Paco de Lucía, Interview (part 1)
Madrid, 1998
About Luzía

Making an album means having something new to tell, you have to live, you have to feel things, you have to nurture yourself with new things so that that album doesn't become a repetition of the one you've made before. Every time I make an album I like to say something new, to create something surprising, to allow the guitar player that listens to the album to enjoy it and have something new to learn from it or to feel from it. That is the reason for which it may take a while for me to make an album; and also because I am a little lazy, because in eight years you have time to make more than one album. But then I am always going on tour. I make too many tours. I spend over half a year travelling and to compose you have to spend many hours in a room without anything else to disturb you, alone, focused on the making of that album. In the end I said to myself: it's been a long time now, I am going to shut myself up in a room of my house and I will not hold any more concerts until this album is made and in the streets and, sure enough, after seven months and ten hours a day of work, here is the album.

I do not know how to define myself; I'm still trying to find myself.

This album is a tribute to my mother. I recorded it during the six months that my mother was ill and in a hospital. I would go and visit her every morning, would spend several hours with her, and during the afternoon and night, I would compose at home. The whole of this album is impregnated with that suffering, with that hurting that I felt inside while seeing that my mother was leaving me, apart from having told her already once before that I was going to dedicate this album to her... and she was very happy to hear this... and she smiled at me in a wonderful way, a smile that I will never forget, and I think that that is enough of a reason to dedicate this album to her.

Luzia with a Z, because I wanted to stress that my mother's roots are Portuguese, and there, they write Luzia with a Z, and the album is a tribute as a whole, as there is also a piece dedicated to Camarón... but the album in general is impregnated with the hurting that you feel inside when your mother is leaving.

The album in general is impregnated with the hurting that you feel inside when your mother is leaving.

In the making of this album I have thrown plenty of chords, plenty of melodies and plenty of ideas into the trashcan... yes they were musically beautiful... but they didn't sound flamenco to me. The attitude is the same as I had with Siroco. The idea is to make the album the most flamenco as possible, and as new as possible at the same time; it is almost paradoxical, a contradiction, and that is the reason for which it is so difficult to make an album that sounds flamenco but at the same time includes surprises and offers something new, new ideas...

I don't want to present myself as a cantaor (flamenco singer) in thisalbum. It was almost an obligation for me to sing because they are two small lyrics which I sing in the album, one dedicated to my mother and the other to Camarón. I sang during the recording process to create a reference that a cantaor could later use when singing these songs, but I felt it was much more intimate, truer and more of a live experience, to make those tributes with my own voice, even though any cantaor would have done it much better.

I felt it was much more intimate, truer and more of a live experience, to make those tributes with my own voice, even though any cantaor would have done it much better.

In some ways I have contributed in the formation of this rise of fusion and experimentation within flamenco. I experience it with great delight and also with pride. When I was a child, there was not too much liberty of action in the sense of composing flamenco music. You had to repeat the old forms of singing and imitate the way in which the older ones played and sang, because the people of the flamenco world and the flamenco critics considered it a sacrilege to change any of the musical notes or anything which wasn't established as pure. Camarón and I broke a little bit with this sense of purism, which in my opinion was a false one. At that time, I saw that that was not pure, that was caging music and leaving it enclosed in a file as a music to be kept in a museum. Flamenco music, because of the way it is, has to be a living and evolving form of music. I always had the feeling that you had to respect tradition, but as my good friend Felix Grande says, not by being obedient to tradition with a blind faith; respecting, but at the same time trying to describe your epoch and the time in which you live, with all the forms of music that you hear and all the evolution that music in general has in any of its other forms of exposure, trying to grow in accord with our times, and always, I repeat, without letting go in the essence, the strength that flamenco posseses.

As a flamenco musician I never went to school to learn how to play music.I am a self-taught musician who learnt everything I did by ear, and sometimes I felt the need to learn a musical technique so that the composition process wouldn't be so tough, because for me, finding the right chord is much more difficult than for someone who has gone to a musical school and knows how to read music in the books that are circulating... and knows how to understand the harmony required and how to construct it.

I thought that the best way to learn was to meet other musicians, for instance Jazz musicians, who are very avant-guard with respect to theharmony. Since I was always curious and active... I never pretended to become something different from a flamenco musician or to dedicate my time to playing Jazz or other things; I had the clear idea in my mind that I was going to learn something that I would then bring to my flamenco and in that way try to grow and expand in some way.

I find Ketama a wonderful band, even though what they play, for instancein their last album, is not flamenco, but there is a lot of flamenco in it. Their way of expressing any type of music is full of flamenco elements, flamenco intentions, I really think that they are a very good band, and like Ketama there are many others making incredible music.

Why so much time to make an album? The standards are high, and I can'tjust come out with any album; I have to release something which will truly be interesting, a surprise.

I have been on tour since I was small, and I am currently doing one that started on the first of October. I toured Europe, I finished the album in December, and when I came back from that tour I went to the United States. I just got back from the United States yesterday and I am leaving for Japan on Sunday, and when I come back, I will hold a few concerts in Spain to present this album with the Sextet.

I think that Brian Adams is a good singer and a nice person. I had a good time with him. We recorded the song in Jamaica in an old colonial house, we had a good time, it was a success and the music reached a group of people that it wouldn't have reached through bulerías. I found this positive, in a way anecdotic, I had already done other soundtracks for films, but I didn't know that it had been made for a film, I thought it was being recorded for an album, and when I got there I didn't really know what I was doing.

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