Creativity. Without prototypes.

If jazz gives freedom to Jorge Pardo, flamenco provides the framework upon which his music and inspiration are built. "Flamenco is an art form with an incredible richness. Personally, speaking as someone with burning curiosity who's dabbled with different musical disciplines, I have to say that just as it's impossible to better jamón de pata negra, it's also impossible to better flamenco." The musician declares that "without meaning to sound chauvinist, you have to admit that flamenco encompasses an incredible artistic wealth, and requires considerable skill in its execution". He sums up "it's really difficult to play flamenco. Those things which might sometimes sound like a wailing sound, a little savage, are spontaneous and are savage, but they contain a lot of musical training and are incredibly difficult to produce."

	Jorge Pardo with Juan Diego (Photo: Daniel Muñoz)

While flamenco structures provide him with the foundations and the inspiration he needs, Jorge Pardo has found a total absence of prototypes: "Obviously, because of my choice of instrument, I have just about nobody to draw on. There's the odd anecdote, with no malicious intentions, a few tales of the most tentative dabbling in flamenco with my instrument in bygone days. But there's nobody that's thrown himself into it like I have, nobody that's passed through the same series of circumstances as I have. And that put me in a unique situation at one time." These days there's plenty of new blood: "Now there's a lot of other people who do it, and do it well."

Jorge Pardo had no-one to look to: "When you train with a mentor, you learn how he positions his hand, his mode of expression, a whole series of things you pick up, and they're what help you and urge you to keep learning and evolving. In my case it wasn't like that. I didn't have an artist's expressions I could study, to show me the role I had to play." The questions he asked himself were these: "What am I, a guitarist, a cantaor? Do I go in for singing?" And the answers he found: "If I go in for singing I'm gonna screw up, if I go in for the guitar I'll probably screw up too... All those kind of dilemmas were what drove me in the end to choose a path in between the two." A wise man indeed. "I've picked up elements along the way from all of the flamenco disciplines, from guitar, from cante and from baile... and expressions and articulation on the flute, drawn in the most part from cante". The secret was "to pay attention to different things to try to find my role... And mainly so someone would hire me."

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