Interview with Cañizares, flamenco guitarist
“I have a music court
in my head which tells me what is and isn’t flamenco”
Silvia Calado. Madrid, August 2010
Translation: Joseph Kopec
You couldn’t feel the hot
afternoon there. Inside the recording studio, on the lower-ground
floor close to the busy street of Arturo Soria, everything
happens in another time, under a different light and at
a different temperature. All senses are set on listening,
just on listening. Cañizares
remains silent. Mariko works on the laptop. Carlo presses
the button which plays the tangos, just having been mixed.
They sound clean, silky and energetic, a little journey
of the senses. And with this there are now only three more
tracks left to conclude the recording of ‘Cuerdas
del alma’.
Cañizares, 'Cuerdas
del alma'
(Photo © Amancio Guillén) |
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The disc, to be released in mid-September,
will be the fifth album by this musician who is part of
today’s flamenco guitar star system, his return to
flamenco after plunging into ‘Iberia’
by Isaac Albéniz. That work, which meant translating
for flamenco guitar the original score for piano, was “a
really fruitful period, a personal challenge. Since I like
learning, I researched, I searched in the music, removed
layers to see what was happening and learned a lot”.
With that album, winner of the 2008 Music Prize, he revealed
to us how much flamenco there was within ‘Triana’
and ‘El Albaicín’. And now it’s
time for him to reveal the flamenco there is within himself.
The title has a message from deep within.
“To me, symbolically, we people have strings in our
soul, and we also have experiences and intentions. The latter
play the strings you have and they’ll sound one way
or another depending on what they’re like: joyful,
sad, excited, happy… It’s the symbolism it has,
the soul as a sort of musical instrument. How your soul
sounds depends on how it’s tuned, how it feels”,
Cañizares explains. We don’t ask about experiences.
The personal ones are just that; personal. And taking a
glance at his
blog, we can discover the professional ones. But what
about intentions? The guitarist says that “intentions
can be the wishes you have: if a wish of yours goes well,
you can feel really good; and you can also feel frustration
when reality doesn’t match what you think. You usually
act according to that intention you have”. And he
concludes by pointing out that “all experiences and
intentions are important to me because they’re the
ones that build your psychological and emotional worlds,
worlds which aren’t very far apart”. So it’s
no wonder the musicians in his company call him “Cañistóteles”
when he starts philosophizing during conversations…
Cañizares and Carlo
González. Recording of 'Cuerdas del alma'
(Photo Daniel
Muñoz) |
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“I’m
a person who thinks a lot before making an album”
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“I’m a person who thinks a
lot before making an album; I don’t make albums gratuitously”,
he forcefully affirms. And his music stems from that deep
reflection: “I think the work’s concept is important.
I never compose a single note without first having clear
in my mind, as a sort of abstraction, what concept I want
from that music. Starting with that vision I have in my
head, I then start to compose the melodies, the notes, the
nuances, for it to then sound. It’s like doing a puzzle;
you start putting together the musical pieces with a sense
of building a work. I don’t compose loose bits and
when I have a lot of them I put them together and make an
album; no, no. My way of working is first to conceive, think
and then start to create according to what I’ve thought”,
the musician admits.
All of this came as a result of a question.
After Albéniz, after ‘Flamenco picassiano’,
after working side by side with contemporary composer Mauricio
Sotelo… do you feel there’s any new find in
your music in the avant-garde sense? Then he launches the
answer: “I don’t agree very much with categories
or labels. In my music I try to contribute what I do in
order to, why not, try to make progress within flamenco”.
And he elaborates: “I don’t use the word ‘progress’
lightly; I think about why I say it. To me, progress means
contributing positive values, contributing something that’s
different, but positive, never giving up musical ethics”.
Cañizares admits that he has “like a music
court in my head which tells me if something belongs to
the category of flamenco or not. Let’s say that the
positive values which can be contributed to this music are
created looking to tradition a lot. If flamenco has to evolve,
it must be through tradition”.
Cañizares. Recording
of 'Cuerdas del alma'
(Photo Mariko Ogura) |
First and last names
He questions the contrary. “The word
flamenco is often taken lightly and is used in other contexts,
but flamenco has very important, very interesting tradition,
with first and last names. It’s sometimes forgotten
that knowledge has first and last names, and at the schools
it seems like we’re taught that everything was already
created. Flamenco has first and last names: Chacón’s
malagueña, Manuel Torre’s seguiriya…
And when we talk about Niño
Ricardo, Sabicas, Montoya and even reach the genius
of Paco
de Lucía, there are first and last names. You
can’t take that gratuitously if you’re a half-serious
person”, he asserts.
Cañizares, 'Cuerdas
del alma'
(Photo © Amancio Guillén) |
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All of it is the starting point for the
scores that make up ‘Cuerdas del alma’. They’re
new tangos, bulerías, soleá por bulerías,
alegrías, a version of the ballad ‘Lejana’,
a trémolo, verdiales and guajiras, with the same
starting point. “Starting from tradition, from the
legacy left to us by our predecessors in flamenco, since
as a result of and thanks to that, we compose with the rigor
and the seriousness needed to make an album. And I put all
my heart into it for it to sound as traditional and as much
like me as possible”, the guitarist elaborates.
And on this album, which will come out
a decade after ‘Punto de encuentro’, for it
to sound like tradition and like Cañizares, the guitar
remains practically alone. “I like things simple;
I think you can achieve great things with simplicity”,
he declares. And therefore, the accompaniment is just “clapping,
box drum, a bass on three tracks and percussions for round-trip
songs like the guajira and a rumba, to provide color”,
the musician details. To which he adds that “in general,
it’s very traditional in the flamenco sense of the
word, with a lot of clapping… and a lot of guitar
solos, of course. The guitar is always in the foreground”.
Thus, the reflection live will be faithful, with the entire
crew present at the studio - Rafa Villalba on percussion,
Íñigo Goldaracena on bass, Ángel Muñoz
on baile and box drum and Charo Espino on baile and castanets
-, plus Juan Carlos Gómez on second guitar.
In the laboratory
Just like the composing and the performance,
the recording has been pampered. “The sound quality
is a premise to me”, Cañizares certifies. And
all you have to do is glance around this studio where the
disc is being finished. “We’re working here
side by side with Carlo González, who’s the
engineer I take with me live, and to me he’s another
musician in the recording. Between all of us, we’ve
achieved an album which I feel really satisfied with. Everyone’s
overall opinion is really good. Not home equipment, professional
equipment; the best microphones and machines cost a lot
of money”, he affirms.
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“When
I record an album I spend a lot more time tuning than
really recording”
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But it hasn’t just been a matter
of pressing the ‘record’ button. “I’ve
been the explorer. I went with a machete into this jungle
to pave the way for those who were later going to stick
in clapping and other instruments. I began recording it
with a metronome and according to my guitar, everything
else has been added. The recording process has been hard
because when you tend to be a perfectionist like me, you
don’t like to leave things ‘sort of’,
and that leads to a lot of headaches”. He recalls
moments when he had a well-performed take, but suddenly
noticed, for example, that the guitar wasn’t uniformly
tuned”. So it had to be repeated. The trials of working
with an instrument made with ‘live’ materials:
“When I record an album I spend a lot more time tuning
than really recording, due to the instrument itself, because
it isn’t an exact instrument. It depends on the temperature,
the wood, the strings… on many factors”. But
nothing daunts him. “It’s harder because of
that, but they’re always experiences and you learn
a lot in the studios. The studio is a laboratory which everything
is amplified in; both the good and the bad”.
But following a year of intense, meticulous
work, everything seems to indicate that what will be amplified
will be the good. Cañizares has once again plunged
into “flamenco music, the music I’ve grown up
with and which I identify the most with”. Music which,
no matter what he’s doing, “is always parallel
in my head”. And he’s done so to create ‘Cuerdas
del alma’, an album on which “always starting
from tradition, I try and contribute my originality to the
music I love, which is flamenco”. Experiences, intentions…
and soul.
