In memory of my grandfather Ramón Soler Campoy, who listened to Trini.
From the life of the Trini We had hardly any documented news until very recently. We had what they wrote Guillermo Nunez de Prado (Andalusian singers, 1904) and the singer Ferdinand of Triana (Art and artists flamencos, 1935), who worked with her. Later, Manuel Yerga Lancharro y Gonzalo Rojo They took care of the singer and, after them, came the fundamental contributions of the remembered Eusebio Rioja y Manuel BohorquezThe search that both of them made of newspaper archives, municipal registers and baptismal records gave good results and have served to shed light on some aspects of the singer's life. On the other hand, her canteThey have been described in books dedicated to malagueñas and related styles by authors such as José Luque Navajas, Pepe Navarro, Jorge Martín Salazar, Rafael Chaves Arcos, José Francisco Ortega Castejón, Luis Soler Guevara, Antonio Alarcón and Rafael Ruiz García.
Today, and to summarise, we know that Trini was born on March 7 or 14, 1866 and was baptised with the name of Bernabela Sofia in the church of the Holy Cross and San Felipe Neri, located in what is now the central district of Malaga. Her surnames are not recorded, as she appears registered as daughter of the Church, That is, she was from unknown parents. She was adopted when she was a couple of years old by the couple Francisco Navarro Montoya (gypsy?), esparto grass grower and day laborer by trade and illiterate by training, and Ana Carrillo Arenas, both from Málaga and born in 1828 and 1831, respectively. Therefore, they were around 40 and 37 years old when they adopted our singer. Both were also children of Málaga natives and were married in the church of San Pablo –in the Trinidad neighbourhood– in 1853, that is, 15 years before adopting Trini. The couple had at least three biological children, all older than our protagonist: Maria Dolores, Jose and Aurora, baptized in St. Paul's Church.
Surely since she was little they started calling her Trini, perhaps because they were neighbors in the traditional Malaga neighborhood. Trinidad Navarro Carrillo We found it registered in the census in 1874. The streets where this humble family lived were Trinidad, Carril and Zamorano, all in the Trinidad neighborhood, near Tacón Street –today Avenida de Barcelona and Calzada de la Trinidad–, a long artery that led to what was the Tacón orchard, on whose land the Civil Hospital would be built in 1892. The name of the street has nothing to do with that part of the shoe, but was dedicated to General Miguel Tacon and Rosique (1775-1855), who fought in the Battle of Trafalgar and was governor of Malaga in 1820.
As is well known, Trini was a professional cante and brought her art to the main squares of the time. She ran her famous tavern – in Bellavista, in the area of the current Pablo Ruiz Picasso promenade – where many flamenco evenings took place. In any case, I do not want to go into further details about her biographies, as they are available on the Internet in works by Rioja and Bohorquez.
«Trini's malagueña was the result of compressing the jabera and giving it more depth, said with short and electrifying ays, as Tío José de Paula did with the seguiriya. That, which seems so simple, entails such a difficulty that it is only within the reach of very few geniuses. One of them was Trinidad Navarro Carrillo. That is why, after almost a century since her voice was silenced, her cante still alive»
Instead I'd rather take care of yours. cante, even very briefly. Trini has undoubtedly gone down in history for her beautiful malagueñas, full of melancholy and beauty. Even so, we can also investigate the traces she left in cantes very different, as are the tangos. In a recording that Pepe Luque Navajas He made it on January 8, 1959 to the veteran singer Diego the Perote (1884-1980), he played slow tangos (or tientos) inherited from those of Henry the Twin, although with some particular nuances.
Diego El Perote – Tangos by La Trini
We suspect that Perote learned them from Trini, whom he greatly admired, because at the end of the recording we heard Pepe Luque say: “These are Trini’s tangos.” The first verse is little known and was probably sung by Trini (according to Pepe Luque, when referring to her, Diego el Perote used to omit the article as a sign of respect):
I told a sculptor
to make me a good man,
where do i go for the model,
son of my heart?
The curious rise that we detect in some syllables of that tango and the next one is similar to the one that he gave to the tangos Rafael the One-Eyed (1890-1974), a singer from Triana who settled in Campo de Gibraltar around 1925. Currently, the slow tangos of Tuerto are included in the repertoires of the people of Algeciras. Parakeet y Joseph the Draper, who followed the teachings of their father, Jose Lerida Cortes.
Antonio Sanchez Pecino, father of Paco de Lucía, often accompanied Rafael el Tuerto at the festivals that took place in Algeciras. It is not strange, therefore, that Paco, when he recorded the tientos The Little Treasure (good things, 2004), he tackled the melody of that song with the guitar cante and the detail pointed out (minute 0:38; the cante He interprets it in the conclusion Diego el Cigala).
Old fans of La Línea de la Concepción used to say that Trini ran a brothel there in the 20s – let's remember that flamenco parties used to take place in the brothels – and that she may have died there at the end of that decade or the beginning of the 30s. Unfortunately, no documents have been found until now. My dear friend and great fan of La Línea de la Concepción Paco Heras He carried out arduous investigations but did not obtain any results, although he was able to retain in his memory what people from his town who knew Trini told him. With all this information, a question arises that we cannot answer: did Trini and Rafael el Tuerto know each other?
But let's go now to the cante which served to immortalize Trini, the girl from Malaga. Of singular beauty, it is a style that in Malaga has been known, precisely, as "the beautiful Trini". Memorable versions were made of it Paca Aguilera –of whom Fernando de Triana said that she was the best follower of his cantes–, the Lame from Malaga –who worked with her quite a bit– and Bernardo of the Little WolvesThe following recording of El Cojo de Málaga (1880-1940) dates from 1921 and he is accompanied by his compadre Miguel Borrull. At the end of cante names Trini:
Lame from Malaga – Palomy mother
Palomy mother,
I remember that once
you were the palomy mother,
you lulled me in pleasure
but the gossip
our love has ended.
In any case, it is another of Trini's malagueña that has been most widely spread, a cante which is still sung regularly. I want to dwell on its possible musical origins. I am referring to its most classic one, which is usually performed with verses such as The path of the way, To my mother for her soul, Is not erased from my mind y Trying to forget youWe can hear it in the voice of the great singer from Ronda, Paca Aguilera (1877-1913):
Paca Aguilera – To my mother for her soul. 1912, Odeon.
To my mother for her soul
Every night I pray to him,
to my mother for her soul,
I take the portrait and kiss it,
enter my chest in my calm
Only I think about his death.
To investigate the background of this Malaga singer we have to go further back and look at very different styles. As strange as it may seem, there are cantes that have lent musical influences to others from very different families. An example is the caña compared to the malagueña of the Canario. We know from Fernando de Triana that the Alora Canary (1857-1885) did not succeed when he went to Seville with his malagueñas. Later he returned to the capital of Seville with a new one that has gone down in history, the one that is sung with the first broken verse and couplets like Spies, The People o Punishment. At that time the most famous singers were Juan Breva, who made malagueñas fashionable, and Silverio Franconetti, who ran his own café cantante in Seville and was a great cantaor de cañas. At the beginning of that cante It seems that the Canary was inspired to compose a malagueña with which, this time, he was successful in Seville, the city in which he was murdered by his father. The Blonde of Malaga. You only have to listen to the following audio to realize such a similarity. It is a montage in which we hear the output of the cane in the voice of the Moron pliers –a direct disciple of Silverio– and the first third of the Canario's malagueña that Niña de los Peines recorded.
The Tenazas cane from Morón and the malagueña from Canario that was recorded by Niña de los Peines.
A malagueña that has a certain musical kinship with the classic one by Trini is the one attributed to an obscure singer called Baldomero Pacheco. With the letter Because I faint while walking, the Blackberry Boy He recorded a style that is attributed to Pacheco on the album Chinitas Coffee (1964) and who also knew Adolf the Knife-WarmerThe truth is that there is a recording from 1908 with the same lyrics and style recorded by the singer from Álora Sebastian the Penalty and whose title is Malagueña del Pena.
Sorry Father, Because I faint while walking (1908)
Your son Pepe, the Pena son, recorded the same music again with the same lyrics twenty years later, but the title reads: Malagueña of the Trini. Big question: why is it not attributed to his father? It is true that there were personal disagreements between father and son that are not relevant, but it is still strange. The melody of that malagueña and the classic one by Trini are certainly similar. Thus, while the first has more rocking thirds, reminiscent of those of the jabera, in the one by the singer from Trinidad these are shorter and more penetrating, more jondos in short.
To glimpse the origin of these two malagueñas we must go back to the thread of the polo, the caña and also the jabera. The oldest recordings we have of a jabera are those made by the Owl in the first decade of the twentieth century. Its melody is not exactly the same as the one played since the mid-50s, starting with the recording of the Child of Malaga for Anthology of the Cante Flamenco. El Mochuelo –who worked at Silverio's café– sings the jabera with a verse associated with sugarcane, They can send me, and we can assume that he learned it from Franconetti himself. He popularized this lyric by caña Rafael Romero from the 1950s onwards, in the aforementioned anthology. But the most interesting thing is that both the beginning of the caña –which shares a melody with the beginning of the malagueña del Canario– and that of the jabera are the same.
The Owl – Jabera
The jabera is a cante quite old, since I already lie Estebanez Calderon in the well-known scene General Assembly of the Knights and Ladies of Triana and the taking of the habit in the order of a certain blonde dancer (which could have taken place on the eve of Saint Anne – that is, July 25, the day of Santiago – in 1841) and which appears in its Andalusian scenes (1847). Speaking of the young woman Dolores, a gypsy dancer and singer from Cadiz – it is very possible that she was the one who became the mother-in-law of Henry the Twin–, he says (respecting the original punctuation and accentuation):
"Among the things he sang, two of them were especially praised. There was once a malagueña in the style of the Jabera, and the other certain couplets that the fans call You will belong. How many had heard the Jabera They all unanimously gave her the victory in this and said and assured that what the gypsy girl sang was not the malagueña of that famous singer, but something new with a different intonation, a different fall and greater difficulty, and that by the name of the one who sang it with such grace, it could be called DoloraThe couplet began with a very fast and stylish Malaga-style start, then retreating and coming to give way to the endings of the Polo Tobalo, with great depth and strength of chest, concluding with another rise to the first tone: it was something that always captivated the audience when they heard it.
Pepe Luque Navajas wrote in his book Malaga in the cante (1965) that in this city the jabera was also known as the "cante of María Tacón». This María was a singer who lived in the area of General Tacón's orchard, the environment in which Trini grew up. Would Trinidad Navarro listen to her? Maria Heel? We don't know that, but it is almost certain that the cante by jaberas yes. This cante It is a fandango in ternary time with abandolao accompaniment that had been sung for at least three decades when Trini was young. In addition, it had gone beyond the Malaga environment since it was already known in Cadiz, according to what Estébanez Calderón writes.
«Without a doubt, Trini has gone down in history for her beautiful malagueñas, full of melancholy and beauty. Even so, we can also investigate the traces she left in cantes very different, as are the tangos. After almost a century since his voice was silenced, his cante still alive»
If we return again to the recording of the jabera del Mochuelo, its evident resemblance to the caña agrees with what Estébanez says, who describes the jabera with "endings of the Polo Tóbalo". It is worth remembering the similarity between the polo and the caña, two cantes brothers.
And we are going to finish. If we listen sequentially to the jabera recorded by El Mochuelo, the malagueña Because I faint while walking (the attribution to Baldomero Pacheco, Pena or Trini is irrelevant here) and the classic one of Trini, we observe that it is the same musical pattern from which the melismas of the end of the thirds have been cut and which preserve the woe of appoggiatura to link the thirds. A detail that must also be taken into account is that there are few Malagans who rely on a ay To begin with, the same as the Mochuelo jabera. In this final audio, what has been said is made clear and we can continue with the following table.
Jabera, Baldomero Pacheco, Trini
With what has been described, it is not risky to think that the Trini carried out a process in which the great melodic ornamentation of the jabera was giving way to shorter thirds and jondos. It was something similar to what happened with the seguiriya of Old Man of the Island, that Paco the Light shortened in Jerez and then, Uncle Jose de Paula left in its most essential form to give it greater expressive charge. Or what he also did Manuel Torres Regarding the initial seguiriya of the gentleman Manuel Molina (With cloves and cinnamon, Always in the corners).
On cante flamenco Two opposing resources operate. One tends towards grandiloquence, and consists of lengthening the lines and overloading them with melismas to delight the general public, always ready to receive a cante more baroque. Another goes in the opposite direction, that is, it resorts to shortening musical phrases, to amputating melodic lines in order to, instead, print greater expressive charge. Although they are words that are difficult to define, we could call the first “virtuosity” and the second “purity”, which seeks to excite the maximum with the minimum elements. In short, diastole and systole. I suppose that the latter is what Trini did from an intermediate stage, the malagueña of Baldomero Pacheco, a character that I suspect could have been born between Juan Breva and Trini, that is, in the decade of 1850.
We could, in short, say that the malagueña de la Trini was the result of compressing the jabera and giving it greater depth, said with woe short and electrifying, as Tío José de Paula did with the seguiriya. That, which seems so simple, entails such a difficulty that it is only within the reach of very few geniuses. One of them was Trinidad Navarro Carrillo. That is why, after almost a century since his voice was silenced, his cante is still alive.
*****
After the separation of John Lennon y Cynthia Powell, Paul McCartney He composed one of the most beautiful songs of the Beatles, Hey Jude, to comfort their son, the little one Julian. A family had been broken. I would like to believe that McCartney's genius also had Trini in mind in that year of 1968, exactly one hundred years after this brilliant singer found a real family to raise her:
Hey, Jude, don't do it wrong,
take a sad song and make it better.
Remember to let her into your heart,
then you can start improving it.
Hey, Jude, don't be afraid,
you were created to go out and make it your own.
The minute you feel it running under your skin
at that point you start to improve it.
→ See here all the articles by Ramón Soler in expoflamenco
