Nacho Arimany, percussionist and composer.
Interview
“You don’t need to
make up new rhythms,
but rather go on deciphering cante’s rhythm”
Silvia Calado. Madrid, February 2007
Translation: Joseph Kopec
Flamenco looks out at the world.
Little by little, the musical dialogue is on the rise,
the borders thin. And further proof of the transit along
that road is World Flamenco Septet, a project led by Nacho
Arimany. The Madrilenian percussionist and composer has
dared to experiment with something apparently as basic
as the “commitment to music, admiration and respect”,
bringing together flamencos and jazz players. It happened
one afternoon last spring in New York, in a circle of
musicians with a bailaora in the middle. And it worked.
The result is ‘Silent light’, an album carrying
within it a firm philosophy with regards to creation,
percussion and the evolution of flamenco... facing the
world.
A pumpkin from Mali, the gateway to flamenco
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Nacho Arimany (Photo:
Daniel Muñoz) |
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A corner in Lavapiés with the
lingering aroma of tea inspires the conversation. Sitting
on a rug in his house-studio, a former neighborhood bakery,
Nacho Arimany relates that he entered the world of flamenco
through a curious gateway: the Spanish Dance and Flamenco
Choreography Contest of Madrid. First, he won a prize
for a farruca composed for the bailaora Cintia. Next,
he was asked to form a percussion group. And he was already
inside. Moreover, he had an original added value: “I
started to introduce the use of the pumpkin as a percussion
instrument, which has made a place for me in flamenco.
Though it was all little by little, from scratch, approaching
the style with the box drum. I’d been instilled
a classical music education at home, and flamenco meant
breaking away from that”.
Academies, tablaos and baile, forever
baile, were his school for eight years. The calls then
started coming from the companies: “The most important
step was taking part in ‘Live’ and ‘De
amor y odio’ by Joaquín Cortés, which
made me learn another style”. And he developed it
little by little, composing for bailaoras such as Rocío
Molina and Rafaela Carrasco, sharing with musicians like
saxophonist Jorge
Pardo... His collaboration with Gerardo Núñez
in the show ‘Los cuatro elementos’ at Flamenco
Festival USA was a turning point: “I stayed in New
York for a month at saxophonist Javier Vercher’s
place and he was really interested in that timbre I was
working on”. And they prepared a concert together
for the University of New York, an experience of use to
him to “go on growing in timbre; I felt that the
pumpkin was more earthly, even sharper than the box drum.
In New York, I began to explore and trust more in what
I was doing. I started stringing together the compositions
from that encounter which, beginning with flamenco, were
in my head”.
Though the concept had to be defined
more exactly: “It had to have flamenco metrics,
but giving it a more universal style, like jazz”.
And without giving up the element which had opened the
way to him: baile. Nacho Arimany explains that “baile
makes me understand the style of the music, since to me
it’s a fundamental part of staging the music and
the base of the album”. And he reflects that “the
music isn’t an esthetic end, but rather a channel
to generate movement or communication”. He deduces
this maxim from “my travels in Africa, where I discovered
that percussion is an element for festivals and the most
important thing there is for people to express themselves
by dancing, which is motivation to create and to connect
with people’s most intimate selves”.
All of these thoughts come together on
the album ‘World Flamenco Septet. Silence light’,
which started off as an assignment for the Canaries Film
Festival. “There, we proposed that the universe
of music and dance is the same, that we have the same
need to move”. In Javier Vercher and Lionel Loueke,
“I found that same version of the sentence from
jazz, like a cosmic commitment to music of playing to
reach a certain place. That’s the kind of jazz I
learn from. And we offer the tradition of baile and the
strength of flamenco to jazz”.
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