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In fact, a musical exchange is already under way...

We have a show we presented in Cuba with a group of Cuban improvisers, called ‘Punto Flamenco: Repentismo a compás’. The 'punto flamenco' is a new palo we cheekily invented, when we discovered that the 'punto guajiro' style and the bulería have exactly the same rhythmical basis. There's so much still to be discovered. I think we can really find a reflection of our music over there. If there were hard disks left over from those days, like from the docks in Havana and Cadiz... In the music we can't see it because flamenco's never been written down, but we can stop and listen to what historians and researchers have to say. I take fusion just as seriously as other people do tradition. And I want to put thought into how I do these things.

What contribution does each of the group members make?

Paco de Amparo plays most of the guitar and is in charge of the 'toque de Morón'. He's the great nephew of Diego del Gastor and grandson of Diego de Morón. He's grown up with that style of playing at home and, apart from that, he has a very modern, rock fingering. He's the perfect person to draw together the Morón school, with a modern and very positive approach.

Pepe Torres makes a fundamental contribution - he's a very humanistic bailaor who plays, sings and dances too: he's triple flamenco. He plays really well, he's familiar with the Morón school of guitar, and is probably one of its leading exponents. In addition, we made good use of the sound of his footwork on this album. Normally on flamenco discs you can hear a tiny burst of ‘zapateado’, it very much takes a back seat, but here we put the sound and the music of the footwork in the spotlight. He also has an extraordinary command of compás because he likes to play in a group, he doesn't try to be a star, but he's a great person. Then there's Moi de Morón, who's the cantaor. He comes from the Joselero school, and also draws on older guys like Juan Talega and Manolito el de María, and he has a real vintage style of cante, he sounds like he's sixty and he's really in his early twenties. He gives a very rich contribution. And then Manuel Flores is the third 'palmero'. And besides handclaps he does a turn dancing too. His style of baile is more old-fashioned - the kind you used to see at house parties, having a laugh, spreading a little joy, conjuring a little magic - adding a positive, humoristic note.

My contribution, apart from playing the tres, is to give it some kind of shape, some direction, a ‘raison d'être’, so it's more than just a group of young flamenco artists from Morón. No, there's a concept here that a local form of music can be universal if the historical conditions allow us to assimilate all that Diego's guitar assimilated. And if we want to make local music, we have to approach it with a universal perspective - it'd be shameful to be purist, fundamentalist, when we can be world citizens. With rights, of course.

Can we go through the track listing...

Diego's repertoire basically covered soleá, seguiriya and bulería. We did three bulerías. One has flamenco tonality: ‘Bulería negra del Gastor’, incorporating all of his main 'falsetas' and using a call-response between baile and compás, with a very modern conception. ‘Bulería del corazón’ is a more modest bulería which is more our own work, it's Paco's and mine, with just one little riff from Diego. It's one of our own creations where you can find harmonically different elements, a more bluesy, more jazzy approach. And the last one, ‘Bulería de las flores’, is the one that plays around directly with Cuban ‘tumbao’ rhythms and also with the 'punto' . There's a soleá too, ‘Como el agua entre las piedras’ - Like water between the stones - that's a showcase of Diego's falsetas, with one of Joselero's cantes. ‘Arabesco’ is one of Diego's own zambras. Normally, in the old days, everyone had a Moorish fantasy... and now there's none of that, which doesn't mean to say it isn't something beautiful. The seguiriya ‘Cambiaron los tiempos’ - Times Changed - has excerpts from a martinete by Joselero that I play on the tres, then we weave the vocals and dance in between the falsetas. The seguiriya is pretty psychedelic, it's nine minutes long. The free soleá ‘Recuerdo’ is Paco's. And the tangos are very old, more designed for the fuller-bodied woman, with traditional remates that probably had a lot to do with the type of dance they did where the boats docked in Seville or Cádiz... The baile danced by older people in Triana was heavily influenced by black people, for sure. In 16th century Seville there was a really high percentage of black people, like about ten percent, much more than there are now with all this talk of a cultural melting-pot.

	"Our music, depending which way you look at it, might be seen as very purist"

It's pretty loaded with vintage material, isn't it?

Our music, depending which way you look at it, might be seen as very purist. It sounds very staid. But what I can't understand is when people do that without taking a new musical approach. It isn't so much using another instrument as using another concept. During the production we thought a lot about whether to include percussion, bass... beef it up a little. But then I thought there were already drums and percussion and palmas and those fabulous stamping feet. The idea was to get the most out of our own resources, it isn't about looking for outside help, but to give what we have an international feel.

Is the result an accurate reflection of your live performances?

Yeah. All of it's recorded live, in the same room where we could all see each other's faces. You can hear there's a different kind of desire to play, it's not the same as productions with click-boxes and a pop kind of production process. This is how Fernanda did it: she came to Madrid in the morning and wham! She did the whole thing in one go and she was out of there. And we're still in a dream world. People thought they'd get better sales figures if they produced flamenco the same way they produced pop records. Probably it was more a matter of creating a production model solely for flamenco, because the sonority of the instruments and the dynamics of flamenco are different.

Son de la Frontera (Photo: Daniel Muñoz)

How important is silence in your music?

This album is a feast of silence. And they're living silences too. Everyone's mike is switched on all the time and you can hear the silence, the 'oles' within, deep breaths... a bit of life. There's enough sterile stuff around, let's have a bit of fertility, please. And you can feel that. We've been playing together four or five years now, because we played great venues all over the world with my mother, suffering from real stage fright, but still managing to just get on with it. That means that just one glance and we know where the next break's gonna fall. The difference is that the music comes from the heart, and is made with a concept behind it, with emotion and with a useful aim. Where are those inner fires? Where are the nerves? That's what attracted us about the old-fashioned albums: not just the way they sang, but also what was happening during the recording.

	"It helps you to play rock before you turn to flamenco. And I'm talking flamenco Pata Negra-style, not Sabicas-style"

And what's odd is that your route to flamenco was somewhat heterodox...

It helps you to play rock before you turn to flamenco. And I'm talking flamenco Pata Negra-style, not Sabicas-style. We have a Pata Negra spirit. We're fishing around with that curiosity, trying to get as in tune with each other as the Amador brothers were. Kiko Veneno told me: “you're reminding me of the old days, it's giving me goose bumps.” But with due respect. It's a question of one guitarist taking a chance, using the other's ideas, taking risks, getting it wrong. If you don't take risks there are no nerves, if there are no nerves you aren't fully conscious, and if you aren't fully conscious you don't grow as an artist.

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