Descanse En Paz: Phillip Hughes

DEP. Descanse en paz, often stated as descansa en paz. It doesn't matter which. It means RIP, rest in peace. There were thousands upon thousands of RIPs on forums and on social media last week. There were also many DEPs. DEP and RIP combined to mourn the death of Phillip Hughes.

It was when I saw that "Ultima Hora" had run the story about Hughes that I realised how deeply and how widely news of his death was being experienced. Contemporary communications being as they are, news agencies being as they are, it was a story which might not have touched the Spanish media in years gone by, but because of the instantaneousness of communications, it did. But this was the death of a cricketer. Un jugador de críquet. They don't play cricket in Spain. What do the Spanish know of this sport?

Well, they do of course play cricket in Spain. The national side may in international terms be in the minor league but national team there is, though to suggest that the overwhelming majority of Spaniards would have a clue about the sport - quite how it is played or quite how silly mid-off might be translated into Spanish - would be well wide of the mark.

Sport has over time followed its own evolutionary pattern of separate development, but there are - as with all evolution - common origins, for example hitting something with something else, which became a bat, while the thing to be hit was moulded into a shape that would allow smooth movement - the ball, the pelota. The Spanish - the Basques originally - have "pelota", which migrated to Spanish-speaking countries, just as much of the British Empire formed a common bond on the cricket pitch. The sports are different but they are not different. They share a common root and they share a commonality in being a sport.

It was this commonality which came across most in the reports of Hughes's death. A sportsman had been killed doing what he did, playing sport. That cricket might be a sport of arcane rules and jargon to the uninitiated doesn't matter. It is still a sport and so part of a global community which comes together in the name of sport;  hence the many DEPs that were contained in the comments to those reports.

The comments were, from the point of view of an English-speaking, cricket-loving observer, more interesting than the reports themselves. "Marca", the leading Spanish sports daily, had several pages of them on its website. The first one I came across said: "apart from being very boring, cricket is also dangerous and should be banned". Another opined that cricket was "a foolish and risky game". Others acknowledged the risks but no one else went so far as to suggest that cricket should be banned, though one added that "frankly, it seems stupid to me to play with balls that can kill". The counterpoint to this was one which said: "People die in cycling, motorcycling, skiing, and I could name others. Sport has a risk. If you don't want to assume it, then don't play it. But using a ball of foam rubber would be like limiting speeds on motorways to 20kph in order to avoid deaths".

It was the ball and its characteristics and the nature of protective gear which dominated the comments. There were those who, not having experienced cricket, were curious as to how the ball was made and others who expressed surprise that there was not greater protection. For those who didn't fully appreciate what had happened, someone went into some detail in explaining how "Hughes had turned on his vertical axis" (in cricketing parlance, he was playing the hook shot) and been struck where it was unusual to be struck. There was also surprise as to the sheer speed with which the ball can be bowled (or, in the absence of a Spanish verb "to bowl", can be thrown or slung). A Pakistani commenter came on to say that Shoaib Akhtar had bowled at 160kph (100 miles per hour).

Unrelated to the incident, someone else, not having any knowledge of cricket, had looked it up on Wikipedia. It was a sport with "a very interesting perspective". It was supposed that England would dominate it, but it turns out that England had never won the World Cup. He noted that India were the current champions and that the tournament had also been won by the West Indies ("a coalition of Caribbean micro-nations that seems to have been a good team").

Well, there's no need to rub it in about England's ongoing failure, but it was a comment which, I guess, highlighted how little would be known of cricket in Spain. Yet despite this, many people wished to comment, and overwhelmingly the feeling was one of sadness. The world of sport had come together. Phillip Hughes, DEP.

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.

MALLORCA TODAY - 22-year-old British tourist dead after Magalluf balcony fall

And another one ... A 22-year-old British tourist died early yesterday morning after a fall of only two metres from a balcony at the Villa Sol in Magalluf. He has been named as Samuel Peter Hill.

See more: Diario de Mallorca

MALLORCA TODAY - Austrian youth dies after balcony fall

A 17-year-old Austrian youth has died after falling from a sixth floor balcony at a Playa de Palma hotel, the Obelisco. Meantime, a 22-year-old Briton has been injured following a fall from the third floor of the Sotavento Club Apartments in Palmanova.

See more: Ultima Hora

MALLORCA TODAY - 74-year-old man knocked down and killed in Puerto Alcúdia

Avenida Pedro Mas y Reus (the Bellevue Mile) was closed this morning following an accident in which a 74-year-old man, a resident of the Siesta Apartments, was knocked down and killed by a car whose driver took the bridge along the road at high speed and seemingly lost control. The driver suffered only minor cuts. The incident occurred in broad daylight at around 10:30.

More on this fatal accident, but which confirms much of what was reported above. The driver was apparently in a worse state than was first said yesterday. This report says that the victim was launched some ten metres by the impact of the car that had first hit a stationary vehicle and which may have been lucky in preventing more pedestrians being hit. See more: Diario de Mallorca

(Photo of the crashed car is on Matt Wheatley's Facebook page. And thanks also to Benjamin Grimley for providing the photo here.)

MALLORCA TODAY - Another balcony death in Ibiza

A 23-year-old British tourist has died after falling from a second-floor balcony at tourist apartments in Sant Antoni in Ibiza.