Donn Pohren, flamenco's hero

The star at the finca became Diego del Gastor, a princely local Gypsy noted for his simple and emotional style of guitar playing, who would later become a legend and icon to flamenco fans and musicians around the world. "He played mostly private parties. The very essence of this man emerged through his playing. He arrived directly at the soul of flamenco without frills or bullshit," Pohren says. Diego's death in 1973, commemorated by a bust in a small park and a street bearing his name, spelled the end for the finca.

I mention the popularity of the flamenco stylings of the Gypsy Kings, and Ottmar Liebert's diluted new-age noodling as well as the Spanish television shows featuring flamenco, suggesting that it may have helped boost the art in recent years. I tell him of the subtle incursion of flamenco as background music for truck commercials in the states, and the celebrity of Joaquin Cortez, the shirtless Gypsy dancer whose romance with Naomi Campbell made tabloid headlines.

"There are people who will think that Ottmar is the real thing," Pohren replies, with a hint of disgust. The advent of American-style record deals hatched in Madrid clubs, Pohren believes, is like the infiltration of McDonald's in the country's ancient squares: an evil he can't prevent but one that he won't accept. "Today's affluence is deadly to the flamenco way of life," he says.

Dorien Ross, author of the acclaimed novel "Returning to A," which recounts her immersion in the flamenco world, credits Pohren with inspiring her first trip to Spain. "He was the first adult I'd met who was really like a big boy," the New York author recalls about her eventual meeting with Pohren. Ross' novel recounts the time she spent at the finca and the nearby town learning to play guitar with Diego del Gastor. Her journey at 17, began with a letter to Pohren and ended with her boarding a plane clutching a map he'd drawn on a cocktail napkin.

"I devoured his books," Ross says, "it was like falling into another world." She shares Pohren's conviction that those days marked the end of an epoch. "Being in Morsn de la Frontera in the '60s was one of those gifts life occasionally offers that changes the course of the river."

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