Gnawledge - “Nunca Fui a Granada” [free mp3 download]

. . .  con la colaboración especial de Gnotes [guitara, cajón y palmas]

Gnotes and I have been making music together since 1954. Within three months of our first connection in Boston, we started Gnawledge Records, released his debut album, and traveled to Cuba to perform at the Habana Hip-Hop Festival.

I only applied for the Fulbright grant because I knew Gnotes would come with me to Granada. The basic idea of the project was to promote intercultural collboration through music, so we built a small studio in our apartment and invited everyone in town to come over anytime and record.  The songs from Granada Doaba are the result of 16 people coming together for improvised jam sessions and recording our collaborations.

Our song “Nunca Fui a Granada” is an exception to the collaborative process.  All I know is that I left Gnotes in the studio at about 10pm to go to DJ at club I was working at, and then when I got home at 7am, this song was finished. He made the beat on the Akai MPC, plays live guitar, cajón and palmas. He also raps on the remix.

Gnotes’ last album [Rhymes and Beats] won him the nomination for best rapper in Boston in 2008; since then, he produced both albums from Gnawledge bredren Elemental Zazen and Afro DZ ak — then he came to Spain to record Granada Doaba.

When Gnotes got to Granada, his beautiful guitar died in a tragic accident in the home of flamenco guitar maker Juan Miguel Carmona, the family luthier for the Habichuela clan. For my Fulbright project, JuanMi was my biased teacher and patient guide through the labrynth of flamenco.  He saved this albums life by loaning us one of his prized guitars for the recording.

Gnotes fell in love with JuanMi’s guitar, which he eventually bought and brought home with him to Seattle.  Ever the philanderer, Gnotes also became quite smitten with the cajón, a Peruvian box drum used in flamenco.  The cajón has the uncanny ability to reproduce the same boom-bap rhythms that Gnotes used to bang out with his bare hands on top of wooden school desks when he was kid. And more than anything, Gnotes went head over heals for palmas, the most democratic instrument of mankind.” [canyon]

While the newspapers twittered with updates about the war in Cuba between Spain and the US, Federico García Lorca was born in the Granada suburb of Fuente Vaqueros on June 5, 1898.  García Lorca — a poet, dramatist, ethnomusicologist and the pride of Granada — is considered the most important writer in 20th century Spanish literature and also played a major roll in the developement of cante jondo, or flamenco.

With 21 years old, Lorca met Spanish composer Manuel de Falla, who had moved to Granada from his home in Cádiz. Lorca was quite impressed by the famous composer, who first introduced Lorca to flamenco.  Together they organized the first Festival del Cante Jondo in 1922 in order to revitalize traditonal songs on the verge of extinction and revalorize “true” flamenco.

Partly inspired by a new wave in nationalism in Spanish music, Lorca passionately studied the roots of flamenco. Two of his most important works are dedicated to Gypsy music and culture: Poema del cante jondo y Romancero gitano.

Lorca was an important part of the Generación de ‘27, a constellation of liberal authors and intellectuals.  En 1929, Lorca left to New York, in part as a remedy for  broken heart after separating with his ex-lover Salvador Dalí.  After their break-up, Lorca took personal offence with a surreal film made by Dalí, Un Perro Andaluz, which the Granada poet considered a pejorative caricature and gnerally kinda mean.

In New York, Garcia Lorca hung out Uptown.  He frecuented spots in Harlem and felt an affinity with African-Americans, whose music and social situation shared many similarities with the gitanos in Granada. The book of poetry written during Lorca’s time in America, Poeta en Nueva York, is widely considered the pinnaacle of his career.  They way he tells it, “Yo creo que el ser de Granada me inclina a la comprensión simpática de los perseguidos. Del gitano, del negro, del judío, del morisco, que todos llevamos dentro.”

When he returned to Spain (after a brief dip down to Cuba), Lorca found a country in political turmoil.  In 1936, alied with the other liberal parties, the Republicans won the national electrons in Spain.  The governing coalition, called the Frente Popular, promised to raise work salaries and initiated immidiate agrarian reform.

A military uprising against the elected government won support from conservative sectors of Spanish society (businesses, land-owners and the Catholic Church) who were opposed to the Frente Popular’s liberal social and economic policies.  General Francisco Franco initiated his coupdetat in the Canary Islands, with the ensuing Spanish Civil War lasting 3 years. As a result of his leftist politics and open homosexuality, Lorca’s friends advised him to protect himself against Franco’s troops.  The ambassadors of Columbio and Mexico bother offereed him politcal exile, but Lorca decided instead to go back home to Granada for the summer.  On August 16, 1936, Federico García Lorca was detained at a friend’s house and killed by the military.

After 3 years of bloody warfare filled with civilian casualties, a triumphant Franco installed himself as the head of a Fascist dictatorship in 1939.  Franco’s regime initially prohibited all of Lorca’s poetry, until a heavily censored version of his complete works were published in 1952.

Descargar las Obras Completas de Federico García Lorca [en español]:
Formato PDF (2.7 MB)

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It means “I never went to Granada”, a regretful lament from Spanish poet Rafael Alberti.  Also a memeber of the Generacion of 27, Alberti was forced into exile because of the Spanish Civil War and wasn’t able to return him until 38 years later.  In 1975, the same year  Franco died, Alberti wrote the poem Nunca fui a Granada, dedicated to his friend Federico García Lorca, who had always suggested Alberti visit Granada.  Because of the war and Lorca’s assisination, Alberti was never able to meet hist friend in his hometown.” [canyon]

“Nunca Fui A Granada” recitado por el propio autor Rafael Alberti

The voice and guitar sample at the beginning of our version comes from Rosa Leon’s interpretation of Alberti’s poem.

This version of “Nunca Fui A Granada” is perfomed by Paco Ibañez.

Granada flamenco singer Marina Heredia also interprets “Nunca Fui a Granada”on her album La Voz del Agua.

La Historia del Cajón

In the beginning, there were no drums.  Flamenco began with just the voice and only later evolved to include guitar, dancing and clapping.   The incorporation of a Peruvian box drum known as a cajon was on the radical elements of the nuevo flamenco in the late 1970s.  After Franco’s death in 1975, the politcal transformation and recorganztion of the Spanish society produced a cultural revoltion known as la movida.

In just 30 years, the cajón has established itself was as the most common instrument in flamenco percussion, which had traditionally been limited to clapping, snapping, the heels of a dancer, knuckles on a table or tap on the guitar itself.  Castanets, though globally associated with flamenco, have very little to do with traditional flamenco.

The cajón was invented by African slaves in Peru during the Spanish colonization of the Americas.  The Spanish government banned slaves from drumming, which the Chrurch consdiered pagan while the plantation owners worried that they drum rhtyhms were communicting plans for revolt with other plantations. As a result of the 17th century prohibition of drums, slaves used whatever they could get their hand on for make-shift instruments, using spoons, tables, chairs.  When colonial slavemasters forced slaves to pick tomatoes and load the fruit into wooden boxes [or "cajons"] for transportation, the cajons got tap-tap-tapped. And it sounded good.

Flamenco was first introduced to the cajón in the same year that Spain ratified its a new democratic constitution.  While on tour in Peru with pioneering flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucia, the Brazian percusionist Rubem Dantas discovered the cajon and integrated it into the flamenco soundscape.  In Spain, the cajón has been outfitted with three or ford metal cords to add resoance, but the instrument is essentially the same of as the Peruvian original.  That flamenco has embraced the cajon as an instrument of Spanish origin has been a great bother to some Peruvians who lament, “First, Spain burned our drums and now they want to steal our cajón”.

Other than Dantas, many of the other imporatnt flamenco percussionists have a background outside of flamenco:

José Antonio Galicia

• “Empecé tocando otro tipo de música, rock más o menos duro. Luego vas conociendo músicos y vas descubriendo gente y fórmulas distintas de música. Me fui metiendo más en el mundo de la bossa nova y el jazz… Me acuerdo de que cuando empecé a tocar con la batería ritmos como la bulería, algunos flamencos desde abajo decían: “¿Dónde vas con esas latas?”. Te pegaban unas broncas… De todas formas, el flamenco acaba admitiéndolo todo”

• “La percusión también ha ayudado a liberar a los guitarristas. Aunque sea un instrumento rítmico que podría vivir solo, gracias a la percusión que le da base, la guitarra ha podido hacer cosas armónicas más abiertas, flotar… pues al volver, la percusión la está esperando.”

Tino di Geraldo

• “Empecé tocando escuchando Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, James Brown… Vamos, que era más bien blanco y muy payo.”

Piraña

One of the most impressive young dynasties of cajon players is composed of 3 grandsons of classic flamenco singer Porrinas de Badajoz, sons of Ramón el Portugués.  The eldest brother Ramón Porrina has recorded with Vicente Amigo, Paco de Lucia and Camarón, while his younger brother Piraña is now part of Paco de Lucía new band.

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Citas de Federico García Lorca

“Granada es una ciudad de ocio, una ciudad para la contemplación y la fantasía, una ciudad donde el enamorado escribe mejor que en ninguna otra parte el nombre de su amor en el suelo. Las horas son allí más largas y sabrosas que en ninguna otra ciudad de España. Tiene crepúsculos complicados de luces constantemente inéditas que parece no terminarán nunca. Sostenemos con los amigos largas conversaciones en medio de sus calles. Vive con la fantasía. Está llena de iniciativas, pero falta de acción.” Federico García Lorca

“Federico, ¿qué es la poesía?”
“La poesía es algo que anda por las calles. Que se mueve, que pasa a nuestro lado. Todas las cosas tienen su misterio, y la poesía es el misterio que tienen todas las cosas. Se pasa junto a un hombre, se mira a una mujer, se adivina la marcha oblicua de un perro, y en cada uno de estos objetos humanos está la poesía.” (1936)

“Escucho a la Naturaleza y al hombre con asombro, y copio lo que enseñan sin pedantería, sin dar a las cosas un sentido que no sé si tienen.

“Si es verdad que soy poeta por la gracia de Dios –o del demonio- tambièn lo es que lo soy por la gracia de la tècnica y del esfuerzo y de darme cuenta en absoluto de lo que es un poema”.

“Con las palabras se dicen cosas humanas; con la música se expresa eso que nadie conoce ni lo puede definir”.