SPECIAL FEATURE + PHOTO GALLERY. FLAMENCO INSTRUMENTS
Not just guitar
S.C./ Flamenco-world.com, August 2010
Beyond the body, guitar is flamenco’s
star instrument. But there was a time when cantaores were
accompanied by vihuelas (a kind of small guitar) and mandolins,
as El Solitario narrates in his ‘Escenas andaluzas’
from 1847. And nowadays, it’s time to open up the
range of instruments enough to allow crossborder artistic
creativity: from the box drum to the udu, with the Malian
pumpkin, Gastor hornpipe, bass, tuba and computer in between.
It isn’t the instruments that are flamenco, but rather
those who play them.
Bells. Llorenç Barber and Andrés
Marín, 'El cielo de tu boca'
(Photo Daniel
Muñoz) |
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In percussion, the Peruvian
box drum which Rubem Dantas brought in because of Paco
de Lucía has prevailed for three decades, but there
are more and more musicians who are seeking other tones
from here and there: tambourines, udu, kalimba, djembe,
pumpkins imported from Mali by Arimany, the thousand and
one bells which Llorenç Barber played for Andrés
Marín in ‘El cielo de tu boca’…
and even Rocío tabors, even if it’s to destroy
them, as Israel Galván does in ‘El final de
este estado de cosas’. And meanwhile, not only do
the familiar castanets reappear, clacked by school classics
as well as neoclassical avant-garde artists like Dospormedio;
but also the most faraway metal castanets which Pastora
Galván rattles in ‘La Francesa’.
Flamenco winds, as Jorge
Pardo calls them, now go beyond the jazz sax and transverse
flute, also exploring clarinets, tubas and even rarities
from Andalusian folk music like the Gastor hornpipe, made
with a bull horn and blown in ‘Arena’. The guitar’s
six strings are joined by those of piano, with a now long
jondo tradition which has materialized in the hands of Dorantes,
Diego Amador and Chano Domínguez. They are joined
by those of violin wielded by musicians from here such as
Bernardo Parrilla as well as ‘import’ musicians
like Ara Malikian, Jallal Chekara and Alexis Lefèvre.
Plus the metals of Raúl Rodríguez’s
Cuban tres, the North African sounds from the violins and
lutes of the Chekara de Tetuán… And they are
also joined by the strings of contrabasses, basses and their
modern electric sister. The paradigm of the flamenco-style
toque of the latter has been consolidated by musicians such
as Javier Colina, Carles
Benavent and the Amador brothers, respectively. The
latest one to appear on stage sounding flamenco has been
Artomatico’s computer, with electronic creations to
the flamenco beat sprinkled with old-time samples.
Cajones and djembé.
Bandolero and Juan Carmona on 'Hands' by Pepe Habichuela
and Dave Holland
(Photo Daniel
Muñoz) |
“We
come in at the point when El Planeta,
the veteran cantaor with great style, according
to the intelligentsia, was beginning a romance
or a run after a prelude by the vihuela and
two mandolins, which made up the core of the
orchestra, and he started those piercing trills
of the cousin, sustained with those melancholy
string accents, all of it with a low, solemn
beat, and every now and then, as if to balance
things up, the intelligent tocaor softly strikes
the instrument’s backside, a feature which
increases the crowd’s very sad attention”
‘Escenas
andaluzas’, El Solitario (1847)
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