SEMINAR: PACO DE LUCÍA, ASÍ
PASEN 60 AÑOS
Paco de Lucía, the cross-border
genius
Silvia Calado. Algeciras, March 26th, 2008
Sometimes, you have to vindicate
the obvious. That Paco
de Lucía is one of the most relevant figures
on the international music scene is something assumed
by the whole world. Whole? No! Algeciras, the Cádiz-area
town where the guitarist was born, the one which inspires
a great deal of his work, needed to be shown what it had
so close... as within. And that’s what has been
achieved by ‘Seminario: Paco de Lucía, así
pasen 60 años’, a seminar in his hometown
which shouted from the rooftops how brilliant and how
international he is.
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Paco de Lucía.
'Cositas buenas' Tour (Photo Daniel Muñoz) |
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Guitarists of the likes of Manolo
Sanlúcar and Gerardo Núñez, his
brothers Ramón de Algeciras and Pepe de Lucía,
his nephew José María Bandera and quite
a few other family members, lifelong friends, writers,
researchers, journalists, event organizers, producers...
and many neighbors (at the same time, admirers) gathered
from March 24th to 27th, 2008 at the Fundación
de Cultura José Luis Cano in Algeciras with the
sole aim of emphasizing how brilliant, how “oceanic”
- José Luis Ortiz Nuevo’s adjective - and
how ours Francisco Sánchez Gómez is.
And out of the three days, one of the
most interesting ones was the one which put Paco de Lucía
in perspective with regards to the world. Journalist and
writer Juan José Téllez, the seminar’s
director, offered a brilliant conference entitled ‘Paco
de Lucía, en la revolución musical de los
años 60 del siglo XX’ (‘Paco de Lucía,
in the Musical Revolution of the ’60s of the 20th
Century’). And he expounded that he was totally
pervious to the social, political and cultural environment
of his time. And the thing is that, to begin with, Algeciras
is a peculiar geographical enclave where, besides flamenco
and all the music of Franco’s Spain, Anglo-Saxon
music arrived through Gibraltar. Across the water, Morocco
preserved the music which the Andalusians had made centuries
earlier. And when he was a boy on the verge of becoming
a teenager he joined the José
Greco Company in the United States, a country where
Sabicas
was already flirting with jazz and Joe Beck’s guitar.
Therefore, nothing is a coincidence.
So it’s logical to lay out a round-table
assigned to a handful of people who know what Paco de
Lucía means beyond Spain’s borders. Juan
Estrada, the artist’s partner, shared with those
attending really funny anecdotes having occurred all over
the world, as did José María Bandera. The
guitarist, his nephew and tour colleague, moreover stated
that “when we go to all those great theaters, people
come first to see the myth close up, but in the course
of the concert, they end up having fun”. Javier
Puga, director of the Mont
de Marsan Flamenco Festival, affirmed that “nobody
in flamenco history has ever had as much international
scope as Paco de Lucía”. And he knows that
for a fact, since the French festival has had the artist
on three occasions, “and if we had an auditorium
with two thousand seats, another two thousand people were
left out”.
Paco de Lucía. 'Cositas
buenas' Tour (Photo Daniel Muñoz)
Yours truly, the contents editor of Flamenco-world.com,
also offered illustrative data about Paco de Lucía’s
interplanetary relevance. According to the website’s
statistics, every month around two hundred thousand pages
relative to the guitarist are consulted, which represents
about five percent of the total. Not in vain, I commented,
“it was necessary to create a special
page to gather all the contents relative to Paco de
Lucía, between news, articles, photos, discography,
audio, and above all, video. When we posted the ‘Cositas
buenas’ video-clip, the server crashed”.
But those who can best attest to Paco de Lucía’s
importance in the world are his followers. And that’s
what the comments are for which people from all over the
world leave at Flamenco-world.com both on his biography
and on each of his albums. Algeciras was touched by these
three examples, understanding that Francisco Sánchez
is a neighbor to the entire world:
Name: JORGE
Country: Argentina
Title: THE GREATEST GENIUSES OF THE 20TH CENTURY
Comment: PACO, CAMARÓN, MARADONA, MILES DAVIS,
FRANK ZAPPA AND PIAZZOLLA ARE GOD PERSONIFIED
Name: Jonathan Mendoza Sánchez
Country: Peru
Title: may flamenco live another 1,000,000 years with
Paco
Comment: I give him my best wishes and I want everyone
who reads this message to know that there’s only
one person on earth who can outdo Paco de Lucía
and it’s Paco himself with the passing of time who
outdoes yesterday’s Paco through the great amount
of love he puts into flamenco music. I’m 16 years
old, but I know what good music is and to me in particular,
Paco’s music is matchless.
Name: Abdullah Asaad
Country: Kuwait
Title: Paco de Lucía
Comment: There is one Paco de Lucía every 100,000,000
years. He stole my heart & I will get it back by being
a great flamenco guitar player ;)
