Interview with Raúl Rodríguez, musical director of Son de la Frontera

“If we want to make local music, we have
to approach it with a universal perspective”

Silvia Calado. Madrid, July 2004
Translation: Gary Cook

Five musicians walk the fine line between flamenco ond the other musical styles the world has to offer, between traditional and modern... Five musicians thrown together by life's little coincidences in Morón de la Frontera, more precisely in the belly of Diego del Gastor's guitar. With the legacy of the famous Morón guitarist as their departure point, and with a tres - a Cuban guitar with three pairs of strings - as the craft in which to sail to the opposite shores of the Atlantic, Son de la Frontera provide a musical offering whose input is local and whose output is universal. With the ample experience of their time spent playing with Martirio behind them, Raúl Rodríguez (tres cubano), Paco de Amparo (guitar), Pepe Torres (dance), Moi de Morón (cante) and Manuel Flores (compás) are natural and inquisitive enough to throw a hitherto unopened door wide open. “This isn't a journey into the vaults, just a way of making music that maybe we need today.”

Son de la Frontera (Photo: Mario Pacheco)

How was Son de la Frontera founded?

The Diego del Gastor school was already in place and his relatives were playing on the circuit. I started going to Morón in '95 as a guitarist, looking for that source of inspiration. The following year, I started to meet the people from my generation of that family, the great nephews of Diego del Gastor, the nephews of Dieguito de Morón, of Juan del Gastor, of Paco del Gastor and of Andorrano, who are grandsons of Joselero. And I started playing with them. In '97 my mother - Martirio - brought me a Cuban tres back from Havana. She'd been invited by Compay Segundo to go and sing with him. And then I saw it: we could play flamenco falsetas with this instrument. For a few years I just played it at parties, with no kind of aim to develop it into something or make use of it in some way. Then when I saw that it wasn't a bad idea, and that Andorrano, Dieguito and the older ones liked it, we decided to make use of it. When I met Paco de Amparo and Pepe Torres (the two great nephews of Diego del Gastor), and Manuel Flores and Luis Torres, Andorrano's son, we started working as a backing group for Martirio from 1998 onward. We spent the last six years making records with her -‘Flor de piel’ and ‘Mucho corazón’- and doing all the tours, especially in Latin America and the U.S.

How much was the birth of the group down to Martirio?

That contact had a lot to do with it. The work with my mother as producer and arranger was to take all those boleros and tangos and give them the flamenco treatment. It was like trying to do the same thing as Fernanda de Utrera did with Diego del Gastor thirty years earlier, when they sang boleros and popular cuplés. Doing that kind of cultural exchange, but in a modern context, I tried to put that great style of playing into contact with musical styles from the Americas, which I think have a lot more in common with flamenco than people think. We played these flamenco falsetas over Venezuelan, Colombian, Cuban, Argentinean rhythms... And we saw that the code wasn't as air-tight as people think.

	"I like to struggle to stop Diego del Gastor music being thought of as dead and buried"

How would you describe the music you make?

The songwriting is based on music by Diego del Gastor. And using his falsetas as a starting point, we draw everything out of them we can. We twist and turn it in every direction, never leaving his music, which is extremely rich, and at the same time needs to be taken to a wider audience. I like to struggle to stop it being thought of as dead and buried. It's very much alive.

The piece ‘Guitarras de cal’ gave rise to the debate as to whether 'toque de Morón' constitutes a school in itself, whether it's a way of playing...

You have to look at it in context. The only instrument there was in Morón to play popular music on during the 20th century was the guitar... and to be more precise, Diego's guitar. There is a school, I say that because there are plenty of creations which come out of Morón, not just techniques. As Diego was the only guitarist to put all the music together, he absorbed all the influences into the belly of his guitar. His best-known falseta probably comes from ‘La Zarzamora’. And he also played in front of Americans from the military base in Morón, who brought with them a very modern concept of music, very sixties, very counter-cultural. And he had to convince them. There are a lot of features that are closer to blues or rock than those that many flamenco guitarists have done since. I feel like in Morón Diego's guitar was a music box. And today you just have to open the box and let it play itself, it not only has its own stamp, but it's musically very rich - both very modern and very traditional at the same time.

So starting there, what do you hope to contribute?

When you put the tres in there, it begins to break down a little. The sonority starts to broaden, there's plectrum work, that has parallels in other string instruments and the steel strings which long since disappeared from flamenco make a reappearance. We want to show we can take this music to heart, play it respectfully, intelligently but in a carefree way. If in Sierra Leone they can make their own music based on what the elders sing, then we can do it too, so long as your approach is one of a new musical style. It shouldn't be a journey into the vaults, just a way of immersing yourself in a form of music that maybe we need today

Son de la Frontera (Photo: Mario Pacheco)

When you pick up the tres, do you really bring Cuban music into the equation?

It isn't an instrument that's manufactured by Gibson or Yamaha or Fender, whereas bongos and other native instruments of Cuba are. And as it isn't a globalized instrument, you never see the instruments, or strings for them, or learning materials... only in Cuba. When she brought it there was nothing I could study - I just had to buy records and learn to play the tunes by ear. But I'm self-taught, so that's what I always did anyway. I realized that to be a good Cuban ‘tresero’ I'd have to spend a lot of time working on it out in Havana, and it looked pretty unlikely. But there was a way. To make myself drunk with it, immerse myself in it, really live the instrument and its sound. I saw that there was a way I could take it by giving it a personal touch that if I were over there would probably be trickier to do. Over here, playing music from over there was a weird thing to do. And to me it seemed like a beautiful situation, a game of tennis back-and-forth, because the instrument is a hybrid descendent of the guitar and the lute which was developed in Cuba by poor Andalusian farm-workers, the 'guajiros'. The fact that it's come back here playing flamenco music and that we take it back out there to show them, like we did at CubaDisco, produces a beautiful sequence of exchanges, exchanges of understanding.

So tell me, what kind of welcome did you get at CubaDisco?

That was where it all started to come together. I was really nervous because it's trying to use one of their instruments to make different music. And it's played differently; I had to look for other techniques, other ways of tuning it, other formulae. And they were well-received. People show such generosity there... and, like my mother says, there's so much soul per square meter, that they're never gonna be suspicious of you so long as you aren't looking to take anything from them. And my intention is just the opposite, to present an interesting point of view that might stimulate them.

	"We try and imagine what would be playing on the borderline, a millimeter before where flamenco begins and a millimeter beyond where it ends"

What meaning does the surname ‘de la frontera’ hold?

We're playing at being on the borderline, at not being from anywhere in particular, just from that place which divides mental spaces, patriotic spaces and cultural spaces. We try and imagine what would be playing on the borderline, a millimeter before where flamenco begins and a millimeter beyond where it ends. Who draws the line, what decides where the border should be between old-fashioned and modern, between local and universal, between flamenco and other musical styles in the world?

So is music from the Americas a path that needs further exploration?

There's more and more common ground, but writers always take an extreme opinion. Flamenco historians have neglected the American sources of input, without realizing that historically they were getting it all wrong. The place where the boats moored before embarking on their journeys to Cuba was in Cadiz; when they got to the other side of the Atlantic, the first port of call was Havana. All those drunken nights on the town, songs, jokes, clothes... all ended up there. Those expeditions went on for years, plundering the mainland, and the last meeting place before returning was in Havana. And they went back to Cadiz and Triana, the two ports which happen to also be the motherlands of flamenco. That was happening just as the key Cuban styles were starting to be established.

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