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Sunday, Nov 23, 2008
Over a bottle of vino tinto, the first non-Spaniard ever awarded the title "flamencologist" talks about one of the world's most vibrant folk arts.
Oct 2, 1999 | Inside Suristan, a club near Madrid's Plaza Santa Ana, flamenco fans are assembling for a show featuring two of the city's newest generation of flamenco stars. Jeronimo Maya, a cherubic 20-year-old guitarist, and Dieguito, an Armani-clad Gypsy singer, quaff pre-gig drinks at the bar.
Heads turn as David Byrne, with an armada of Spanish record execs, parts the cloud of cigarette smoke on his way to a stage-side table. Byrne, uneasy as a nun, is surrounded by a group of boisterous Gypsies cheering the performers who take the stage.
Maya's sinewy hands fan over the strings in the first slow, sad passages of a Soleares. Dieguito, eyes closed, emits a low throaty cry that hushes the room. Byrne's eyes lock on the singer in either a moment of primal conversion or recognition of the next recording contract bonanza.
After weeks of travel through Spain sampling flamenco music in clubs, outdoor festivals and the ubiquitous private flamenco clubs called peqas, it became clear that Spain's flamenco music scene was moving toward a flashy rock-style promotion evident in Madrid's clubs.
For Donn Pohren, an American who's spent the past 45 years in Spain writing about a flamenco world that has slowly given way to Americanized commercialism, it's a sign of corruption. He's the only non-Spaniard ever awarded the title of "flamencologist" by the closed circle of writers and academics who make up the "Catedra de Flamencologia." And his books, praised by such Spanish artists as guitarist Andris Segovia and dancer Carmen Amaya, have become underground classics fueling a quiet affair between legions of flamenco aficionados around the world and this uniquely Iberian art form.
We'd arranged to meet at a cafe in a suburb 12 miles from Madrid. The next morning I boarded a train that crawled through the tawny hills outside the city past an abandoned bullfight school, its crumbling walls a reminder of the rustic Spain where flamenco once thrived.
I found my way to the cafe and took a seat near a rack of hoofed hams dangling from the ceiling. With a predictable Spanish tardiness, Pohren appeared at my table briskly ordering a drink in Minnesota-tinged Spanish. Over a five-hour lunch accompanied by several bottles of vino tinto, Pohren told me the story of his flamenco pilgrimage.
"In the beginning I used to say my mother was Spanish, and call myself Daniel Maravilla, which did help in getting accepted," the 69 year-old author says of his early efforts to gain admittance to the then-closed flamenco world. "Now I couldn't care less whether I'm accepted or not."
Pohren has reason to be sure of his reputation these days. A few months ago he joined the pantheon of flamenco heroes memorialized by statues in the public squares of small towns dotting Andalusia. A plaque was erected in Morsn de la Frontera, a town near Seville popularized in his writings, which decades before regarded him as foreign provocateur.
When he arrived in Spain, though, flamenco music was still an outsider art -- every bit as back-alley to Spain as jazz or blues was in the United States at the turn of the century. It was a music that devotees spoke of in mystical, quasi-religious terms, describing their discovery of it as a "baptism." Pohren's exploration of the flamenco cabal became an expedition through the dark umbra of Spain's alter ego on a river of wine and song.
His flamenco baptism, he says, occurred on a family vacation in Mexico City in 1947. "Wandering downtown one day I heard a guitar, singing, foot-stomping issuing from a bar, and went in. During a break I asked the guitarist what the music was," Pohren recalls. "He smiled and told me it was flamenco." Pohren remembered reading about Carmen Amaya's troupe, whose tours through the U.S. had made headlines. "I mentioned this to the guitarist. He pointed to the woman who had been dancing and singing and told me, 'That is Carmen Amaya!'"
The chance encounter with Amaya and famed guitarist Sabicas in a Mexican cantina marked the beginning of the 17-year-old's lifelong sojourn. Six years later Pohren abandoned his orderly Eisenhower-era Minneapolis neighborhood with a one-way ticket on the Queen Mary bound for Spain tucked into his pocket. His quest took him to Seville's narrow corridors, where Gypsy singers, toreros and their rich benefactors all rubbed elbows in pursuit of the flamenco life.
"I lived for a period in the Barrio Santa Cruz, in Seville," Pohren says. The compact, mostly Gypsy, neighborhood, with its jumble of narrow streets overflowing with flamenco bars, was then the heart of the flamenco world. "The flamenco scene in Seville was still in full bloom; an all night, round-the-clock affair. The cafes on Alameda de Hercules at about 2 or 3 in the morning were overflowing with flamenco artists waiting to be hired."
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