Ecijano, born in 1976, José Manuel López Gutiérrez, better known in the scene flamenco , the Chemi LopezHe has been intensely active as a record producer for many years, at the head of The Music Drugstoreand delving into historical archives to shed light on the past of what jondoThe first installment of their project is the result of that effort. El cante after the cante, a volume that has just been recognized with the Pencho Cross Prize of the International Festival of Cante of the Mines.
– Let's start with the award. What does recognition like this mean, after so many hours of solitude that a researcher experiences?
– Research is a wonderful adventure. I've thoroughly enjoyed the entire process, especially those moments when you uncover a completely new piece of information that changes everything. It gives you a huge adrenaline rush, and the next day you crave more. But obviously, that's impossible to be the norm because we're not machines, and we're not always at our sharpest or our intuition is always at its peak. I don't know if you experience this too, but when you're completely immersed in research and have thousands of pieces of information in your head, dormant, interacting with each other at an astonishing rate, you find ways to theorize and argue with incredible fluency. Your machine is well-oiled from so much daily practice and immersion in the subject you're studying. So far, so good.
- And then…?
The problem is managing the process when you have a family that needs your attention, when you need to come out of your shell and lend a hand with things at home. I thought I was handling it well, but once the book went to print, Inma asked me to get back to normal as soon as possible. I hadn't been able to fulfill my family obligations in simple but important ways, like listening to something my children want to tell me about school, for example. And I imagine some of my artists also noticed this absence. Ultimately, to make this happen, other people I care about had to sacrifice themselves without asking for anything in return and without the slightest complaint until the work was finished. Recognition like this is my way of justifying myself to them. It's the only moral payment I can offer them: here are the results, the prize is yours. This, and the emptiness of leaving the book at the printer, which crushed me, are two things I still struggle with even now.
– At what point did you go from being an amateur to a researcher?
– I've always been very keen to know the historical origins of my hobbies. The same goes for Carnival. My world has always been music, but I wasn't a schoolboy; in fact, I learned to play guitar by watching VHS tapes of TV programs. And that—not having formal musical training, from a conservatory—was a burden for me. So when I decided that the flamenco It was going to be my life; I wanted to acquire formal knowledge and enrolled in Musicology. I'm talking about the early 2000s, with my teaching degree completed and working in a school.
"I am concerned about the attitude of the fan to flamenco In general, they deny that there's any semblance of quality today compared to other eras. (...) They've placed certain artists from the 1930s on a pedestal solely for having recorded shellac records. Even if it were just one bad one, they still consider that flamenco singer superior to anyone today. Just look at the stupidity. This sentimental, outdated, and absurd fad, cheerfully displayed on social media, drives me crazy.
– Who was working in this field at that time?
– So, musicologists dedicated to flamencoThere was Faustino Núñez and little else; although, Faustino wasn't yet as well-known as he is now. In my case, what I was looking for were primarily methodological tools to apply to a research model of the flamenco opposite to what I found in what I was reading. Keep in mind that the career of FlamencoMusicology didn't exist at the current levels either. The other part of my training plan was to learn how to produce records so that, using the tools of musicology, I could record artists. flamencos far from the model mainstream which was established in the nineties and is still in force today, but much more provincial and awful. Professionally, it's what I've been doing since 2011, with varying degrees of success depending on who you ask. Some seventy-odd records, which is quite a lot… But meanwhile, I was also dedicating a lot of time to research, although I hardly published anything. I amassed so much data that a few years ago I decided to start a blog where I posted interviews I did during my time as a critic with Bernarda de Utrera, Menese, Lebrijano, Manolo Sanlúcar, Manuel Mairena… or opinion pieces. But you need time to maintain a website In good condition and with quality. With La Droguería Music, we've also published six books, and I've contributed to almost all of them, but I'm not listed as a co-author in the credits because perhaps those contributions were closer to stylistic editing or layout than to my influence on a significant or decisive part of the work. I can't deny, in any case, that the work on those six books was also crucial in deciding to fully commit to my own two summers ago.
– Javier Osuna was telling me how you bloggers have caused a revolution in flamenco research, is that right? Were those who came before so lost that their theories can't withstand the slightest scrutiny?
– Those from before, almost all of them, had the bad habit of shaping a history of flamenco They were at the service of their aesthetic ethos every time they published, gave a lecture, or participated in those legendary conferences. Or presented a festival. They sold you whatever story suited them, even to increase their activity in the scene. I'm not saying anything outrageous, because I myself was on that path. Fortunately, I began to connect with another circle of the flamenco which opened my eyes to many things. It's fair to say that most researchers today have abandoned that perversion. It's true that thirty or forty years ago, the wonderful digital archives didn't exist either, where with a click you have hundreds of 19th-century newspaper clippings. Nor did flamenco scholars make a habit of going to physical archives, with the honorable exception of a few, as I mentioned. Back then, this lack of data was compensated for with imagination, with what each person supposed might have been the origin of this genre according to their aesthetic leanings. Who was going to refute anything if no one had conclusive proof? And to top it all off, books were churned out like hotcakes, copies of copies of copies; thus, great falsehoods became established as unshakeable truths, and these are still repeated today.
– What remains of that?
Fortunately, that attitude is almost eradicated, but now anyone without any training can find the same news story as you and post it on Facebook. I love that freedom, but posting a newspaper clipping from over a hundred years ago on social media doesn't make you a researcher or a discoverer of anything. You should accompany those snippets with at least a short paragraph that provides context. But most people who upload clippings to social media aren't prepared to interpret data accurately. That's why bloggers were fundamental to this great shift in the research paradigm. I haven't been as active as Javier Osuna, Antonio Barberán, Faustino Núñez, Rodríguez PeñaDavid Pérez Merinero was a strong contender… Or Manuel Bohórquez, who, despite being one of the old guard, knew how to reinvent himself and energize all those I've mentioned before. The work of Andrés Raya, who coexisted with that old school but was more modern than any of them, seems essential to me because he taught us to question everything, to take nothing for granted. And I don't want to forget the current blogs of Rafael Chaves, Antonio Conde, or Ángeles Cruzado, also extremely important. I completely agree with Javier. Moreover, if other great researchers like Ramón Soler, José Luis Ortiz Nuevo, Gerhard Steingress, Philippe Donnier, or Gregorio Valderrama had had blogs back then, things would have changed even more.
– Although your book has a lot to cover, one aspect particularly interests me: art history usually focuses on the creative side, but not so much on the technical. This book demonstrates how technique can completely transform an art form, doesn't it?
– We've seen this for some time now with the graphic arts, for example. Digital media has completely transformed everything. But if we go back to the origins of recordings, when the first audio samples were recorded on Edison's primitive phonograph between 1877 and 1880, almost no one imagined that this toy that repeated phrases and short snippets of songs would displace, or nearly wipe out, the publishing industry, which until then, through the distribution of printed copies of musical scores, generated significant revenue for composers. These scores contain the notation, but the interpretive spirit, and what the flamencoIt's not called "air," no. Musical air, the personality of a work and its performers, truly begins to communicate when the recording is commercially distributed. And what was once only heard in a Madrid venue can now be heard, performed live, with its own unique feel, in a bar in Paris or Mexico.
"There are very well-prepared people to do that." A definitive study of our repertoire wouldn't be expensive, but I fear there's no interest in putting an end to the myths about goblins and the biased squabbles of both sides, because as long as they persist, we can continue peddling smoke and mirrors. Without that work, the flamenco It doesn't have much of a future for a very simple reason: a lack of knowledge of the repertoire is leading to a simplification of the styles being sung. Always the same ones, and by the same people. Overdone and worn out.
– That changes everything, of course.
– The new performers started copying what works, what sells. Flamenco Included. If Chacón sells, let's imitate Chacón. And, indirectly, let's fix the musical repertoires. In this way, the melodic indecisiveness of those early ones canteThe recordings, little by little, became something definitive or that has changed very little. Then there are determining factors such as the duration of the recording, which, at around three minutes, forced the performer to constantly keep track of time while singing. There was no possibility of a focused performance conceived as art: two or three verses, short falsetas, speed, and concise thirds… and on top of that, singing with their head practically inside a bell. This gradually normalized with the arrival of recording with electric microphones, in which a different kind of artistry is progressively evident when recording. And then, with magnetic tape as a new medium, around 1950, the recording time increased, and the singer could afford to perform three verses of seguiriyas in a relaxed manner. And six or seven of soleares. The performance slowed down, the guitarist relaxed, and a new model of interpretation was distributed worldwide, generating new possibilities. But not only in the flamenco… The next twists were the implementations of multitrack recording and digital sequencing.
– The average music fan usually lives with the melancholy of “what they will never hear.” How do you experience this? Do you grieve over any hypothetical recording, lost forever?
– We'd all love to find a tin record with Silverio's voice, but that's physically impossible. I give details about this in the book. Or those recordings of El Mellizo from 1894 with Hugens. But imagine they do surface, we play them, and it turns out that El Mellizo wasn't as good as we assumed based on the written opinions of his contemporaries. Or that upon listening to his malagueña, it has nothing to do with what is sung today as Enrique El Mellizo's malagueña. What a disappointment, right? There's an audible example of this: the two cylinders of Manuel Cagancho that the Catalan impresario Ruperto Regordosa recorded in Seville around 1899. When a later flamenco singer had already recorded several of those supposed recordings. canteThen recordings of the real Manuel Cagancho surface, and we discover that Cagancho wasn't the mythologized, sublime singer he was made out to be, nor are the songs he performs similar to those recorded later. Of course, it would be wonderful to hear the famous martinete of La Jitana de Jerez, which Lorenzo Colis recorded in the same days of January 1894 that Hugens recorded El Mellizo. And so many others. But is the flamenco community prepared to accept the changes this would bring to the historical understanding of flamenco? flamenco that we have assumed or that we have been made to assume?
– What do you think? Is it?
– The responsible thing to do would be to review everything and leave future generations a legacy with more certainties and less fable. In this sense, I'm more concerned about the attitude of the fan of… flamenco In general, regarding the current scene, there's a disheartening lack of judgment that leads them to capriciously promote some artists while ignoring others. Or worse, to deny that there's any semblance of quality today compared to other eras. This leaves young artists completely disoriented, bewildered, doing absurd things, giving palos They're blind because the fans don't listen with the intention of enjoying them. This type of audience lives in constant denial, as if that somehow makes them more prestigious than others like them. They're the ones who, at best, only consume voices that sound good and are fashionable due to marketing, but which bore even the most inexperienced person after two minutes. And with supposedly expert critics endorsing everything, which is what makes you think. They're the same ones, ultimately, who have placed certain artists from the 1930s on a pedestal for the sole merit of having recorded shellac records. Even if it was just one bad one, they still consider that singer above any of today's artists. Just look at the stupidity. This trendy, melancholic, outdated, and absurd fad, so cheerfully displayed on social media drives me crazy. Especially because it's one of the reasons, perhaps the most important one, why young people are running away from flamenco. flamenco.
– And then there's the researcher's melancholy: the data that can never be verified, the document that can't be found… Is that a given, or who knows if…?
– As I say in the book, we will never know exactly what that was like. flamenco or preflamenco from 1850. Basically because it can't be heard. Biographical data on performers will continue to appear, along with some press mentions, but little more of value beyond what has already been located. Or does anyone expect to find the famous bundles of scores that Pericón described? Perhaps an article from El Planeta, inaugurating our genre? However, there is a monumental task ahead: the scientific analysis of the music of the canteThat is where musicology has a great deal to contribute. flamencobecause the flamencologia was limited to cataloging the palos from the perspective of the beat or rhythm. And that's as far as they got.
"The next period of 'The cante after the cante'It covers recordings with electric microphones up to the switch from shellac to magnetic tape. A few months ago I acquired a collection of four thousand shellac records, to which I must add another three hundred that I already had. They are almost all from this period, 1925 to 1950, and they will greatly facilitate the fieldwork for the second volume. I am thoroughly enjoying cataloging and cleaning these little gems because I'm a real geek and I really enjoy that kind of thing.'
– What's the situation now?
Lately, harmony has been the subject of intense study, but the field of melody remains practically untouched. And what little research exists is precarious. It's true that Faustino Castro, Guillermo Castro, and even Pierre Lefranc have done invaluable work. But almost simultaneously, we've witnessed a capricious, arbitrary, and unscientific apportionment of musical authorship. As a result, people now identify music as being by La Serneta, for example, without the slightest certainty as to whether La Serneta actually composed music by [unclear]. canteSo, if that were the case, what is sung today as her soleares would bear any resemblance to the original by this singer. We're still in our infancy in this respect. It's incredible that at this point, with the disproportionate amount of money that governments have allocated to flamenco, a definitive study of our repertoire has not yet been launched.
– Are the conditions right?
– There are very qualified people for it, and it wouldn't even be expensive, but I'm afraid there's no interest in putting an end to the myths about elves and the biased squabbles of both sides, because as long as they persist we can continue selling snake oil. Without that work, the flamenco It doesn't have much of a future for a very simple reason: a lack of knowledge of the repertoire is leading to a simplification of the styles being sung. Always the same ones, and by the same people. Overdone and overused. We had a rich range of music, for all aesthetics and sounds, but very few are bothering to work on these almost unknown pieces. The great thing is that there are more and more record collectors and a huge amount of material is being compiled that, otherwise, would have disappeared sooner rather than later. At least the samples are being preserved, and what I'm saying can be addressed later with artificial intelligence tools.
– A second part has been announced El cante after the canteWhen will we hear from her, and what field will she explore?
– The next period covers recordings made with electric microphones up to the switch from shellac to magnetic tape. A few months ago, I acquired a collection of four thousand shellac records, in addition to the three hundred I already had. Almost all of them are from this period, 1925 to 1950, and they're going to make my fieldwork for the second volume much easier. I'm thoroughly enjoying cataloging and cleaning these little gems because I'm a real geek and I really enjoy that kind of work. Keep in mind that for this first volume, I made a point of not bothering private collectors. It takes a lot of effort to acquire these kinds of records, catalogs, cylinders… and so on, only to have someone come along asking for information or audio recordings, when these collectors can publish works, like the one I've done, in the future. I'm not going to call Carlos Martín Ballester, for example, just to inconvenience him. Carlos, besides being the number one in this field we're discussing, is a gentleman and isn't going to tell me to get lost, but we're all old enough and well-mannered not to fall for these things. I preferred to turn to public collections like those of the Andalusian Center of FlamencoThe National Library, Eresbil, etc., which are maintained with the taxes we pay. Only at the last minute, with the book almost finished, did I request access to the collection of the Peña Juan Breva because he needed certain cookies and to certify various matrix data. So now I'm preparing a space in the studio to store these slates, plus about eighteen thousand more vinyl records, including LPs and EPs.
– And what will be the final step?
– I'm really in no rush to release anything commercially. Continuing to produce with La Droguería Music is the priority. Right now I'm working on three recordings of cante At the same time, and when summer ends, I'll start two more. It's reassuring that for the second volume, I had almost finished the entire list of productions by label before starting the layout of the first, so I'm quite far along in that aspect. But, as with this one, I don't want to limit myself to publishing a kind of phone book without context. I like to tell a story that engages the reader, that gives meaning and broadens the horizons of the fan, which is something many readers have thanked me for. I want to provide new biographical information, delve into the technical and business aspects of the labels with all the new developments that were taking place, the social incidents, and how political changes influenced the genre. Writing the first volume was slower because I also had to decide on the presentation format, layout, narrative style… So, the second will probably be ready between mid- and late 2027. ♦
Absolutely admirable work!!!