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ON GUALBERTO, MUSIC AND FLAMENCO:
"If you want to be true to yourself, you just
have to stick to your culture"
Despite the fact that, deep down, Gualberto's work clings to the roots,
there must be those who say that isn't flamenco...
I have never tried to do flamenco. I base myself on flamenco.
Is this flamenco? (And he plays a seguiriya on the veena).
A flamenco artist knows.
In the few approaches there have been to classical music,
the trite argument has again been recurred to that flamenco
displays a certain complex...
I think it's the opposite. It depends. I'm not
a tablao flamenco artist, I'm not a traditional flamenco artist.
I'm a flamenco artist because I was born here and I use its
structures to express myself. I mean, I don't even try. On
the contrary, when I write things for classical musicians,
they know that you either have or don't have that little flamenco
something I add to the guitar. But I also lack things from
classical musicians. A classical musician who plays flamenco
has a complex because he doesn't plunge into it entirely.
Since I'm always in the middle, I can take up flamenco and base
myself on it. If you're true to yourself, you just have to stick
to your culture. I grew up here in Seville, but my references
were the Beatles, Jimmy Hendrix and the Rolling Stones. Flamenco
artists too, but I had that so close to me that I went around
the world when I was sixteen years old. And at twenty I went
to America to meet Frank Zappa and Hendrix and everybody. And
whether you like it or not, I mix that with flamenco.
What is left of those references in Gualberto?
A great deal. I recently played the electric guitar in Burgos
because they held the twenty-fifth anniversary of a concert
that many groups played in there. You don't forget that. But
if you're a musician, your life progresses and you pick up new
techniques. I didn't know music when I started to play, and
it therefore never occurred to me to write for a harp and a
cello. Once you learn, and you learn because you have the need
to express yourself another way, then you start to use the flamenco
base without any complex whatsover. It carries the essence,
but not the total shape. I've also done it with rock. Nuevos
Tiempos was the first Andalusian rock group, from which Triana
evolved, the first one I played in, and from there came Medina
Azahara...
What do you think of the current Andalusian
contribution to pop rock music?
If we're talking about what is called flamenco fusion... well,
it isn't really based so much on flamenco as on Latin rhythms
such as salsa, rumba, tango, festival tunes and even rock. It's
OK, but mixing flamenco with the music we used to make as the
Smash with Hendrix, Pink Floyd... was really great. It's not
like salsa, which is more for dancing. In Triana Jesús (de la
Rosa) loved the Doors; we even used to do versions of their
songs.
Gualberto's studio is the ideal place to erase the present and
go back in time. Sitting on the carpet, Hindu-style, surrounded
by instruments, musics, incenses, and a beer or two, we suffered
some kind of bewitchment that took us back to the rocking North
America in the early seventies. And Gualberto tells incredible
stories of how musicians flipped out when he played flamenco,
of that recording 'Summer en el Barrio', how he met his favorite
group in New York, through a friend who was an opera singer,
pacifist and ecologist. And how he became a studio musician,
without knowing music, for people of the likes of Aretha Franklin,
how he taught The Band (Bob Dylan's group) how to play bulerías
and lived with them for a month, how he recorded 'Taranto' on
the electric guitar for Jimmy Hendrix, and how he played at
the same club as John McLaughlin.
And the story of Woodstock... "I appear in the
film because they showed me as the prototype of an American
hippy. And me with my accent saying "yo, Spanish". I paid
thirty-some dollars, and afterwards it was tough luck. A disaster...
half a million people. The food ran out at the supermarkets
and the army started dropping food by air. I was lucky because
a lady in town gave me food and even clean clothes because
I reminded her of her nephew or I don't know who. And there
was music constantly. Santana, Raví Shankar, The Who were
there... I was carrying a U.S. Army sleeping bag, a sitar
in one hand and a flamenco guitar in the other. And I just
kept on playing. And all because I went on vacation to see
my girlfriend who was there at college studying Greek. One
day I met Zappa in Central Park and when he was in Seville
we played for hours and he remembered that night. I met living
legends and I just freaked out. But many times it was the
other way around; they were the ones gaping at me when I played
flamenco".
What do you think flamenco has which makes it understood regardless
of borders, cultures and languages?
Flamenco has several things which makes it understood. What
a musician appreciates most is emotion. Flamenco is pure emotion.
It has a very flashy, different, complicated technique, to
the point that blues and rock are played anywhere in the world,
but you have to be born here to play flamenco. It's a very
complicated technique which is mixed with the feeling and
the culture. The most virtuous guitar in the world is flamenco
guitar. There is so much wealth... and I think that it's because
of the emotion the artists release. I myself like flamenco
as a source of inspiration, but I've never tried to do traditional
flamenco. I might have played it by right when I was abroad...
If you're a flamenco artist, you play what you feel. And how
am I going to give up what I grew up with in my youth? I come
and go.
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"The bounds of experimentation lie on oneself"
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And where do the bounds of experimentation lie?
The bounds lie always in the intuition, in the musician's talent. If a musician
wants to do something commercial, he isn't going to go in depth. If you want to
do flamenco and the music you write is to express yourself, you open yourself
up to criticism. But you do it knowingly with the intention of self expression,
not for the massess who want something simple without complications... (He starts
singing "un movimiento sexy" and laughs). The bounds lie in oneself.
Is it difficult to make new types of music? Someone once told me, "your friend
Carlos Cano says nobody makes up anything ", and I answered "he made that up ".
When you have a feeling and you express it, it's yours and yours only. Then something
new has to come out. And it could possibly sound like something else by coincidence.
But, for instance, what I was playing before (and he picks up the veena)... I
don't think it sounds like anything. And a flamenco artist listens to it and undoubtedly
sees the seguiriya by Tomás Pavón. Flamenco has a lot of wealth to be used. I
compare the musician with the painter. The painter has no reason to use just green
and blue... there are no bounds. But I always have to be in a mood to begin; that
is the seed.
Continue
revista@flamenco-world.com
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