Why Does Mallorca Not Love Flamenco?

When Paco de Lucía passed away in February last year, the association between Mallorca and the world's greatest exponent of the flamenco guitar died with him. A few years before his death, but already a resident of the island, he became the last in a line of celebrity faces that the regional tourism ministry felt might help with promotion. Famous though he undoubtedly was, the choice seemed a little odd, though not perhaps any odder than there having been a German model (Claudia Schiffer) or a Russian tennis player (Anna Kournikova) as faces of Mallorca. Nevertheless, what did a flamenco musician have to do with Mallorca or the Balearics? Flamenco isn't Mallorcan music.

When de Lucía decided to uproot and move to Mallorca, he did so because he was looking for somewhere to enjoy peace and quiet. In Toledo, where he had been living in a six-storey mansion, he had tired of Japanese tourists flashing their cameras at the impressive gate. His house had been featured in tourist guides and on tourist routes.

Toledo lies not so far south of Madrid, a city which, despite being a fair old distance from the birthplace of flamenco in de Lucía's native Andalusia, was and is a centre of the flamenco tradition. It is said that Barcelona is also such a centre, which might seem a little surprising. Flamenco is synonymous with Spanish culture, even if it is a culture largely of Andalusia and of the capital: when Madrid was being promoted for the 2020 Olympic Games, the video featured flamenco strongly.

Away from Toledo, away from Madrid, de Lucía was able to enjoy the quiet life he craved. He would go with his family to the occasional village fiesta. He might play. But he had no interest in drawing attention to himself. He was content with being part of a community, mingling with the local people, unmolested by them.

That someone of his fame was able to achieve this says much for his humility, but what did it say of flamenco? Of course he was famous, enormously famous, a global superstar. He had been able to pack the main hall at Palma's auditorium in late 2010, but otherwise, what was the island's relationship with this music, with this tradition?

Take yourselves back to the days of early mass tourism in Mallorca, and there was a culture to be promoted which was pretty much mandated from Manuel Fraga's ministry for information and tourism. It wasn't a Mallorcan culture but a Spanish one. From the ubiquitousness of souvenirs to the bullfight to the music, it was Spanishness that was for sale, and flamenco was one of the products.

Flamenco had suffered badly because of the Civil War and its aftermath, not because it was proscribed but mainly because it was being lost amidst the poverty in Andalusia. It wasn't until 1956, when a "cante jondo" contest was held in Cordoba, that its revival started. The Franco regime was to cotton on to its renewed popularity as a tourism money spinner, and what was good for the Costa del Sol was also good for the Costa Brava and Mallorca.

Come forward fifty years to the current day, and flamenco in Mallorca, while it still has its place in the tourism scene, is a quite different beast. It is everywhere in its more serious guises - its music and its dance. Consult what's on pages, and you will find, especially in summer, flamenco seasons, flamenco nights, flamenco as part of music festivals (those of a classical nature), flamenco and dinner events. Mallorca appears to be almost drowning under the sheer weight of flamenco, further bolstered by Andalusian cultural fairs that have sprung up in many a town.

Yet despite all these events appearing in what's on listings, despite there being a significant Andalusian population in Mallorca, promoters of flamenco are bemoaning the fact that it simply isn't capturing the general public's imagination. They attribute this partly to a lack of promotional visibility, but how can this be? As I say, flamenco seems to be everywhere, and be it somewhere like the Embat beach chiringuito at Es Trenc or the Santanyi International Music Festival, promotion seems anything other than invisible.

Flamenco in a different, more of-the-moment guise - flamenco chill - is undoubtedly popular, but this genre differs quite significantly from more traditional flamenco and in one very important way: the singing, which is all but absent. There are various forms of singing, such as the "cante jondo", but it has to be said that it is an acquired taste. Vocally, flamenco can grate.

Is this a reason for not capturing the public's imagination? Maybe it is. Or maybe it is a memory of how traditional Mallorcan music was sidelined by the Spanishness of early tourism. And maybe, quite simply, because it isn't Mallorcan music.

Paco de Lucía: Death of an innovator

A month ago, Pete Seeger died. Seeger was considered to have been a folk music purist, and the story goes that he was so offended by Bob Dylan's use of electric instrumentation at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival that he threatened to cut the cables. In fact, he did say that he would cut the cables, but that was because he thought the sound was distorted. Nevertheless, the story took hold that Seeger, the purist, objected to Dylan's going electric and so sided with many in the audience who took exception to the non-traditional use of the electric guitar in folk music and booed Dylan's performance.

Apocryphal the story may have been, but it is often cited as one of the more obvious examples of how musical genres, in being developed and taken away from their traditional roots, can cause not only a musical revolution but also disrupt the status quo and order of things within these genres. Dylan's poetry had already been enormously important in shaping the direction of 1960s music, but when he plugged in the amp that music took a giant leap forward. The folk music old school was horrified, but a whole new school emerged. The order of things was disrupted for good.

Miles Davis did something similar in the jazz world. In fact, Davis kept doing some things differently. He pretty much invented electric jazz and the whole idea of fusion, be it with rock or other styles. The purists were offended, but thanks to Davis, jazz was to come out of an elite closet in the 1970s and to create a whole new audience who listened to Davis and the often rock-influenced albums of his numerous collaborators and protégés, and one of the musicians who was involved with this new electric-jazz genre with Davis was the British guitarist John McLaughlin.

In 1979, McLaughlin, who was alternating between playing acoustic and electric guitar, teamed up with first Larry Coryell and then Al Di Meola, both American jazz-fusion guitarists. Di Meola replaced the drug-addicted Coryell and brought an additional touch of Latin influence to a trio whose third member was Paco de Lucía. Together they recorded an album called "Friday Night In San Francisco". It comprised five tracks, and it was essentially a jazz album, except of course there was a difference, and that difference was the playing of de Lucía, the maestro of the flamenco guitar.

There were to be two further albums by this trio, one released in 1983 and the third in 1996, but it was the original collaboration which unleashed the opprobrium of the flamenco traditionalist. The status quo and the order of things in flamenco music were disrupted and, as had been the consequence of Dylan with his electric guitar, they were disrupted for good; de Lucía had created the fusion of flamenco with jazz.

It is no exaggeration to place de Lucía on a similar pedestal as Dylan and Davis. By following the fusion route, de Lucía took flamenco to a wider international audience while he also spawned a whole separate genre of flamenco jazz which itself crossed over and became a key ingredient in the distinctively Spanish flamenco chill music. In so doing, he offended purists, but what the purists failed to appreciate was that de Lucía, by finding international popularity because of fusion, was also able to popularise more traditional flamenco music. Indeed, he became the great ambassador for flamenco: what he described as one of the five or six "essential genres" of world music.

But de Lucía had, before he became part of the guitar trio, shown an inclination to innovate. He came to prominence at the end of the 1960s and in the 1970s through his work with the flamenco singer Camarón de la Isla, with whom he had started to push the barriers by introducing elements of pop and rock. Through all this creativity and innovation though, de Lucía retained the credibility of having been born into the flamenco style of his native Andalusia.

His international popularity and recognition was such that he found himself adopted as a "face" of tourism promotion, that of Mallorca's. A resident of Palma for some years, he was brought on board by the Balearic Government under Francesc Antich, though in truth, he was one of a succession of celebrities that the tourism ministry attached itself to and whose role was unclear and whose involvement, for promotional purposes, produced very little. That wasn't his fault, though.

He died suddenly of a heart attack in Cancún, where he had a home. It is said that he had become less keen on playing the guitar and that he preferred to spend his time out of the limelight and with his two young children. At the age of 66, his loss is great, but his legacy is greater still. A master and an innovator; one of Spain's greatest ever musicians.

Photo: Wikipedia.

Pick Up My Guitar And Play

Is Paco de Lucía the tourist image that the Balearics needs?

This is a question posed in today’s “Ultima Hora”. The Spanish guitarist is now the new face of the Balearics. That Paco may prove to be a “magnificent ambassador” for the islands I will not question, but I will pose the question that will come to many lips - who is he?

In the past there have been various faces knocking around as promotional hooks for the Balearics and Mallorca - Michael Douglas, Claudia Schiffer, Anna Kournikova. Like them or not, at least most people have heard of them; Paco on the other hand. I suppose in all of this is the idea that Paco will represent something a tad more cultural than the likes of German supermodels or over-hyped Russian tennis-players. That Paco is arguably Spain’s most famous flamenco guitarist and that he has taken flamenco to a wider audience and crossed-over into other musical forms (e.g. into jazz with the likes of John McLaughlin) is not in dispute, but I ask how many people among the general mass of British tourists could tell you who he is. Were his appointment, if one can use such a word, as the face of Balearic tourism solely for Spanish consumption, then all would be fine, but the gig he’s been landed with was being pushed at the London World Travel Market, from which follows the conclusion that he is the international face of Balearic tourism.

Can someone tell me what exactly does being the face of Balearic tourism entail? Does Paco front some ads or what? Come Boxing Day, and there it is, a TV ad for the Balearics, shots of turquoise seas and a grinning waiter pouring some sangria before gleefully trousering some euros and up pops Paco strumming a few chords before saying in good Fred Pontin style - “Book early”. No, I don’t think so either.


Weather - winter has arrived. Cold and wet. Apparently the Dijous Bo day at Inca yesterday was pretty well attended. Brave that’s all I can say.


QUIZ
Yesterday - Barbara Streisand, “The Way We Were”. Today’s title - a line from?

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