Pepa de Benito, Gaspar de Utrera and El Cuchara, cantaores. Interview

“Cante can't be learned”

Silvia Calado. Mont de Marsan, July 2005
Translation: Gary Cook

For a couple of days, Utrera was left without flamenco artists. No less than thirty artists from the town crossed the entire Iberian peninsular to take the legacy of La Serneta, Los Pinini and Los Perrate to one of the most orthodox audiences on the flamenco map. A passion for purity, for tradition, for true flamenco... the Mont de Marsan Festival once again offered up its stages to the territories of the origins of cante flamenco. And if at last year's festival Jerez was under scrutiny, on this occasion it was the turn of Utrera to demonstrate its vitality. And it did so with a gala in which the legends stepped aside for some promising newcomers. Gaspar de Utrera, Pepa de Benito, El Cuchara. Tomás de Perrate, María Peña, Jesús de la Frasquita.

Pepa de Benito (Photo: Daniel Muñoz)

“Neither Gaspar nor I are going to last forever.” Pepa de Benito knows you have to pass the baton. “The youth has to struggle and you have to teach them to do that.” And that's because there's a hotbed of fresh homegrown talent out there. El Cuchara affirms that it's alarming “just how forceful the young flamenco artists are. Utrera is a fertile breeding ground for fresh talent, it churns out plenty of new cantaores.” To which Gaspar de Utrera adds that “there are some very good artists coming out of Utrera. They're going to reach great heights because they have the right conditions in their voices and they have melodies. There are a lot of young people out there, loads of them, you'll see this evening”. And boy did we see.

Pepa de Benito: “The youth has to struggle and you have to teach them to do that”

The difference between one generation and another is obvious, even though they're united by that naturalness that flamenco still has at certain points around the countryside of Seville. There, vocals aren't taught. “Look, ‘miarma’ (*), cante can't be learned – it either runs in your veins or it doesn’t, and there's nothing you can do about it. You can learn flamenco dance but if cante doesn't come from within... You can sing, but the vocals have to have that little something, that special lure, and that lure has to be in your blood.” She got that little something at home... coming from the 'casa de Los Pinini'. “We're all descended from a family of cantaores and almost everybody sings. At parties we don't have any choice but to sing, we've grown up with that stuff since we were little and it's what we've heard, what we've seen all along.”

Gaspar de Utrera: “My voice is ‘cracked’ from hunger”

	Gaspar de Utrera (Photo: Daniel Muñoz)

His story is very different from that of his fellow artists, working only part-time as a vocalist until Pedro Bacán revealed his talents in the production ‘El clan de Los Pinini’. Gaspar de Utrera, who plans to record his latest album this coming September, did endure the hardships of being a professional cantaor during the tough times of the fifties. “Now flamenco is at a high point. We didn't used to know where our next meal was coming from. Ever since I was a little boy I used to try to make ends meet down at La Alameda in Seville. That's why my voice is ‘cracked’ from hunger”. Then came the tablaos. El Duende, El Corral de la Morería, Arco de Cuchilleros, Los Canasteros. “I reached Madrid at the age of fourteen and I stayed there fifteen more years. I worked at all the main dancehalls and I sang for all the big names.”

El Cuchara: “Utrera is a fertile breeding ground for fresh talent, it churns out plenty of new cantaores”

His experiences from that era are countless, but if you ask Gaspar de Utrera to recall a memory, he doesn't think twice. “One day I got drunk with the bullfighters Gitanillo de Triana and Luis Miguel Dominguín, and with several other artists. We went down Gran Vía in Madrid to Plaza de España. There was a portrait photographer who photographed people on a cardboard horse. And I mounted the horse with a stick and I started to lance Dominguín, pretending I was bullfighting. I mean here was the greatest bullfighter in history, and I was prodding him with a stick!” Does that photo exist? “Today it would be worth a fortune, that photo. My sons should know. Estaban Picoco, Diego Pantoja... Do you know who has that photo? Joselito el Barbero, they should wring my neck! He'd go to my house and he'd turn everything over,” he tells El Cuchara.

El Cuchara (Photo: Daniel Muñoz)

And the fact is, waiting their turn in the dressing-rooms of the Espace François Mitterrand, these ‘twenty-somethings’ from Utrera never stop telling yarns, joking around, and flying the flag for a town where flamenco has a unique genetic blueprint. El Cuchara, grandson of Pinini and a true character with his sombrero, cane and cravat, loves to defend the flamenco idiosyncrasies of his town. “It's like the watermelons from Los Palacios, where the soil is good - but they don't taste the same as the ones from Rota. The soil in Utrera offers a cante that's different from all the others.” Gaspar de Utrera emphasizes the melody, “it has its own hallmarks.” Nobody can quite put their finger on what they are exactly, but it's a type of cante that's used frugally, firmly accentuating the beat of the compás, sketching out the melodies with a special range of tonalities. In addition to which, as Pepa de Benito points out, “the freshness of a cante that hasn't been learned, but that comes from inside.”

And that's exactly what you could see on stage. El Cuchara sang por tonás. Gaspar de Utrera por tientos. Pepa de Benito por soleá. Singing and, at the same time, playing the role of godparents to the rising stars of Utrera's flamenco scene, a task that Antonio Moya, guitarist and artistic director of the gala, has taken on for many years now. Tomás de Perrate, son of Perrate de Utrera, with his ancestral vocals. Manuel Amaya, a true follower of Bambino. Mari Peña, a vocalist who's a rising star of the upbeat 'festero' styles native to Utrera. Jesús de la Frasquita, firm defender of the local legacy. And the fact is, as guest bailaor Jairo Barrul notes, “Utrera is a land of cante.” Flamenco dance has its place, “but it's a home-grown baile,” as Esperanza Peña, Fernanda Peña and Juana Suárez demonstrated on stage. All of them spokespeople for the new generation, who came not only to demonstrate how high they're willing to raise their inherited art, but also “to learn from those great artists of another generation, to bathe in the talent that oozes from them just when they walk and talk.” Just as Jairo finishes these words, El Cuchara is telling Gaspar de Utrera - while the two take some refreshment for their vocal chords during the interval - of the time when... “No way - this guy's crazy!”

(*) = ‘my love’, ‘darling’, in Seville dialect

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