Artlcles »Tour dates in october and november 2001 »Review
of the concert at the Jerez Festival 2000, by Luis Clemente. Live
Videoclips »Colegio
de Médicos. Madrid
"I've got very fixed ideas, gazpacho is for eating, not singing" |
He has recorded his first record at the age of 23. The artistic maturity and clarity of ideas with which he faces his professional career aren't so surprising when you are aware of the tremendous experience acquired over a ten-year period of singing on stages the world over. From the contest he won as a child in his hometown, up to his artistic collaboration with Enrique Morente, Eva la Yerbabuena, and Vicente Amigo, Arcángel has seen all the faces of flamenco and he continues unfazed down the arduous road of cante. In the press pack that you present to the media it says that you won a Fandango Contest at the age of ten. Did you learn to sing much before that? Only a short time before, but I sang a bit, if not, I never would have dared to go out there and sing, but obviously it was a hobby, I liked it a lot and, well, it was a crazy kid thing, they said "come here" and I thought "well here I am because I came" and that's it, I sat myself down and got lucky. Was that a decisive moment when you thought you would like to be a flamenco singer? Well, it was an important moment at the time, the thing is I don't think I've ever found myself saying that I wanted to be a cantaor, it was more like something that came around, an idea that was knocking about in my head, back and forth. I believe the first time you sang in a theater was with the dancer Mario Maya. And in Sevilla's Teatro de la Maestranza (capacity 2.000 people). Good grief, when I got there, you can't imagine how I felt! Imagine, at only 16 or 17. And how did they contract you for that performance? That was sheer coincidence, I was part of a show put together by Pepe Roca, the singer from Alameda, together with the string instrumentalist from my record, Jesús Calluela. It was a tribute to an old woman flamenco singer from Moguer, a small town in Huelva. In this tribute to La Parrala, the female star was Carmen Linares and the author, of almost all the music I believe, was the guitarist Juan Carlos Romero, both of whom I knew. They invited Mario Maya to the show in the Gran Teatro Huelva and he came to the dressing-room afterwards to say hello. He said he was going to call me to sing, something which I interpreted as a social nicety, a courtesy, but sure enough, several months later he called me to sing there. And that opened a lot of doors for me regards cante. The person you've sung the most for is Eva La Yerbabuena. What have you learned? Plenty, and there's something I really like about her which is that she has very clear ideas about what she wants to do and she doesn't let herself be intimidated, she has a strong personality, both on and off stage, she works hard and gets what she wants by the most difficult route which is that of quality, but which is, in the end, the road to satisfaction. What does it feel like to sing for a dancer who transmits so much on stage? It feels very good of course. She has the concept a dancer should have, there's no struggle to see whether the chicken or the egg came first, the cante precedes and is the fundamental basis for the dance, and she interprets the cante, she dances the cante. Not just because it's right or wrong, but because that's the way she feels it and she likes cante a lot. When you work with two other singers in Eva's shows, it seems as though there's an inevitable influence between you in several stylistic details. After working together so many times in the last three years, and so intensely, at the least we know each other well, not to mention the ambience that reigns in Eva's company, which I have never experienced in any other group. I don't mean to say that there's a bad atmosphere in other groups, but in hers we're all pulling together, there's a healthy conviviality and I think that shows. In fact, even though you're promoting your first record, you continue to sing for Eva's show. Yes, yes, as long as I can I'll continue with her, I like her dancing a lot and I have a good time there. We've all worked together to mount the shows, we cooked them up ourselves, and we ate them, it's been six shows in three years, work and more work. Paco (Jarana) brings out the music and everyone gets working on it, we've arrived at a great understanding, on stage there's no ill will or negative feelings, everyone is trying hard. You have a close relationship with Juan Carlos Romero. Juan Carlos... we've known each other for a long time, we're from the same city, his wife has a dance school and I began there singing for the girls, for the student recitals and all that. Then I started to sing for him. And in the end you made the record together. He's the producer and guitarist. He had what I needed to sing. New pieces that sound very flamenco, quality songs, with no concessions to commercialism. And he's a person who understands me and is my friend. Sometimes a look is all that's needed. He's not terribly well-known, they had to be persuaded that Juan Carlos was the guy we needed. He's a very good composer and he likes flamenco singing so much that he composes thinking of the cante. He has a very special concept of cante and of flamenco, and what he does makes a lot of sense. Juan Carlos is no show-off, he doesn't go after the easy applause... You can tell that from the record, anyone who hears the alegrías will wonder why they're in such a low tone, but that's exactly the trick, to get the most out of the bass tones. It's always more difficult, people are sometimes mistaken about that. Another example, they say that a singer is screaming when he sings high, but he's also screaming in the low tones. Your voice has a curve, the volume that comes out determines the vibration that you can make with your vocal chords. It bothers me that so few people stop to think about how to sing. There are singers who greatly misuse loudness, you see it in the contests, it sounds like they want to impress people with their power, which is more like athletics than music. No one used to shout, that theme of Enrique's that goes "viene como viene" ("it comes like it comes"), it's like that, smooth... You have to push when you have to push, for example at the end of the trilla I push, but you have to push when it's the right moment, not be shouting all the time. There's a part of the general public that is impressed with very high tones, and the speed has even been changed on many recordings to reach impossible heights. I don't like that, there are many people who are determined to reach a high note and they forget about everything else, you have to take care of everything, not just that note, if the rest is no good, that note's no good. Mayte Martín told us that if she could bring any singer back to life it would be La Niña de los Peines. Well me too! (laughter). And Caracol and Chacón, it must really have been something to hear Chacón's voice, even with today's technology you can't capture the reality of the cante, and even more so in the old days. That happens even with today's records, in the end technology is a filter, that happens to me and to Estrella. The studio is cold... To get yourself into a studio is the worst thing in the world, there we were with Juan Carlos on the other side of the studio, repeating things, and when you like a certain verse, you don't like how it ends, so you do it again and then you like the beginning of the other one better, and that's how it is in the studio... In the studio you realize how practical, quick and easy it is to sing live. Oh man! There isn't enough money in the world! In the studio everything sounds a certain way… it reached a point that I said "Carlos, we have to make a decision!" It's that in the studio you get working and you don't stop, and everything is a drag, you can spend your whole life recording, and just when you're doing the last few pieces you realize that you're beginning to get the flow of it, and then you can start all over again and change the first songs... You could sing your whole life away like that! After all the work, can you listen to the record at home? I listen to it because I'm very pleased. |
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