Festival Bienal 2008 special interview with Manolo Sanlúcar, flamenco guitarist

“The first thing I see in the mirror
every morning is my father”

Juan José Téllez, 10th September 2008
Translation: Gary Cook

Manolo Sanlúcar doubles up at the 2008 Festival Bienal

The man to whom Seville's Festival Bienal de Arte Flamenco pays tribute is twice as old as the event - now in its fifteenth edition and thirty years old. Manolo Sanlúcar has 64 years behind him, and his eyes are those of one who has nothing to lose now. In the late afternoon of his life, the death of his son is a wound that will probably never heal. And maybe that's why he takes comfort from his memories. Now, after headlining at the festival's opening gala, he awaits his concert at Teatro Lope de Vega on 19th September, where he'll present ‘Baldomero Ressendi, la voz del color’.

Manolo Sanlúcar (Photo Daniel Muñoz)

“I studied to be a painter,” confesses the man, Manuel Muñoz Alcón. “At the age of 13 Ventura Millán used to give me classes. He was an amazing self-taught painter. But from the age of eight I played guitar too. The first time I remember playing was at my brother Isidro's christening party. I must've been eight or nine years old and I was godfather. My father still hadn't given me a lesson and I already fingered the guitar, kind of plucking. When my father was young he used to cycle to Jerez to have a class with Javier Molina. Later he'd forget everything he learned on the way back because he had to cycle another thirty miles.”

His father's name was Isidro and he worked as a baker, although he tried other trades, and his life was an eventful one. “Of course, his generation was unique. He never had shoes until he was 16. That's when he wore his first pair of lace-up canvas sandals. He was in the war for two years, they were hard times but he loved Andalucía for its beauty and its culture. My father gave me much more than the guitar. I used to sit down next to him and he'd start speaking about his people, about flamenco people. I didn't know whether they were my family or not, but from that moment on they became part of my family: El Pelusa, Canalejas, El Pinto, El Sevillano… If I'd had a different father I would've been someone different.”

“I loved the bakery. I'm a really good baker. I was a master baker before I turned fourteen. The baker's trade was an art back then, but now it isn't really. Back then we got the dough and we'd make plaited loaves or loaves in the shape of underwear. And we knew how we had to make the bread if it was a dry day or if it was a damp day. There were special loaves that were like chocolates: you broke them open and inside was a ball of bread that kind of sprang up - that wasn't just an artifact of cooking, it was the result of a carefully-planned process of preparation.”

All of his brothers and sisters - José Miguel, María José and the great Isidro, continually bring back memories of the family's recently deceased patriarch, who influenced them both genetically and in everyday life. “My father's mother gave birth to three children. And she went out to clean three different houses. I wonder how one person can work three half days. My father saw her bury his sister - her youngest daughter who died because the rats bit her.”

His sister María José remembers the little old man who made music with bread, and who before he died wanted them to take him upstairs to see the portrait of his mother one last time. “My father told me the worst thing in the world is a fixed wage,” Manolo recalls. “We all really admired him and we talk about him constantly, as if he were still alive. Because he is still alive. One day there was going to be a poetry recital in Sanlúcar and he bought tickets for balcony seats. I was five and I could draw you that moment from memory, how we were sitting and how he cried as the poems were recited. I saw my father cry twice, and that was the first time. It scared me to see him weep, but later I saw him again, applauding joyfully with a tear still rolling down his cheek. And even though I was only little, it struck me that words and beauty could cause such an effect.”

“The first thing I see in the mirror every morning is my father. I've got his face, but not his pleasant disposition - he was a really charming guy. My father told me I was a boy for six months. I was already shaving when I was twelve. At that age the flour trucks would deliver two hundred pound sacks, and my uncle and I would bring them in. I met Ana when I was 15.”

Isidro remembers his father passing on the idea that a handshake meant more than any written contract. And he instilled his ways in Manolo too: “A sense of responsibility has been key in my life. I've worked my fingers to the bone "playing" the guitar. Up until the death of my son, I even did my exercises on Sunday, three hours practice a day minimum.”

In the shadow of La Niña de los Peines

	Manolo Sanlúcar (Photo Daniel Muñoz)

It was his father, too, who opened doors for him with his guitar, and who got his career on the move. It seems like Manolo Sanlúcar is writing a novel when he recalls that magical day, maybe in 1956: “Pepe Pinto had a bar in Seville in La Campana, called Bar Pinto. And word had reached there that there was a kid in Sanlúcar that played the guitar really well. So he called for me to go and play for them. My father came and said, ‘Hey, the moment's come - Pepe Pinto wants to hear you’. My father used to take me when I was going to play, but this time he told me El Quija was going to take me.”

El Quija, as Daniel Pineda Novo recalls, was actually called Luis Márquez Alés, who was born in Sanlúcar in 1892 and passed on in 1963. His golden years as an artist had been in Triana, in Coria del Río and according to Manolo Sanlúcar in Alcalá, which he left to return home: “By the sound of it he wanted to get away from all the partying because it was killing him. In Sanlúcar he earned a living selling candy, French toast and sultanas from a long wicker basket. He'd do his rounds but he'd have a rest at home mid-morning, and whenever I went round I'd try to get him to sing. So my father, who was a smart guy, preferred someone well-known to sing for me so that Pinto would actually listen to my playing, and not just any old aficionado hanging around the bar. When he heard the idea, El Quija told him he couldn't because he'd lose a day's takings, and he had to earn a living somehow. And without thinking twice, my father bought the whole basket of sweets that day.”

And so it was that the young guitarist arrived in Los Amarillos with El Quija, a vocalist who Daniel Pineda always sang the praises of, citing the quality and depth of his voice: “His soleá Trianera was so good that Mairena came to listen to him,” according to the writer. And the guitarist says that in fact that first time in Bar Pinto Antonio Mairena was there too - long before he won his Llave de Oro award. He was propped up on the banister rail while the audience were pushing and shoving each other to hear that teenage guitarist better, but mostly to hear the legendary Quija.

“Mairena was there but they hadn't even dragged him over a chair to sit on. It was the first time I ever saw people ripping their shirts. Let's start with a soleá, Pinto suggested. And I did the old Niño Ricardo falseta - which actually came from Ramón Montoya - and it earned me a huge 'olé'. But then El Quija began to sing and I became invisible for the rest of the evening. When he paused I took advantage to play a few flashy routines, but that was when everybody else was exchanging comments. Pastora Pavón was also sitting there. La Niña de los Peines was the eternal mother of Andalucía. Mother to her children, to the sun, to the planets, to the moon. While nobody else even noticed me, she was smiling in my direction.”

Invisible or not, Pepe Pinto liked that boy's performance, but he'd just finished a tour: “Pepe Marchena's begun his, though, so you can go along with him and when he's finished you come with me. But we're not going to be able to pay much,” Tomás Pavón's brother-in-law told him.

“They paid me 50 pesetas - that was 51 years ago. My father had to give me an extra thousand pesetas to kit me out, because he didn't care at all about the money - what he wanted was for me to get a break.”

So switching between the companies of Pinto and Marchena's son, he had the chance to rub shoulders with guitarists like Melchor and Manuel Conte, while La Niña called him “kitten” and sang along in the dressing-rooms when he took out his guitar.

“I remember I was just a kid and Marchena used to address me us 'usted'. Marchena was a genius. You know what he's supposed to have said on his death bed when his wife shut the curtains to keep the sun off him? ‘Don't take away the light, I've got so much darkness left to see.’ As if darkness could be seen.”

Manolo Sanlúcar (Photo Daniel Muñoz)

“I think Paco is perfect”

It was back then that he also forged a friendship with Ramón Sánchez Gómez - Ramón de Algeciras - who was a little older than him and used to accompany Juanito Valderrama: “Ramón was my friend. He was born to be a star and looked like a movie idol. One day he told me he had a brother I had to listen to. And I did. When I met Paco, I could sense that attitude to the guitar, that nobility, that feeling, those musical journeys. He'd get wonderfully tied up in a difficult melody that finished off with a single note. How could someone so young be so easily able to cast off what wasn't necessary? He was three or four years younger than me, and he told me: you're the greatest genius of all. Back then his family was pretty close and he'd come over to my place or I'd go to his and we'd spend days like that.”

Nowadays Manolo Sanlúcar is aware that a sector of flamenco's followers seems to be split between one style and the other, between him and his compadre Paco, as if it were essential to choose between Picasso and Dalí or try to measure and compare their talents. “That kind of comparison makes me blush. I think Paco is perfect. I think between the work he's done with his struggle and what I've done we've covered just about everything possible in flamenco. Paco's life has led him to experiment in some musical areas that I wouldn't dream of entering. And vice-versa. I see myself more in the context of classical music.”

They've worked together on several occasions. For example they shared a sequence in the movie ‘Sevillanas’ by Carlos Saura. And they composed the bulería ‘Compadre’ between them.

“The idea,” recalls Manolo, “was to write an album between the two of us. But when he was free I was busy and the other way round. The day we recorded ‘Compadre’, we were listening to it in the studio and there came a moment when you just couldn't keep silent any more. That was when he told me: “You with your melody and me with the rhythm - there's no-one who can touch us.” I remember that time really well, what a laugh! The two of us spent the day eating biscuits and imagining what the old-time flamenco artists would say if they could see us doing that, like two little boys.”

“To me everything Paco is awarded can never be enough. Paco is well aware that I feel absolute admiration for him. Paco is like nobody else. Everybody thinks he's a genius but I don't just say that for the sake of it. I say he's a genius because of a, b and c. I'm Paco de Lucía's number 1 fan. I think everything he's contributed to flamenco is so valuable, we should all be super-clear about that. What an ugly word - super-clear! So anyway sing Paco's praises, that's OK, but why turn your nose up at me? That makes my blood boil, and it's nothing to do with jealousy. I've never felt the pain of jealousy, I can't allow myself to do that. But it makes me mad. For example, in a different sphere like classical music, people like Carmelo Bernaola or Luis de Pablo - people on a musical level so high that I find it shameful they have to earn a living giving classes. They should be earning enough to be totally dedicated to their musical discoveries.”

“Whenever anything good happens to Paco I'm the first to feel happy because I was the first to see him grow in terms of his musicality and his capacity for commitment.”

So he accompanied his friend when he was named Favorite Son of the Province of Cadiz. He would've accompanied him, too, when he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Cadiz, but nobody invited him to the ceremony: “They never used to let flamenco artists into universities. In the conservatoire violin was fine, and so was the French music that was popular with the nobility, but not the guitar or flamenco. Today a change is starting to happen in that sense, but we have to carry on fighting with talent and with class.”

He was also happy to see the Prince of Asturias award given to the Algeciras-born guitarist, but he's disappointed at the lack of recognition he's received himself. He revealed this in a recent interview with Manuel Bohórquez published in El Correo de Andalucía: “Whenever anything good happens to Paco I'm the first to feel happy because I was the first to see him grow in terms of his musicality and his capacity for commitment,” he affirms.

“All the love I've put in, my commitment to the artform has meant that as well as giving concerts and writing songs I learnt to read music, learnt about harmony, composition, choice of instruments and some facets of what it takes to direct an orchestra. How did I do it? Putting my body and soul into my work. Ana, my wife, could've sent me packing many years ago. So you look at all the effort you put in and then compare it to the real impact of what you do. If you take a wander outside and ask a passer-by if they know who invented penicillin, which probably saved their life more than once, most likely they won't know it was Fleming who came up with it. I don't expect recognition on the streets, but from institutions I do. My music has filled the Metropolitan Hall in New York, and the New York Times decided that ‘Medea’ had been the best ballet of the year. Critics also applauded that audiovisual encyclopedia of Andalucía we presented at the Expo, which we took to the New York Fair. That's all very well, but I need a little pampering from my own people now and then.”

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