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As a guitarist, do you feel the pressure of having to compose?

	Miguel Ángel Cortés (Photo: Daniel Muñoz)

It seems like a nightmare, as if we were enslaved to the guitar. I’ve realized over time, and I mean I’m one of the youngest ones, that you have to enjoy things more. Since I had my son I’ve also seen that things go away, that then you go over to the drawer, as I usually say, and what happens? Things come by themselves in music; you have to work on them and you have to seek them, but if a really good detail comes one day, you have to get on the ball and develop it. That business of spending twenty hours there to see if you can force it out, that’s not cool. That’s an unbearable situation. You have to get your hands ready because we make a living from this and you have to be in front of the crowd. I don’t see it as an unbearable situation. And it’s not that I don’t study; I study more than anyone. Then if something comes out, since we’re really modern and we have our mike and our Protools, then you save it. And it’s nearly as if you were putting together a puzzle. You have a little piece, another bit of soleá comes out, your metronome... and you compose as you go along. Nowadays there’s a lot of technology; it isn’t like before when there didn’t even use to be a cassette recorder.

(The piped-in music continues. He constantly moves his fingers while talking...)

A few days ago you presented ‘Bordón de trapo’ in Granada. Tonight you’re accompanying Sonia Miranda. Do you approach both registers differently?

Totally. The day before yesterday we had the presentation in Granada... and it has nothing to do with it. When you play for singing, you’ve got to have really good technique, but the concept’s different. Your own concert is like a boxing match; you’re the star on stage enduring a round lasting an hour and a half. You have to have tremendously clean hands as far as the sound and a really purified technique. Here, for singing you do embellishments and a couple of falsetas for each cante and the lead-in. It’s like lying in bed in comparison (he jokes). Of course, you always have your responsibility. You get that feeling of breathlessness when you’re solo. If you don’t respond, right away people make a gesture to you with their hand to see what’s going on. That’s what we guitarists like most because you do your own music, but it’s what makes you get ready most. Before the Granada concert there were days I spent playing from nine in the morning to midnight without realizing it. In a concert like that, if your one hundred percent at home, on stage you’re always eight-five percent, no matter how much you’re used to it. You have to be a bit more than a hundred percent at home... But the truth is that it changes a lot. Just like when you play for dancing, it’s a different style, you’re more into the rhythm and your wrist gets dislocated from strumming. And when you go and play for singing it’s another rung on the ladder; you don’t get the tact, all fake fingernails... a drag. When you go with percussion, you wrap yourself up a little bit more and it sounds more for the people, you move your body more, it’s liked. But when a guitarist is most discovered and is seen in full form is when he’s solo. That’s why hardly anyone does it. When Gerardo was solo at the past Bienal, people flipped out. He went non-stop for nearly two hours and you couldn’t even hear him breathe. That’s fantastic. And nevertheless, he’s more in the shadows than others for whatever the reasons may be, perhaps because the people he’s been with are more famous...

Miguel Ángel Cortés (Photo: Daniel Muñoz)

What do the voices that have collaborated on your album suggest to you?

We all know they’re leading flamenco figures; that’s obvious. Carmen Linares is maturity and experience. She’s a person who brought me out since I was a boy; I was seventeen years old and she’d just come from accompanying people on baile such as Mariquilla, Javier Barón... She grabbed me with my brother and she’s the one who made me learn to play for singing. Esperanza Fernández is my accomplice. I got to Seville with one hand in front of me and the other behind me, exhausted, stiff. By the way, there were some rumors in the flamenco world saying I’d had an argument with Carmen, but that’s not true at all, the thing is at that point in time I preferred to do my music, to try it with other cantaores. In fact, we keep on working together. And Esperanza took me in like a brother. She’s a cantaora who has one of the most flamenco echoes there is right now and masters the compás better than anyone. And Arcángel is a diamond in the rough, a glorious-sounding voice which you listen to and it leaves you saying: what happened? He’s taught me things without knowing it, because he’s really fond of guitar and he’s got a particular sense of rhythm: where he places his voice, where he makes me put the tones when I don’t want to, because it goes with another really good sense of rhythm, like what’s being sung and what’s being played nowadays. He has a lot of experience and a really great gift I don’t even think he himself knows about. Camarón died and everybody was singing Camarón-style. And along comes someone different singing at a different speed, in a different timbre... That’s why he’s gotten to where he is.

(And Miguel Ángel keeps moving his fingers...)

And has that also happened in guitar with regards to Paco de Lucía?

	"What we young people are changing is the sense of rhythm

What we young people are changing – I include myself with colleagues such as Niño Josele, Diego de Morao... – is the sense of rhythm. Before, it used to be euphoria to play the notes faster and the rhythm was there like a metronome; it used to change less. And now what we’re following is that trend, which Paco began, of changing things. Now two details are being played with more. It isn’t the typical falseta with the melody twice and its finish. There are no falsetas now, there’s music and music can last this far or that far; however you feel it. It’s a good detail, that’s it, what does it matter. As long as it sounds like its style... The technique’s important, but there are already kids who play well and don’t worry so much about using the metronome and working their hand off.

(Miguel Ángel Cortés’ keeps on fluently making music...)

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