I continue to surrender to the freedom of music Phosphorite And I ask myself: what mysterious gift does the maestro possess? What strange and beautiful secret resides in his soul that makes one feel fully and joyfully identified with his radiant message? Therein lies the greatest gift bestowed upon the flamenco singer: to overwhelm us from afar, at a given moment, with a musical burst of enigmas that, in our darkest hour, dazzles us with the sudden flash of a heart-wrenching lament, making us feel the desire to eternalize that instant, to always relive that moment of lavish charity.
The sequence could be this: suddenly, a blazing burst of beauty. We were relaxed, listening to the voice of the last one Prometheus that day by day stole the charm of music from the air, and suddenly, everything has changed. For a moment, we are flooded with an intimate, confident joy. Something vague, formless, yet powerfully real and true, has spoken within us. Who performed the miracle? In this case, a flamenco singer, the pride of Andalusia and the honor of Spain, has performed the supreme simplicity of a miracle.
This is Fosforito's undeniable message. The overwhelming sound of his name already tells us that we are in the presence of the last master, an ember of the sacred fire of an era that recovered the silences of flamenco TRUE. Voice of silence He called her Pablo García BaenaHow soothing to the soul is Fosforito's silence! It is the mystical silence of the master. It is the wonder of art, the sovereign emotion of contained beauty. And indeed, from the desolation and turbulent tendencies of canteIn an abandoned park, one of the most prized achievements emerges. flamencoFosforito, the silent and sparkling light of our time that pierces the darkness in which some intellectuals did not shine, the work of a man who labors in the fog, and with him the earth disappears beneath his feet.
Today, after his departure, we remain at his mercy, as evidenced by the fact that leading figures of our time, such as Jose Merce o Carmen LinaresThey began their artistic journey looking to Fosforito as a role model. And that's because... cante The master's essence is something that lives and evolves ceaselessly, a stubborn impulse to produce ever-new and better forms through evolution. But always fighting against all odds, making good that which defined him. Henri Bergson on its creative evolution: an immense army capable of crushing all resistance, perhaps even death itself.
"This is Fosforito's undeniable message. The overwhelming sound of his name already tells us that we are in the presence of the last master, an ember of the sacred fire of an era that recovered the silences of..." flamenco "Truth. Voice of silence," Pablo García Baena called him. "How soothing to the soul is Fosforito's silence!"
With my farewell, I don't intend to prove anything new. Many readers will have been faithful witnesses to how, whenever the master, as a human being, acted laxly, his adversaries, or those who write at the behest of profit, sought to highlight it as conspicuously as possible. But in the end, the vicious and incisive campaign remained shrouded in mystery, even though some try to justify it with the old philosophical maxim that, in order to understand something, to be able to observe and analyze it, the intellect must first kill it.
Even so, they could not stem the tide of the master's flow. It slips through the cracks of their analyses like water through a basket. For it is precisely Fosforito who gathers in the cup of his right hand the supreme mastery, the reign of the canteyes, and lets them escape slowly, delicately into the amorphous air of this devastating, confused, and commercial twilight that invades us.
However, far removed from this mercantilist frenzy, his work matured in silence. Filled with a keen eye for detail and nuance, and comprising a total of 26 records in my archive, it is achieved with exquisite musical intuition and heartfelt depth. A master of all styles, from the polo and the zángano—where he founded a school starting in 1957—to the debla, the taranto of Almería—which he revived in 1957 after 24 years of not being recorded—or the petenera of Medina the Old, which she arranged to the rhythm for the dance of Manuela Vargasand from the Malaga styles to the mining variants, passing through the most complex forms such as that seguiriya of Juanichi the Handler (My friend Cuco) which he was the first to rescue in 1967, or the Cordoban soleá of Onofre better finished of all those that were recorded (To my homeland, Córdoba, the year 1982), and even the canteSeveral seasons left Spain phosphorescent, as was rightly stated in 1962 Ricardo Molina.
And so continue the most fertile territories of flamenco, thanks now to those soleares apolás, cantiñas, tangos from Triana and Cádiz, the taranta of Birdie (Last night I went to the theater and saw the Empress) or that Linares taranto of Fool Carica God (I can't take it anymore.), canteThese elements form a sublime lesson for developing an aesthetic conscience and an original ideal. flamenco.
But in order to establish that Fosforito is the most encyclopedic flamenco singer of his generation, I take the liberty of skimming over his reference work, although without analyzing, obviously, the typology of Flamenco Masses.
And in it we find that Fosforito recorded on the Philips (1958 and 1959), Belter (1964 to 1976), Polydor (1966), Hispavox (1967), Olivo (1978 and 1979), RCA (1982), Chumbera Records (1988) and Fonoruz (1989) labels, and he did so alongside the guitars of Vargas Araceli, Juanito Serrano, Alberto Velez, Juan Habichuela, Juan Maya Marote, Ramon from Algeciras, Manolo Carmona, Paco de Lucía (between 1968 and 1973 at Belter), Manuel Cano, Pepe Habichuela, Henry of Melchior, Peter White y Manuel Santiago.
"His work, always ablaze with a flame of love fused with an irrepressible cry, fills the entire realm of the jondo"It spreads generously beyond the limits of Huelva, and resounds, poured forth with strange and sonorous rhythms, upland, as far as the gray peaks of the cornered Almería or as far as the lands of the Campo de Cartagena."
But since our protagonist has been linked to Lo Ferro for life, I'll mention, finally, that it was Fosforito who finalized the nature of the Ferreña. It happened at the 2003 festival, and the following year it was recorded by Bonela Jr., cante which could be called a dazed Malagueña given its kinship with the Malagueña that we owe today to the Cartagena singer Concha the Peñaranda.
This is how Fosforito has lit lights that will shine for many years, given that his eternally rich singing vein finds rest on the classical shore of the permanently alive, and because in the cante flamencoAs with everything, what counts is the amount of life, the amount of creative essence that is breathed into each canteAnd the work of the last master crackles, then, with a powerful, vibrant life, developed under a seal of sincere authenticity, profoundly original.
The explanation is that, while some flamenco singers are driven by moods, and others by convictions, Fosforito embodies both. On the one hand, he is a man who has known how to cultivate the canteIt is with the meditation and detachment of a medieval monk. Moreover, he has powerfully intervened in what we might call the beginning of the end, since, in his time, he far surpassed all the recording achievements of living flamenco singers. Hence, his work constitutes a fruitful treasure, containing within it all the essential values that prevail in the Flamenco.
In that sense, some may ask: how many variations has Fosforito impressed? A hundred? I don't know, nor do I think that number calls my arguments into question, because his work, always ablaze with a flame of love fused with the irrepressible cry, fills the entire realm of the jondoIt spreads generously beyond the limits of Huelva, and resounds, poured forth with strange and sonorous rhythms, upland, as far as the gray peaks of secluded Almería or the lands of the Campo de Cartagena. For whoever seeks the heaven of their canteThe reason he's up in the heights is because he never attended his singing geography classes. ♦
→ See here the previous installment by Manuel Martín Martín about the farewell to Fosforito.
