Flamenco at its Finest, Documentary at its Greatest
"An Andalusian Journey" presents a historic time capsule of people and place
On April 30, fellow Substacker Judy Cantor-Navas published a piece entitled “Flamenco on Film: My Favorite Movies About the ‘Delirious’ Spanish Art,” an article I immediately opened up given that only three days earlier I had handed in a “capstone” project to conclude my studies for my Bachelor of Arts, on the subject of “Indian Roma Influence on Flamenco and Modern Guitar.”
If it’s confirmation of just how fascinating the multi-faceted art form of flamenco has proven to filmmakers and TV commissioners that for all my extensive research, I had only seen one of the many different “movies” recommended by Judy, the inverse is also true, for one of the most powerful, emotional and beautiful music documentaries I have ever seen escaped her list entirely. I had already planned to write about it; Judy’s post inspired me to make sure that I did.
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AN ANDALUSIAN JOURNEY: GYPSIES AND FLAMENCO
Q: “Could you define el cante (the song) for us, because we don’t know.”
A: “We don’t know either.”1
So runs an early interview clip in the 1988 Arena TV two-part documentary An Andalusian Journey: Gypsies and Flamenco, in which an unnamed flamenco spokesman from the Béticos Gitanos enclave within Triana - the distinct(ly unrecognized) city just across the Guadalquivir River from Seville (think what Salford is to Manchester) - reveals, with a warm smile, the limits of his expertise.
It’s one of the few times we hear the voice of an interviewer throughout the two hours of magnificent TV that has only just begun. That voice almost certainly belongs to Jana Boková, a Czech-born photographer who managed to escape the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of her home country and establish a career in France, UK, and the USA, where she worked for Rolling Stone among others. If this gave her a musical background of sorts, it did not make her a natural expert on flamenco, but with the BBC’s commission in hand, and with what was evidently an excellent research team on board also, she set about constructing what is, frankly, a masterpiece. It is also a reminder of a time when limited television channels often resulted in better television shows, a time when TV documentaries actually did what they said on the label.
Following the straight line from Seville to Jerez de la Frontera to Cádiz, the three main Andalusian cities to have spawned flamenco (adding a couple of side-stops along the way), Boková not only (re-) assembled the Great (and mostly Gypsy) families whose names are written, in bold, in the history books, but provided a physical space and a cinematic canvas upon which they could sing, dance, play guitar and generally make merry with an absolute minimum of intervention. In doing so, she provided a rich historical archive of people and place.
The first time I watched An Andalusian Journey, I did not recognize the actual faces, nor even the names, to the extent they were shown on screen (which is all too rarely, one of the documentary’s only faults). Flamenco is very much its own culture, with its own heroes/heroines, its own tragic figures, its own complex history, even its own form of Spanish guitar, and an insider’s legendary performer can easily be an outsider’s unknown. But after being mesmerized by the characters shown on screen - not just their loyalty to cultural tradition and extended family, but the joyous love evident in that loyalty – and learning more about the culture with every passing week, I returned to view again, this time studying the names in the end credits. In the process, I found that the vast majority of featured artists had been further detailed in the section “200 Flamenco Gitano Artists” in Bernard Leblon’s easily readable 1994 study, Gypsies and Flamenco. In other words, the stars of An Andalusian Journey were, pretty damn much, the legends and legacy stars of flamenco itself in the 1980s.
A word here on the word Gypsy. The descriptor has fallen out of favour in many places for its perceived pejorative tone, and some Roma people have welcomed a name change to reflect more accurately their ethnic roots. Others however, along with their most resolute advocates, continue to use the word Gypsy or its local equivalent. A 2013 paper by University of Limerick dance professor and flamenco expert Marianne Philips noted that “Spanish Gypsies… continue to refer to themselves as gitanos, or calé for the language they used to speak… In fact, many have never even heard of the word “Roma””. In the course of the research for my project, I came across multiple Gypsy foundations, research centers, and advocate groups, some funded by prominent Universities or even the European Union. (The book by Leblon, for example, was published by the University of Hertfordshire Press via its Gypsy Research Centre, and the author was additionally on the board of a French University’s research group on European Gypsy History.) Additionally, the word Roma does not cover all the different groups that migrated from India over the course of a thousand years or more: the Sinti, for example, whose own journey led us to French “Gypsy Jazz,” are a distinct people who left India as much as two centuries earlier. Most pointedly, the Gitano characters within An Andalusian Journey proclaim their Gypsy legacy with great pride.
Q: “Are you a Gypsy?”
El Chocolate: “Well, I’m hardly a fox terrier, am I?”
El Chocolate (above) is the only character who shows up in both episodes, initially in Sevilla/Seville, and then in Jerez as well. We first encounter him seated, somewhat anonymously, in the back corner of a gathering of the Farruco dynasty, themselves descended from the family of the great – by which I mean arguably the greatest - flamenco guitarist of them all, Ramón Montoya, whose early phonograph recordings, dating back to 1909, demonstrate considerably more finesse and vitality than most other genres committed to such early shellac.
This Farruco family is helmed by the great bailor (dancer) El Farruco, who introduces to the cameras and viewers his assembled clan, which includes daughter, La Farruca, his son-in-law El Moreno, that couple’s four-year old child prodigy bailor Farruquito, along with two other young female dancers who may well be Farruco daughters also. But even El Farruco, who in both size and stature is a dead ringer for John Belushi, defers to El Chocolate (born Antonio Nuñez) as “the patriarch… the master of us all… the eldest, and the one who led us.” (Discogs lists 19 albums by El Chocolate.)
When we then see El Chocolate singing from that same back seat, though only after seeking out, receiving and sipping from “una copa de tinto” – a ritualistic glass of red wine – we understand Leblon’s written description of El Chocolate as having a voice “forged by Gitano suffering, a rebel voice that ‘hurts.’” Despite his crisp white dress shirt and cream jacket giving him the air of a casual businessman who just happens to have stopped by, he sets off on the introductory “ay-yi-ye” warm-ups with a ferociousness born of that generational pain. When he then sings an old copla describing how “I go out in the fields at night and I make the stones cry,” stretching almost each and every vowel into a long melisma, and gesticulates in every direction while remaining seated in the corner, one hardly doubts that he could.
“I think flamenco could have come from a cry, from the first man who fell down, and said ‘aye’ and went on ‘aye aye aye.’” El Chocolate.
A camera from the back of the room now takes over: we see the seated Los Farrucos – as El Farruco named his family dance troupe – clapping along with precise synchronicity, then suddenly into the frame steps El Farruco himself, dressed like his flamenco counterpart, the torero (the bull-fighter), in black waistcoat, trousers, tie and hat, his large stomach hanging over his otherwise tightly buckled lower half. Again I defer to Bernard Leblon, who describes El Farruco’s dancing style as a mélange of expressivity, subliminated rage and duende2… Rarely has a dancer of such girth inspired such emotion.” And with those descriptions, don’t you too now want to pause from reading and get to viewing?
But wait, for Boková has hardly got going. For their next location, the crew detours slightly to Utrera, where we meet La Fernanda de Utrera, whose recordings are outstanding for having captured not just one of the finest female voices of the era with exceptionally high quality yet equally great emotion, and on the song ‘Ritmo de Andaluz,’ the additional foot-stomping rhythm of accompanying dancer Curro Vélez. (I include it further below as one of the finer flamenco recordings I have heard.)
La Fernanda is seen here singing to the accompaniment of Paco del Gastor, himself a descendent of a guitar-playing family dynasty. The pair, wildly different in age and repose, form something of a double act, each raging enthusiastically about the other’s (proven) talents. “I’m crazy about his guitar,” says La Fernanda, “it turns me inside out.” But Paco, who apparently teaches flamenco guitar these days in Morón de la Frontera, is aware of his own required musical modesty when playing alongside someone of Fernanda’s stature. “You have to know how to adapt to the singer. The guitar should never go in front of the singer, it always has to follow him.” [Spanish grammar regresses to the masculine]
La Fernanda and Paco del Gastor provide a rare example, at least for this documentary, of flamenco artistry hailing from payos – or non-Gypsies. Asked what appears to be the requisite question from Boková - “Are you Gypsy?” the pair look at each other and the camera with the same kind of incredulity as if, say, Dusty Springfield and Steve Cropper, great white soul artists they may (have) be(en) were innocently asked if they were Black by an interviewer who they have just realized must be Blind in turn.
“No! No! Who us?” replies La Fernanda with a laugh of dismay.
“Flamenco is something you are born with,” explains Paco a few moments later “Gypsies are just given more of it.”
The second part of An Andalusian Journey begins in the flamenco cradle of Jerez de la Frontera, with solo guitar performances in one of the sherry capital’s vast sherry cave by Chico Moraíto, yet another who shows up in Leblon’s Top 200. (“El cante belongs to the Gypsy,” Chico offers between puffs on a cigarette. “The Gypsy’s way of expression is different from the payos, Of course the payo sings well, but the gypsy is more profound.”) Almost an hour later the documentary winds up, after many other fascinating encounters, in the nearby port city of Cádiz, or rather, its gypsy neighborhoods of Santa Domingo and Barrio Santa Maria, with an incredible gathering of local Gitano luminaries (and payos, like the 14-yr old dancer Ana Maria who confesses that she is not but “would like to be” a Gypsy), in what could be an old Cortijo (farmhouse) rented especially for the occasion, with an enclosed courtyard, but could as well be a barrio equivalent. There gathers a large clan around a large Gitano man called Gineto, whose cheerful countenance – I am “at your service” he tells the cameras, clearly delighted by the BBC’s invitation – sets the tone for the juerga3 that soon takes place over what would appear to be many hours, all meticulously yet unobtrusively filmed by Boková and her crew.
As the party progresses and the empties pile up (flamenco is a culture historically fortified by multiples copas of wine, sherry or beer), various singers and guitarists step in and out, and former dancers of advancing age up from their seats and to their feet in an attempt to rekindle the halcyon days of their youth. Among them is Gineto who, inspired by the singing of the woman alongside him (one of his many daughters?) suddenly becomes a whirling dervish of rotary spins and precise backsteps, his giant size – Gineto makes El Farruco look more like Dan Aykroyd than John Belushi –dissipating and almost disappearing within the flailing movement of his excited limbs.
Moments later, the film cuts to Gineto the next afternoon, at his day job – selling lottery tickets on a street corner, income that, along with whatever he makes as a dance instructor, is somehow meant to feed his seven or eight grandchildren, given that their mothers are all currently unemployed, so he tells us. Gineto, smiling as always – it appears evident throughout this movie and beyond that the Gitanos are not given to complaining about their lowly existence in Spanish society - is already nostalgic for the gathering of his “whole family” the night before. He proudly names among them his nephew Juan(ito) Villar, yet another of the great singers who shows up in Leblon’s selective list, and one who likewise made it into the flamenco playlist I assembled for my academic project, entitled Mi Cante y Un Poema after a song I initially included, which you are welcome to listen to on Qobuz from here or clicking the image below.
Juanito Villar now closes out the documentary, performing at the juerga4 the previous night, accompanied on guitar by the bearded Niño Jero, yet another descendent of a great flamenco family. (The final song, a tango, includes the line “I am a Moorish Gypsy, and I come from Casablanca,” speaking to the possibility, as yet unconfirmed by DNA testing, that the calé Gitanos, often considered distinct from and by other European Gypsies, came to Andalusia via North Africa rather than the proven route up through Persia, Greece and Armenia, fanning out across Europe from there. This would make them the only European Gypsies who truly came through Egypt.)
If the casual viewer remains in any lingering doubt as to the majesty and status of these performers, those gathered at the location are most certainly not. We see Giteno openly crying at the beauty of the performance – a common mark of respect in flamenco audiences – and we hear the joleo, the cries of encouragement from the aficionados, and when it all concludes to a near cacophony of perfectly syncopated clapping and footstomping, we hear cheers from above as well, where two entire balconies have been filled with extended relatives and other members of the Cádiz flamenco culture, many of them young women whose chants of “otra, otra” (i.e. encore) confirm that Boková and her crew have both arranged and then filmed something very special indeed.
The session ends as all these family and performer sessions end, with a moving portrait. By this, I mean that Boková silences and stills the assembled cast, but not her camera, into whose lens these flamenco families duly stare, unblinking. It’s a simple and profoundly effective cinematic tool, and it resonates, long after the credits stop running. This is portraiture at its finest.
An Andalusian Journey is a celebration. It does not dwell on tragedy. Not of the centuries of Gypsy persecution by the Catholic Kings, nor on personal stories of hardship beyond that of daily toil for modest pay. Any sorrow can only be ascertained by what we now know. Key among that subsequent knowledge base ios the absence in Cadiz of Camarón de la Isla, not just the city’s most famous flamenco singer but one of the greatest the culture has ever produced, certainly its late 20th Century “rock star,” one who unfortunately died of rock star excess that included the rock star drugs of the era, though his death in 1992 at the age of just 38, was ascribed to lung cancer brought on by heavy heavy smoking. Thanks to Cantor-Navas’ post, I now know that there is a Netflix documentary series of Camarón (in Spanish with English subtitles available).
He is hardly the only one with a tobacco addiction. To spin all the way round to what was initially going to be my opening paragraph, An Andalusian Journey begins with a shot of El Farruco, all in white, sat in the corner of what turns out to be his dance studio, lighting up a cigarette as he instructs a small child in flamenco dance. El Farruco is kind but firm as he tells him to dance soleá and emote duende. He then asks the child if he would dance to a song if it’s sung by his father, and we start to get the picture of the direct family lineage that becomes the running theme of this travel story. The singer, El Moreno, is El Farruco’s son-in-law, which means you have probably figured by now that the grandson must be Farruqito, and we should be glad to see all three of them captured like this, for El Moreno would die on stage in Argentina in 2001 while performing alongside Farruquito. The grandson, who could only have been four years old in the documentary, would, two years later, kill a cyclist while driving “recklessly” in his Spanish home town, and serve prison time for it, all of which now permeates his dance.
Such are the narratives of the mostly calé Gitano flamenco families – pain brought on by history, poverty brought on by circumstances, tragedy brought on by lifestyle. All of that can be summed up in the word duende, and An Andalusian Journey, the slightly degraded quality of which on its YouTube archive only adds to its filmic majesty, offers us a rare inside deep dive.
The English translations here are per the subtitles on YouTube, presumably those of the BBC at the time. I know enough Spanish now to know that many of them are simplified.
Duende is a word particular to flamenco with no easy definition. The great poet and flamenco champion Gabriel García Lorca did his best in a speech in 1933 in Buenos Aires when he talked of it as “A mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained.”
I hesitate to call it a juerga, as that implies a private gathering within a Gitano cave or house or caravan. But these gatherings do feel intimate, as if we have been invited inside.
Wow Tony, that is fascinating that you are researching the art and culture of flamenco! We are walking some of the same musical steps again :)
I'm just back from a trip -I can't wait to read this. Thanks for much for the shout out!
A fascinating read Tony. It's on Youtube and it's now on my list!
I was interested in the paragraph on the use of "gypsy". I have a mate who plays "gypsy jazz" and has had issues with venues not being happy with the "words". I'll send him your take.
Cheers
Dick