Lo flamenco de Manuel Chavez Nogales That's the title of the new book that the publisher has just released. AlmuzaraThis work is not a musicological treatise or an anthology, but a unique vision of this art that opens the door to a little-explored—but no less important—facet of the thought and sensibility of this distinguished journalist, who tries to analyze this musical manifestation as part of a social, cultural and sentimental context of the Andalusia he lived and thought about.
The book is composed of texts written at different times and places, in which, with his masterful pen, he reveals the attentive gaze of a journalist concerned with how a society manifests itself. He denounces the trivialization of flamenco by those who have reduced it to postcard folklore and vindicates the artists —misunderstood, ridiculed— who have kept this art alive with moving honesty.
Thus, Chaves Nogales is getting closer to cante jondo not as folklore, but as expression of pain, memory and Andalusian soul and perceives with deep intuition that the flamenco It goes beyond the stage: "It is an emotional and symbolic reserve that continues to pulse when everything else has been exhausted."
"Chaves Nogales denounces the trivialization of flamenco by those who have reduced it to postcard folklore and vindicates the artists –misunderstood, ridiculed– who have kept this art alive with moving honesty»
Far from easy local color and folkloric postcards, Manuel Chaves Nogales he approaches flamenco with a clear, intelligent, and deeply respectful gazeHe doesn't seek exoticism or grandiloquence. What he finds—and leaves us with—are precise, human, sometimes harsh portraits of an art that at the time didn't need embellishments or stagecraft to move us.
There are no clichés here. There are poor courtyards, long nights, nameless artists, and also mythical figures. There is a real, contradictory, complex Andalusia, narrated by a journalist who never wanted to be a protagonist, but who left memorable pages when he decided to tell what he saw.
Manuel Chaves Nogales (Seville, 1897 – London, 1944) is today one of the leading figures in 20th-century Spanish literature and journalism. As editor-in-chief of The Herald and director of Now He became the leading figure in journalism during the Republic. His literary work, spanning journalism and novels, produced several fascinating books on Russian themes. The return to Europe by plane, The Bolshevik in love, What remains of the Tsarist empire y The teacher Juan Martinez who was thereAnd in 1935 he achieved enormous publishing success with his well-known journalistic series on Juan Belmonte in La Estampa and La Nación, recently published by Almuzara.
The war forced him to leave Spain, and after a period in Paris, from which a good part of his book emerges The agony of France (1941), he settled in London, where he continued to develop top-tier international journalistic work. In the climate of exile and war, with his health greatly deteriorated, an unfortunate surgical procedure caused his death while he was preparing a book with the testimonies of refugees from the German occupation.
