Nuevo Flamenco: Re-Imagining Flamenco in Post-Dictatorship Spain

Nuevo Flamenco: Re-imagining Flamenco in Post-dictatorship Spain Xavier Moreno Peracaula Submitted in fulfilment of the degree of PhD Newcastle University March 2016 ii Contents Abstract iv Acknowledgements v Introduction 1 Chapter One The Gitano Atlantic: the Impact of Flamenco in Modal Jazz and its Reciprocal Influence in the Origins of Nuevo Flamenco 21 Introduction 22 Making Sketches: Flamenco and Modal Jazz 29 Atlantic Crossings: A Signifyin(g) Echo 57 Conclusions 77 Notes 81 Chapter Two ‘Gitano Americano’: Nuevo Flamenco and the Re-imagining of Gitano Identity 89 Introduction 90 Flamenco’s Racial Imagination 94 The Gitano Stereotype and its Ambivalence 114 Hyphenated Identity: the Logic of Splitting and Doubling 123 Conclusions 144 Notes 151 Chapter Three Flamenco Universal: Circulating the Authentic 158 Introduction 159 Authentic Flamenco, that Old Commodity 162 The Advent of Nuevo Flamenco: Within and Without Tradition 184 Mimetic Sounds 205 Conclusions 220 Notes 224 Conclusions 232 List of Tracks on Accompanying CD 254 Bibliography 255 Discography 270 iii Abstract This thesis is concerned with the study of nuevo flamenco (new flamenco) as a genre characterised by the incorporation within flamenco of elements from music genres of the African-American musical traditions. A great deal of emphasis is placed on purity and its loss, relating nuevo flamenco with the whole history of flamenco and its discourses, as well as tracing its relationship to other musical genres, mainly jazz. While centred on the process of fusion and crossover it also explores through music the characteristics and implications that nuevo flamenco and its discourses have impinged on related issues as Gypsy identity and cultural authenticity. Even though this project is rooted in popular music studies it also attempts to think through the issues covered in relation to concepts and methodologies of other disciplines such as postcolonial studies, anthropology, and cultural theory. The aim is to create a dialogue between these disciplines and explore the ways they can bring a new focus and a set of analytical tools to bear on the material of study. iv Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the continuous help and advice of my supervisors Prof. Richard Middleton and Dr. Ian Biddle of the International Centre for Music Studies at Newcastle University (ICMus). I came to Newcastle with the only objective of completing an MA and it was thanks to Richard’s suggestion that I embarked on this project. I have a deep gratitude to his encouragement and his warm support, and can only confess that I have learned a lot from his comments and responses. Ian has always been a source of advice and friendship and I can find no words to express my thanks to his permanent hospitality. In spite I have been constrained by the need to reconcile research for this project with a full-time job in Catalonia, they have always been at hand and have always offered their time whenever I requested. I am also deeply grateful to Miguel Ángel Hurtado for providing invaluable information on some of the musical pieces on which I have been working and for being always supportive of this project. I have benefited enormously from the advice he has offered and from the rewarding conversations around (and beyond) music that have arisen in front of his piano. My gratitude goes also to my friends at the Institute of Vidreres for always encouraging me, and to Nacho Montoya for the enthusiasm he has always shown on this project. My brother Jaume has not only been an inspiring model of commitment but has been an endless source of encouragement as well as my nephew Jordi, that has always forgiven me for the little time I have been able to dedicate to him. My parents Joan and Pilar have aided me in invaluable ways. In them I have continuously found the most thoughtful advice and have provided the moral and practical support that has allowed me to work on this project. This thesis could not have been written without them and it is to them that I dedicate it. Aquest modest treball és per a vosaltres. v Music is inscribed between noise and silence, in the space of the social codification it reveals. Every code of music is rooted in the ideologies and technologies of its age, and at the same time produces them. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music1 1 Introduction Once an ‘isolated’ and neglected land that even catered images of exoticism to other European countries, Spain is now part of the global cultural flux. If there is a moment at which to locate the point of departure for this new cultural heterogeneity it should probably be situated during the first years of the post-Franco era. The reestablishment of democracy with the first democratic elections (1977) since the time of the Second Republic and the writing of a new constitution (1978) inaugurated a period of deep transformations that become known as the transición (transition), which was a moment that also introduced intense changes in the cultural and social arenas. During the nearly forty years that followed the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), one of the biggest efforts of propaganda of the fascist regime of general Franco was to construct an image of homogeneity with the objective of unifying a country politically divided, culturally diverse, and fractured by the war. Even though, in most cases, the only instrument employed to achieve this goal was that of repression by force, the regime also put to work all the available cultural media to spread its hegemonic ideological discourse and to wipe out counter-cultural resistance.2 One of the most committed among these efforts was that concentrated on the field of projecting a centralised national identity, with the firm intention of emphasizing the idea of Spain as an ethnically homogeneous country. As Jo Labanyi states, ‘the Franco regime tried to unify the nation by projecting difference outside its borders, or confining it to internal exclusion zones, in the form of otherness.’3 At a racial and ethnic level there is no doubt that the most salient ‘form of otherness’ in Spain has been that of the Gitanos;4 their racial/ethnic representations have been, for this reason, central in the construction of ‘Spanishness.’ 2 The political and economic integration of Spain into the European Union5 was not only a major step in inserting the country into international cultural flows but, most important of all, it opened it to foreign influences. According to this, Labanyi also underlines how: The loss of distinction resulting from a multinational economy and from the ‘global village’ created by world-wide access to the media goes together with the recognition of internal differences: to be Spanish is to be Spanish and international at the same time; the Manichean thinking that enabled Francoism to argue that everything that was not Spanish must be anti-Spanish no longer holds. Some Spaniards –and foreign tourists– lament this loss of Spain’s ‘differentness’ as if it meant the loss of ‘Spanishness’ itself. But the postmodernist deconstruction of identity does not mean that one has to abandon all attempts at definition: rather, it means recognition of the fact that ‘Spanishness’ is a shifting concept, encompassing plurality and contradiction. And, above all, that identities are strategic constructions: neither inherent nor imposed, but negotiated.6 In the last decades of the 20th century, therefore, Spain had to contend with an enormous transformation of its social, political, and economic conditions. A visible consequence of this circumstance in Spanish culture –and especially popular culture– was the change that took place in the circulation of racially and ethnically loaded images, sounds, and stories. Although it is clear that this fact is directly connected to the rise of immigration (mainly from North African, Sub-Saharan, South American, and Filipino origin), it is nonetheless true that it also had a deep consequence in relation to the identity of Spain’s local ethnic subjects, the Gitanos. 3 According to written records, anthropologists and historians working on the Gitano culture have always claimed that the so called ‘bands of Egyptians’7 crossed the Pyrenees and arrived into Spain at the beginning of the 15th century. In spite of being a community that has been living in the Iberian Peninsula for more than six centuries, Gitanos have always maintained a lifestyle and a shared identity clearly different from those of the dominant population among which they live, the non-Gitanos, whom they call the Payos.8 It is in this sense that the figure of the Gitano has always been regarded as an insider Other, distinct from normative Spanishness. But, this apparently straightforward panorama is in fact much more complex and problematic than it seems. To fully understand the persistent investment in the construction of this idealized image of the Gitano within Spanish society requires us to be aware of an intricate paradox. The fact is that, in particular historical contexts, the Gitano identity has collapsed into the Andalusian identity, which in its turn has come to stand for Spanish identity both outside and, to a certain extent, inside Spain’s cultural arena. This ambiguous and contradictory situation became intensified by the romantic ideology of the 19th century. The romantic Orientalist perspective conceived the Gitano (sometimes, as mentioned above metonymically conflated to Andalusia and the whole of Spain) ‘as a foreign and exotic presence who stealthfully imported something of the East into the West,’9 an image that even in contemporary discourse seems very difficult to eradicate. Awakening fascination, and yet in most cases also being demonized, the Gitano has continuously provided an imaginary figure that has answered the need for a fetishized difference both inside and outside Spain.

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