Ricardo Pachón and Enrique Montiel present the album at the 2005 Jerez Festival

S.C. Jerez, March 2005

The summer crickets can be heard in the background. Camarón is singing at Venta de Vargas (Vargas Inn), outdoors, playing the guitar. Someone presses the recording button on a four-track recorder. And the miracle is done: the voice of that teenage cantaor is recorded for posterity. But over thirty years have had to go by for that treasure to be dug up. The nephews of María Picardo and Juan Vargas - the owners of the inn - found it a short time ago wrapped in oily plastic, and aware of the value it might have, handed it over to Ricardo Pachón and Enrique Montiel. Camarón de la Isla's producer and biographer corroborated the substance of the ‘incunabulum’ and saw to getting an album out of it. And not just another record in the artist's discography, but rather a previously unreleased album revealing that since he was a boy, “he was a great connoisseur of basic cantes”.

Camarón de la Isla

At the round-table about Camarón held by the 2005 Jerez Festival on March 1st at Bodega de San Ginés, Enrique Montiel described the development of ‘Camarón en la Venta de Vargas’ as "surprising". He relates that when “María Picardo and Juan Vargas' nephews showed me the Philips tape, without even listening to it I knew it was the missing link that was going to show he'd mastered traditional flamenco before going to Málaga with Miguel de los Reyes and before he was mediatized by Antonio Sánchez in Madrid”. The first move he made was to go and get Ricardo Pachón, and they went together around Seville in search of a four-track player. A collector of sound gadgets provided them with one and they were thus able to pass all of the material, four hours in total, to the sound program ‘ProTools’.

Although the owner of the inn had even recorded flamenco off the radio on the reel, the finding was at the beginning of the tape. The first four songs it had are the four that start off the album ‘Camarón en la Venta de Vargas’: the Chozas bulerías, fandango caracolero, ‘Seguiriyas de los grillos’ and tangos extremeños. And as Montiel explains, “they're four cantes in which Camarón plays for himself, among others, a seguiriya that drove us crazy”. Ricardo Pachón adds that this cante “offers the wisdom of an artist who at the age of sixteen was already doing cantes through seguiriyas by the Caganchos or Manuel Torre”. And they compare the contribution of that seguiriya with that of the soleá contained in ‘Antología inédita’: “If the seguiriya and the soleá are the ultimate test for cante flamenco, we've proven that Camarón was and is a long-range cantaor, though his lighter side has become more famous”.

Jerez, Cádiz and Triana

They also conclude that in the cantaor lies “the synthesis of flamenco since his family on his father's side were natives of Jerez and his mother combined Cádiz cante and, through La Niña de los Peines, that of Triana”. The album makes it clear that even back then, when Camarón was still a teenager, he used to manage to personalize everything he sang. Carlos Lencero, author of the book ‘Camarón. La leyenda del cantaor solitario’, points out “he had the special ability to listen to anyone's cante, it went his ear, he processed it in his brain, and when he sang it, it was already his own”.

Moreover, Pachón and Montiel picked out from the recording a party held in a room in which Camarón sings accompanied on the guitar by Manolo Brenes, with worse sound quality but equally valuable. They are the fandangos ‘Se me acabó el gusto’, bulerías ‘Azúcar candé’, ‘Tarantos del Tío Rufino’, fandangos ‘De invierno’, seguiriyas ‘Sierra de Armenia’ and bulerías ‘Amante de abril y mayo’. The entire repertoire is new with regards to the cantes recorded starting in 1968 in Madrid under the orders of Paco de Lucía's father and beginning in 1979 after ‘La leyenda del tiempo’ had already been produced by Ricardo Pachón. Now joining the nineteen titles making up Camarón de la Isla's discography is ‘Camarón en la Venta de Vargas’, the first chapter in the story of a legendary cantaor.

magazine@flamenco-world.com