SPECIAL FEATURE. 100 YEARS: MANOLO CARACOL, FLAMENCO CANTAOR
“A very... very strange
school”
S.C./ Flamenco-world.com, July 2009
Translation: Joseph Kopec
There are still those who don’t
understand why a cantaor like Arcángel, with a glazed
voice, decided to put together a show dedicated to Manolo
Caracol a couple of years ago. And when asked, he answered
that he was moved by admiration: “Of his passion,
his courage and his truth”. The young Huelva-born
cantaor then feared that Caesar had fallen into oblivion
and thought that it was always fair to render unto him what
was his. Camarón
understood that on that night of August 29th, 1969 at Venta
Vargas. The night of the duel so beautifully narrated by
Félix Grande in the book ‘Rito y geografía
del cante’ (Alga 1997). In synthesis, the poet related
that when Manolo Caracol heard Camarón sing as a
boy, he offended him forever with a “that’s
not bad”.
And that late night he wanted to get his
revenge, challenging the veteran cantaor to fire off fandango
after fandango with the guitar nut climbing dangerously
upwards. “Camarón wanted to destroy the maestro
for not having praised him years earlier, when he needed
it the most. And Caracol was being destroyed and, as if
on his knees, was secretly telling Camarón: learn,
kid, you have to sing from the depth of distress; you have
to sing with pride, resentment and wisdom, the way you already
do, but moreover you have to sing from the depth of distress”.
Of course, the maestro gave the coup de
grâce when he sang the premonitory fandango he left
recorded on his last album, one year before dying in a car
accident on February 24th, 1973:
Me
voy a morí
Gitanitos de la Cava
Me voy a morí
Venid gitanos, gitanas
Quiero que lloréis por mí
Mis gitanos, mis gitanitos de la Cava
|
I’m going to die
Little gypsies of the Cave
I’m going to die
Come gypsy men and women
I want you to weep for me
My gypsies, my little gypsies
Of the Cave |
And he died and thousands of people - gypsies
or not - wept and flocked to his burial in Madrid. But now
it is time to commemorate that he was born no less than
one hundred years ago. It was on July 7th in Seville, on
Lumbreras Street in Alameda de Hércules, in the bosom
of a family of flamencos and bullfighters; related to the
Ortegas and Gallos, and further back in time, to great-great-grandfather
Planeta. Manuel Ortega Juárez learned by listening
to his father, an amateur, connoisseur and bullfighter’s
aid; and to those who shared the mythical party nights with
his father in such a flamenco neighborhood. Just around
the corner would be the voices of La Niña de los
Peines, Tomás Pavón, Manuel Torres…
and Antonio
Chacón. The mythical Jerez-born cantaor was precisely
the bridge which led him to turn professional. Manolo Caracol
himself told journalist Ángel Álvarez Caballero
in 1972 that Chacón had told his father that he was
seeking young amateurs for the Granada Cante Jondo Contest,
he found out and showed up the following day at the Hotel
Roma to offer himself as a candidate. “And you, what
do you sing for?”, the maestro asked him. “I
sing for everything”, the boy answered him. The double
meaning is fitting.
‘Ex aequo’
winner
It was the month of June and he went there
to La Alhambra to take part in that competition of cantaores
from outside the commercial circuit promoted by Federico
García Lorca and Manuel de Falla, among others. Boy
Caracol came out the winner of the extraordinary prize,
but shared with an old-time cantaor, Diego Bermúdez
‘El Tenazas’. And leaving aside the joking around
which the result caused in the national press, the truth
is that the son of Manuel Ortega ‘el del Bulto’
came out propelled from the Patio de los Aljibes. The last
night of the contest, a flamenco party was held at the Hotel
Washington Irving in which Antonia
Mercé ‘La Argentina’, besides wearing
the still-warm shoes of La Macarrona as a sign of veneration,
hired the young cantaor for a tour of Andalusia.
Cante Jondo contest in Granada
(Photo Nuevo Mundo 1922) |
-Still
cante jondo!... La Voz de Granada is right;
our city continues to be ridiculed everywhere
as a result of the famous Granada Contest and
its continuation everywhere. –“We
were eyewitnesses – says the newspaper
- at the court’s ‘Parisiana’
of those displays and we were ashamed”…
And it didn’t read the little article
‘An explanation: The first prizes of the
cante jondo contest in Granada…’,
because the thing is that “Boy Caracol”
and old cantaor Diego Bermúdez say they
were wronged as each considers himself the Contest’s
first-prize winner, with the result that the
first prize was not awarded and the Jury split
the extraordinary prize in two and awarded it
to the two cantaores who don’t agree,
the Boy’s father stating that both he
and Bermúdez “are the contest’s
first prizes. Neither one before nor the other
afterwards”… And maestro Falla stirred
heaven and earth for this!...-V.
La Alhambra,
bi-weekly arts and letters magazine
August 31st, 1922
|
|
But when this article was published in
the cultural magazine ‘La Alhambra’, “the
Boy” had already been singing for a month in the Terrace
of the Teatro Centro in Madrid - currently the Calderón
Häagen-Dazs - advertised in the newspapers back then
like ‘La Época’ to the shout of “the
famous king of cante jondo, boy Caracol, prizewinner of
the Granada Contest”. Now then, he was preceded by
a “cinematograph and variety show”, by Emilia
Vez and Amparito Medina. Besides singing for the aristocracy
in private, he continued to appear on the bills of theaters
in the ’20s together with some of his maestros. If
he sang at the Teatro Pavón in Madrid in 1925 together
with La
Niña de los Peines, Pepe Marchena and El Cojo
de Málaga, in 1929 he was in a lineup with Manuel
Torre.
One year after establishing himself in
Madrid, the Spanish Civil War broke out. And the circumstances
were not at all favorable for the late-night merrymaking
of old. So from the ’30s onward, Manolo Caracol would
have to settle in at the theater, an ecosystem dominated
back then - speaking of flamenco - by the ‘opera’
shows of cantaores like Pepe Pinto and the theater dance
shows of bailaoras such as Pastora
Imperio. And it is there where he found the material
for his star creation: the staged picture. As Álvarez
Caballero relates in ‘El cante flamenco’, “it
was just another day when Juan de Orduña invited
Pastora Imperio and Manolo to his house on Ventura de la
Vega Street. There, a pianist and a lyricist presented a
creation for Pastora entitled Gitana blanca and they wanted
to know what the artists thought of it.
The sounds of the zambra sink into
Caracol and he starts to think that not everything can be
sung unaccompanied por seguiriyas or fandangos hurriedly,
as is being done in Flamenco Opera”.
He had made the idea materialize for the
first time in the show ‘Luces de España’,
in which the bailaor couple consisting of Custodia Romero
and Rafael
Ortega appears. “And there, the first staged picture
was put up on a stage: La romería del Rocío.
“In the grand finale, I tell Melchor “to play
Moorish-style”, and to an unhurried beat, like that
of a zambra, I start to sing to the beat of a hammer, that
of Gitana blanca; Custodia and Rafael kicked off and that
was great”, he stated to the journalist years later.
Manolo Caracol drove the audience mad with pleasure and,
at the same time, drove the purists mad with rage, for cante
accompanied by pianos or by orchestras didn’t fit
in.
The tandem
Caracol-Flores
 Manolo
Caracol and Lola Flores |
|
And he was still to meet Lola Flores. Some
say it was in 1943 in Seville, at Pinto’s bar, where
the young woman, her mother and her agent Arenzana pulled
up in a horse-drawn carriage when Caracol was there. Lola
Flores’ controversial biopic places the encounter
at the Teatro Villamarta in Jerez. Whatever the case may
have been, the thing is that the businessman called up the
cantaor from Madrid to offer him to perform with Lola, the
latter asked him for the exorbitant sum of six thousand
pesetas per day, the former accepted, the latter said goodbye
to Pinto and Pastora… and the legendary couple Caracol-Flores
was born. They premiered together with ‘Zambra 1944’,
triumphed with a second version of ‘La niña
de fuego’ and until a decade later they weren’t
resisted by either theaters or cinemas. Together, while
they were feeding the morbid curiosity of forbidden love
in the undertones of the hit ‘La Salvaora’ -
as Antonio Burgos recalls at his website -, they made films
of manners successful with the masses such as ‘Embrujo’
(1947) by Carlos Serrano de Osma and ‘La niña
de la Venta’ (1951), directed by Ramón Torrado
and which, by the way, is an interesting documentary film
about the ancient art of tuna fishing. And the dual picture
was even immortalized as the label and brand of an anisette
from Cazalla. The intense relationship between Lola and
Manolo - which the film ‘Lola: la película’
(2007) by Miguel Hermoso focuses on broadly and controversially,
providing a portrait of the artists which bothered their
descendants quite a bit - broke off due to a two-year exclusive
in America. He didn’t accept it. She did.
But shortly afterwards Caracol would accept
Pilar
López’s offer to cross the Atlantic with
‘La copla nueva’, just when his daughter Luisa
Ortega was being launched as an artist. As she herself recalled
before the press on the eve of the tribute paid to Caracol
on June 12th, 2009 at the outstanding Patio de los Aljibes
in Granada, she made her début together with him
in 1951 at the Teatro Calderón in Madrid with a show
which remained on the bill for eighteen months and which
was “sheer madness”. The cantaora, in these
statements to the EFE Agency, moreover gave the keys to
her father’s trademark as an artist:
“He was a man ahead
of his time”
“He lived just for
cante, something he couldn’t help"
“His artist’s
genius didn’t leave him until his death"
“There wasn’t
big or little cante; it all depended on the
moment of inspiration”
|
|
And the truth is that cantaor Manolo Caracol
has gone down in flamenco history for his captivating personality.
His heterodoxy was criticized, his irregularity was criticized,
but nobody questions his artistic individuality. Not even
he himself. So he made it known to interviewers: “I
haven’t copied anyone. I’ve made a theater,
I’ve created a school, and what I sing is mine and
I don’t sound like anyone else. Bad, good, so-so,
worse, it’s by Manolo Caracol... My school is a very...
very strange school. I’ve created really hard things,
like, for example... who would have told Enrique
el Mellizo, or Silverio, or Chacón, or Tomás
el Nitri, that I was going to sing to piano and that I was
going to sing ‘La Salvaora’ at the end of the
cante por malagueñas?”.
Caracol’s discography, today
For the past thirty-six years, for want
of his person, the testimony lies in the sound and audiovisual
recordings. He recorded on slate and on vinyl, his discography
being highlighted by the anthology ‘Una historia del
cante’ in 1958, commented by musicologist García
Matos; and his last album, which commemorated his fifty
years as an artist in 1972. That ‘Mis bodas de oro
con el cante’ included the aforementioned farewell
fandango. In the past few years, we mean this first decade
in the century and millennium, different record companies
have dusted off and re-released part of his sound legacy,
with different quality titles on the market. In 2002, Discmedi
compiled over twenty cantes from his slate
recordings dating back to the ’20s, ’30s
and ’40s, with guitars by Niño Ricardo, Melchor
de Marchena, Manuel Morao and Manolo Badajoz, accompanying
above all his fandangos, zambras and carceleras.
Two years later, a CD entitled simply ‘Manolo
Caracol’ came out of the label Philips’
archives which gathered nineteen cantes recorded between
1962 and 1968, among them, pieces as curious as fantasy
por malagueñas, poetry-seguiriyas and galloping bulerías,
accompanied by Melchor, Juan Habichuela and pianist Arturo
Pavón. The compilation put together by Music Ages
in 2007 is also complete, with sixteen cantes coming from
four
EPs, among them, 'Juerga gitana' and 'Una historia del
cante flamenco'. Which displays the original covers, by
the way. These are joined by the seventh volume of the prestigious
collection ‘Grandes
figuras del flamenco’ (‘Great Flamenco Figures’)
by the label Le Chant du Monde of the French company Harmonia
Mundi, an album which stresses cantes such as the seguiriya,
soleá and martinetes. Records which were joined last
year by the biography ‘Manolo Caracol. Cante y pasión’
by Catalina León.
But if one document is currently valuable
to commemorate the figure of Manolo Caracol, it is the episode
dedicated to him in 1972 of the television series ‘Rito
y Geografía del Cante’ by Spain’s
public television. At present, it is the ninth volume of
the re-release in book-DVD format. And what he was and what
he means today is thus explained by journalist José
María Velázquez-Gaztelu in its introduction:
“In the early seventies, shortly before his demise,
Caracol was already beginning his retirement, and although
personages like him never go away completely, he had left
his activity in theaters years earlier, just occupying himself
with managing his tablao Los Canasteros in Madrid and with
savoring the triumph he achieved with the album ‘Mis
bodas de oro con el cante’, released in 1972”.
By the way, although it has other musical uses, it is still
possible to imagine what the famous cave-shaped tablao on
Barbieri Street was like, where in those golden ’60s
artists sparkled such as La Paquera, Gaspar de Utrera, Manuela
Carrasco, Manuel Soler, Manzanita, Merche Esmeralda, Paco
Cepero… and even the members of Ketama before the
group was formed. And continuing with the DVD in question,
Velázquez-Gaztelu himself, who appears very young
interviewing him at his new house, thinks it was his last
will and testament as an artist:
“He
still had an ace up his sleeve and he sensed
that it was the right time to pull it out, challenging
death in raising the stakes. He waited for the
arrival of fertile inspiration, of ‘duende’,
as he used to call that occasion as magical
as it was unpredictable, but which he believed
in blindly, since it was a whirlwind which did
not take long to appear, wiping out everything
it found in its path. And then, without waiting
an instant, he gambled it all. And he won. That
is why this program is Caracol’s true
last will and testament, his last flamenco sigh,
which is none other than a master class in cante,
the expressive well-roundedness of an enlightened
artist, while he left us, in the last heartbeat
of his life, the glorious bits and pieces of
eternal music”.
|
|
His truth lies in his cante. The truth
of a cantaor who in this 2009 is commemorated with different
acts promoted by Andalusian public administrations, besides
the cante of some of those considering themselves to be
his heirs. Already held in June was the one recalling his
premature triumph at the Cante Jondo Contest, attended by
one of his most faithful followers, Córdoba-born
Manuel Moreno Maya ‘El
Pele’. A sensible congress took place in May at
the University of Seville. And the next event is scheduled
for December 10th, when a curious double tribute is to be
carried out shared between Caracol and Mairena, the artform’s
heads and tails, at the Teatro de la Maestranza in Seville
(for the time being, Fernando Terremoto and José
Valencia are confirmed). But the best tribute which can
be offered to the now mythical Sevillian cantaor a century
after his birth is the one paid by each enthusiast on his
own, forever listening, exploring and tasting the cantes
of Manolo Caracol, that very… very strange cantaor.
