensembles, Son de la Frontera, makes its Bay Area debut with Juan del Gastor as guest artist. The group's artistic focus has been a revival of Diego's music. Jackson Browne, a longtime flamenco enthusiast, calls them "the best new group I've heard in any genre. A riveting tribute to the seminal flamenco master Diego del Gastor, the CD embraces the tradition of flamenco puro and succeeds in making it new."
Son de la Frontera is a fusion group, one of whose innovations is the addition of a non-flamenco instrument, the Cuban tres, as part of their homage and exploration of Diego's music.
Four members of the Son de la Frontera quintet have Morón in their blood: two were born there, and two are grand-nephews of Diego, including 30-year old dancer Pepe Torres, whom Serva first introduced to Bay Area audiences in 2003, before the group was launched. Torres is the grandson of the singer Joselero, whom Serva accompanied in his early forays to Morón. When Torres first met Serva in 1999, he told him how envious he was for having missed so much great flamenco in Morón in its heyday. Pepe also recalled a photograph in his grandfather's house of a young guitarist accompanying his grandfather Joselero: "I never knew until now that it was you," he told Serva.
After Serva's 2003 show at Berkeley's La Peña Cultural Center, Torres met Bay Area flamencos who had tapes of his grandfather singing at fiestas in Morón that he had never heard. The level of afición - knowledge of and affinity for - his pueblo's culture surprised him: these Americans knew more about it than most Spaniards, even flamencos of his own generation.
"Pepe's dancing is brilliant," says dancer Kerensa DeMars, who produces a weekly Sunday flamenco show at Thirsty Bear Brewery and has performed in Spain with the fusion group Radio Tarifa. "His footwork is so musical and has such a range of dynamics. It's incredibly flamenco, super masculine - a perfect balance of pacing and explosive power. He's not just another dancer with a pretty face, he's one of the musicians. As a dancer, that's something I aspire to achieving: pure musicality."
Musicality is one feature of what Serva praises as the accessibility of Son de la Frontera, whose popularity began outside Spain as a world music group performing Diego's flamenco riffs far from the source - in Mexico, Cuba, South America and northern Europe.
"Their popularity doesn't relate to anything that's going on in Spain now," says Serva. "They're not a bunch of people trying to be super hip or super complicated. The most salient feature of their music is its clarity."
Singer Nina Menendez sees their use of Diego's music as something that transcends slavish copying: "Flamenco is an oral tradition. You can't write it down. Diego never played the same way twice. His falsetas, his toque (playing) were a framework for improvisation. And that was part of the musical culture in Morón. That's a big difference between so-called "modern" and so-called "traditional" flamenco. Modern flamenco takes on some abstract ideal of music: whether it's a young, perfect body type for a dancer, or overly choreographed performances, or the technical virtuosity of the guitar, with complex harmonies and dazzling riffs. Traditional flamenco, on the other hand, is more about cultural identity, an expression of family, community. It's a legacy, a shared frame of reference." At Son de la Frontera's Yerba Buena show, a flamenco legacy of three generations will be onstage when guitarist and singer Juan del Gastor performs with them.
"Even though they never met Diego, his spirit lives in their hearts," says Juan del Gastor. Of the Bay Area aficionados and others who visited Morón in the 1960s, he adds: "We were kept ignorant under Franco, and they exposed us to a new way of thinking. The Americans became ambassadors for Morón toque. They brought the culture of the world and its music to us and we gave them our art, our flamenco gitano."
If flamenco is associated with a particular place - Andalusia - and ethnic group - the gitanos of Spain - its musical borders have always been porous. North African, Jewish, Indian, Latin American and Caribbean elements have all contributed to the evolution of its diverse traditions and forms. It is a music that has crossed many frontiers. And contemporary flamenco artists have pushed its boundaries further than ever before, adding jazz, Brazilian samba, blues, modern dance and rock into the mix.
Son de la Frontera was the brainchild of the group's only member not from Morón de la Frontera, the outsider who became an insider - Raul Rodriguez. It was Rodriguez who brought the Cuban tres to Diego's music, and his trajectory began circuitously, at the opposite end of the musical spectrum, in the world of pop music and fusion.
Born in Sevilla in 1974, Rodriguez started out on electric guitar with an interest in blues and rock. Diego had recently died, and flamenco's direction was undergoing a radical shift toward more complex harmonies and a more cosmopolitan sound. To many, Diego's pueblo-style flamenco seemed a quaint relic from the past.
Rodriguez's mother, the actress and superstar singer Martirio, was one of a group of avant-garde pop singers eager to help propel Spain out of the conservative shadows of the Franco years. Her association in the 1980s with singer/songwriter Kiko Veneno would produce some of the more irreverent and campy fusions of pop, flamenco and punk, which critics dubbed "nuevo flamenco" or new wave flamenco. But Veneno "discovered" Gypsy flamenco in California in 1974, when he was hitchhiking and doing what he calls his "hippie thing," playing guitar like a folkie, barring chords with his left thumb wrapped around the neck. In Mill Valley, he ran into a Gypsy singer and guitarist from Morón, Augustín Rios, a nephew of Diego del Gastor. Rios turned Veneno on to Diego's music - in America - and it changed his musical outlook, including, as Rios recalls, the way Veneno held the guitar.
Back in Sevilla, Veneno began collaborating with Martirio and two Gypsy rockers whose group Pata Negra moved Diego's music up the pop charts in 1987 with an electrified flamenco version of one of the maestro's most famous falsetas, covered in their hit, "Blues de la Frontera."
Rodriguez had heard some of this material in his childhood, and it began to percolate just as he was shifting from electric guitar to flamenco. By the mid-1990s, he was playing professionally with Kiko Veneno. It didn't take him long to return to the source.
"Everything," he said in a recent interview on a flamenco Web site in Spain, "begins in Morón de la Frontera."
Rodriguez first came to Morón with a friend in July 1996, he told me in a recent interview, and it was then that he first met Diego's youngest nephew, a guitarist and son of the singer Joselero named Dieguito. "He was playing upstairs from the marketplace," Rodriguez recalled. "We were with him until the next day at noon, completely entranced, listening to him play. That's when I realized that Morón was the most magical place for flamenco."
In Morón, Raul began collaborating with the other future members of Son de la Frontera, dancer Pepe Torres, the singer Moi de Morón, guitarist Paco Amparo, and percussionist Manuel Flores. His mother Martirio was reintroducing romantic coplas to the jazz world, via pianist Chano Dominguez. And she wanted a new backup band for a tour and trilogy of records she planned, a band that could add an authentic flamenco flavor to her vampy, cabaret-style performances. Rodriguez suggested his new musical friends from Morón, and Martirio, who had long admired Diego's music, hired them for a 1999 tour.
Martirio's jazzy fusion of coplas and flamenco was a huge hit, particularly in Cuba and South America. It coincided with a '90s trend of reviving forgotten musical traditions, most famously, Ry Cooder's forays in Havana. Two years earlier, Martirio had caught the eyes and ears of one of the legendary stars that Cooder would spotlight, the tres player, singer and master of son cubano, Compay Segundo (1907-2003). Segundo composed a catchy tune with a four-note melody that is arguably the best known piece of Cuban music today: "Chan Chan," the opening track of Ry Cooder's Buena Vista Social Club. Segundo asked Martirio to join his European tour and sing at his 90th birthday celebration in Havana. When he heard about it, Rodriguez asked his mother to bring him back a tres, a guitar-like instrument with three sets of double-course metal strings. And she did - a present from Compay Segundo.
Martirio's backup band eventually jelled into Son de la Frontera, and their bold fusion of two roots traditions, flamenco and son cubano, has yielded two CDs. In their own and Diego's compositions, they make the rhythmic exuberance of his rhythms and riffs accessible to new audiences. Son de la Frontera has journeyed deep into the heart of flamenco, crossing many musical frontiers. In the emblematic figure of Diego del Gastor, they rediscovered something essential and universal about the integrity of performance. While true to his music and its improvisatory style, they have made it their own and made it new, introducing audiences far from Morón de la Frontera to his art and musical genius. As performers, they work as a true ensemble, showcasing no individual star, be he a dancer, singer or solo guitarist. They are not a cuadro or a company, as their friend Paco Pavia writes in the liner notes to "Cal," but rather a flamenco band, perhaps the first of its kind, pointing the way to a new direction for the art.