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Photos by Jacobo Garcia Guereta
 
Agujetas - "En la Soleá"
New Cd
Curro de Jerez: guitarra.
In his own words: This is his "best recording", a true live performance among
some friends, without effects or overdubs. The booklet includes lyrics (In English
and Spanish), pics and additional info.
When
you miss me
the day you miss me
you will lose your mind
you will run in my search
like a bolting horse.
You will enter my house
and you will not see me
and you bill miss me.
Fandangos
naturales
With a knife I killed her.
She was a streetwalker.
And when she was dying
we told each other who we were.
And she was my sister.
That his son should be a lawyer
was a father's greatest wish.
and the son did not fulfill it.
In his pocket he didn't want
papers belonging to criminals.
Leaf a tawny gracefulness,
Rose of Pitiminí
the other day, beside the road, a man who pines for you
sent his regards through me.
(rose of pitiminí: a tiny beautiful kind of rose)
Agujetas
Homepage
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This man sings out his truth to the world because he is incapable of pretense,
either in life or in singing. Here there is no softening, there are no sticky
conjoinings with anything or anyone. Whatever his singing is worth, it is only
the voice of a man at High Noon (talk about Gary Cooper) opening his way as with
the strokes of an ax and with shouts that cut the world in two, without looking
left or right, at you, or me, or god or his altar boys.
Manuel Agujetas
is either loved or not loved, it's as simple as that, because reason is too minute
a thing to understand the desperate charm of a blacksmith gypsy resisting every
blow from the claws of society and the State.
If Manuel has
built his house without a plumb or a level and with his own hands, who am I, or
is anybody, to demand him to please our particular geometries? Isn't his cry by
seguidillas, at the edge of life and death, the most archaic, dark and chastised
voice; the voice of so many voices, which are entrailed to a certain point in
the voice of a land, Andalucía; voices that have added their graceful, rebellious
and libertarian accent to the whiteness of a mural that has so often showed the
flamenco footprint of Spain?
To sign for a
second time an introduction to Manuel, twenty five years after the first one,
when he arrived in Madrid and recorded an LP to the accompaniment of Manolo Sanlúcar,
means not only that through time and its changes friendship and dialogue have
been possible between an artist and a critic; it also means that in spite of the
doubts his restless personality may have aroused at some time, the cantaor has
fully confirmed his strong artistic identity and has become an indisputable star
for all lovers of his art and one of the classics of the cante from Jerez that
already has its echo in other younger voices.
It is a cante
with his chest forced in the center at full lungs strength and with his mouth
wide open; a cante which thrusts our of that cave of a mouth all the scratches
a history of priests and militaries had left in the memory of his relatives and
all the blows and dents in his own biography. Thus he makes possible that fierce
entry into a great "tercio" (each of the stanzas that compose a cante) of the
fandango from Jerez, which makes us feel he is serious and must be taken seriously.
Lightly touching the memory of Manuel Torre -on the same path and in the wake
of his great fellow countryman-, the dramatic intensity and the "rajo" (a break
of the voice in order to obtain special expressive intensity) in his tarantos
and seguidillas, or the desolate tempering that his virile voice imprints in his
wail by soleás while he roams along with a bitter philosophical evocation or takes
his revenge on sentimental wrongs, all of these are causes that, when exploding,
sow splinters in the hearts of his audiences, because his presence and his singing
are not complacent and no honest man or woman can escape without paying for it.
Franciso Almazán
Continue
When
you miss me
the day you miss me
you will lose your mind
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