MARINA HEREDIA, FLAMENCO CANTAORA. INTERVIEW
“This album is me”
Silvia Calado. Granada, May 2010
Translation: Joseph Kopec
When ‘La voz del agua’
was released, she announced that album was beginning the
road she wanted to travel as a cantaora. So ‘Marina’
is the confirmation of those words. The third disc by Marina
Heredia has her first name as its title, which indicates
personality and simplicity. They’re the two features
of this album, which the cantaora talked to us about in
her dressing room amidst bouquets and make-up jars, minutes
before the premiere in Granada. It had to be there, in the
magical city whose landscape combines La Alhambra with the
white peaks of Sierra Nevada, it had to be in her city and
with much of its sound. “I always like to give my
native land a little gift because it’s given me a
lot. And on every album I hope to recover some of that flamenco
from Granada which is unknown to the greater public”,
the artist states while the guitars are still being tested
on stage, while the evening falls upon the red fortress.
And in fact, Marina and ‘Marina’
have a lot from this land. She recovers the fandangos of
the dances from the caves which she used to hear her grandmother
sing, she does a new selection from the endless source of
Moorish tangos and she has finally worked up the courage
to pay tribute por soleá to her father El Parrón,
a cantaor who “has always had a very personal way
of living flamenco”. She rules out having done so
to make him known, since “he’s never cared very
much about people knowing who he is”. But, of course,
if “it’s useful for people to get to know him
and they’re lucky enough to listen to him, then great”.
Moreover, the tribute hasn’t been simple for her:
“The soleá has been really hard for me to record.
He commands so much respect in me that I went to the studio
to sing it and I couldn’t. But I knew that I had to
do it because it’s been very present at my house and
my father has sung it really well all his life. He has that
deep voice which is just right for the soleá, which
gives it that tragedy. I knew when I did the soleá,
I had to do it really well. And on this occasion I was a
little bit bolder in the end and I recorded it”.
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“The
soleá has been really hard for me to record”
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Nothing to do with the mastery she naturally
has over styles like the tangos and the fandangos from here,
from Albaycín itself. Many fans and more newcomers
are going to be surprised by the close, archaic air of the
fandangos. Marina explains what they are: “They’re
abandolaos, very similar to the verdiales from Málaga,
but I think they come from the same place... they come from
where they want to come from”. And specifically, the
one she performs “is a style which has always been
done in Sacromonte’s dancing; it was a cante for dancing
and Pepito Albaycín stopped them and pushed them
forward”. She had her reference so nearby that they
were easy for her to do: “My grandmother was a cantaora
and I have a lot of old recordings of her where she does
this type of fandangos”. The tangos are even more
familiar, with that deep granaíno trademark which
she already recorded on her previous album: “The good
thing about Granada with tangos is that it has a lot of
variety; you can do a great many cantes with them. I don’t
know if they’re better or worse, but they are totally
different, for example, to those of Triana. They have like
a really Moorish sound, a little because of the mixture
which we’ve had here. And they aren’t a challenge
like the soleá, since we have them in everyday life,
at our own parties”, she details.
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“There
are little tributes to the artists who help me, inspire
me and teach me the most every day”
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But the album’s repertoire doesn’t
just stay in Granada; rather it covers every cantaor territory,
from where the sun rises until where it sets. As Marina
Heredia affirms, “there are little tributes to the
artists who help me, inspire me and teach me the most every
day”. Looking at Jerez, she makes a reference to La
Paquera, “with a seguiriya which even though it isn’t
hers, it’s inspired by her”. Going along the
Mediterranean coast, there’s a song por bulerías
by El Chino de Málaga, ‘Entre chinos’,
“with stuff recorded from private parties and previously
unreleased cantes which we’ve found”. And reaching
the east of the peninsula, she makes a cante from Levante
her own which at the same time is a tribute to Encarnación
Fernández, a cantaora from La Unión, who,
in Heredia’s opinion, “deserves a bit of attention
because she’s a woman, because she’s a gypsy
and because she’s contributed a great deal to that
field artistically”. On the way, there’s a vindication
following up on the advances to achieve real equality between
men and women: “It’s really hard to contribute
to this field and if you’re a woman, even more so.
Women have been set aside a little bit from these types
of cantes. Yes, they sing very amusingly, but not... serious
cantes”.
-Is that still like that, Marina?
-No, not any more. They didn’t
use to let us, but we could have been…
* * *
Marina Heredia and El Parrón
in the backstage (Photo Daniel
Muñoz) |
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A little while ago, Marina Heredia received
a very special visit in this same dressing room.
-Are you nervous?
-A little bit.
-Come on, this is a piece of cake for
you.
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“Parrita
has been one of my favorite artists ever since I was
little”
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The one who said this was Vicente
Crespo ‘Parrita’, an artist sitting on the
fence between flamenco and pop ballads, with a thirty-year
career, an overwhelming personality and more influence than
many people would like to admit. Of course, that isn’t
the case of Marina, who opens her third disc with ‘No
me lo creo’, the emblematic song by the Valencia-born
artist, who she is a total fan of. “Parrita has been
one of my favorite artists ever since I was little. I have
all of his albums, I know all his songs. Every time he used
to come to Granada, the first one screaming there was me,
as if the Beatles had come”. Marina says one day she
worked up the courage to phone him. She proposed for him
to be a guest star in this premiere and he answered: “Whatever
you want, whatever day you want and whatever time you want”.
And here he is.
-What does he think of your version?
-He loves it. Moreover, Diego del Morao
plays on the album and that’s an unbelievable party.
Another person who didn’t want to
miss this premiere night is Farruquito,
author of the disc’s alegrías entitled ‘Sed’.
In a little while he’ll be up on stage to also add
his baile to his lyrics and his music. And Marina beside
herself with bliss: “I’m mad about Farruquito
as an artist, as a bailaor, as a guitarist, as a cantaor…
He isn’t a cantaor or a guitarist or a poet, but he
has that aura which only some have”. It was just a
matter of a phone call and “he called me up two days
later to tell me he had them”. According to the cantaora’s
description, “they’re really fresh, they sound
like Cádiz, they smack of salt and sound really current”.
Although he hasn’t played such a
big role in the composing as he did on ‘La voz del
agua’, Jerez-born guitarist José
Quevedo ‘Bolita’ is again a key piece on
an album by Marina Heredia. The cantaora emphasizes it like
this: “Bola is fifty percent of me artistically. I
tell him about some paranoia of mine and then he racks his
brain to put it into practice. We get along really well
in that; he understands me really well, we’ve been
working together for many years. He’s quick and fresh
when working. And as a guitarist, imagine what he’s
like, a studio… mouse”. So there have been months
of exchange: “This disc was a little more wrought
than the previous one because they’re cantes. The
decision just had to be made about who was going to perform
in each song. And oh well, many e-mails, for we flamencos
are really modern. I’ll send you a link and it takes
me three hours to open the link, I call him up, I can’t
do it, you’re so clumsy... When it’s not that,
then he comes to Granada for a few days, which he loves.
He always tells me to look for a little place to stay for
him, he wants a cave”.
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“Bola
is fifty percent of me artistically”
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And that understanding between the two
of them is what has made ‘Marina’ such a sincere
album. “It’s a really personal album, but we
also wanted to give it that title because it’s really
simple: it just has cante, guitar, clapping and box drum.
Traditional cantes and traditional lyrics, it all responds
to the intention of making it classical”. But naming
it was difficult: “It was hard for me to give it a
title, but one day I stopped to think and asked myself:
what is this album?”. And she gave herself the answer:
“This album is me, it has nothing else, it’s
Marina”. In fact, she says she reasserts herself “in
my freedom of expression as a cantaora. And working is much
more comfortable when you’re doing something which
truly comes from within; you perform it much better. You’re
doing it with your five senses; there’s no sense which
is telling you, no, not here”.
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“The
album had to be made because you have to have a medium,
annually if possible, for people to hear you”
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What has changed in this project is the
way of having it reach the market. If on ‘La voz del
agua’ she tackled self-production and self-published,
with ‘Marina’ she employs an intermediate formula:
“In this case what we’ve done is self-produce
it and when the master was totally closed, we sold it to
the record company and they’ve taken care of the manufacturing
and distribution, authors, marketing... And I think it’s
a good combination, since if the artist has to work on all
of it, it’s really hard”. She admits that it
was “both a rewarding and a hard experience, since
you have to take a lot of time away from the cante in order
to devote it to everything else”. But the truth is
that she doesn’t know if she will repeat it again,
even more so in a context as changing as the record industry
is today. Illegal downloads worry her, but she’s sure
that the artistic level hasn’t been affected and trusts
that, as has been the case so far, the work lies in live
shows: “The album had to be made because you have
to have a medium, annually if possible, for people to hear
you and see you evolve. José
Mercé has been the only flamenco topping the
charts, but that’s a rare case. What other flamenco
has achieved that?”. Hardly anyone, that’s true.
But I wish other flamencos like Marina Heredia would also
achieve it.
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