Download MP3 –> “No Te Rebeles (Seguiriya)”
Gnawledge con la colaboración especial de
Hidetomo Nambu (flamenco guitar)
Maya Oshiba (violin)
DJ Doblegota (scratch)
Flamenco was born acapella. In the beginning, there was no flamenco guitar and no flamenco dance, just the human voice. Flamenco (and hip-hop) are verbal acts of self-declaration from a community marginalized by poverty and prejudice. For 1000 years, a cycle of suffering followed the Gypsy diaspora from India to Andalucía, where flamenco was born.
Gypsies first arrived in Spain in the 15th century, just a few year prior to modern Spain’s founding as a single unified country, after an 800-year Iberian civil war between Muslims and Christians. Unlike the Moors and Sephardic Jews, the Gitanos was never completely expelled from Spain, partly because they were (and remain) a devoutly Catholic community.
Flamenco was originally assembled by Spanish Gypsies, known as gitanos [hee-tanos]. I say “assembled” because it was not invented but forged from a patchwork of indigenous Iberian musical traditions. Gitanos transformed preexisting Spanish music — with all its diverse Gregorian, Sephardic and Arab influences — into a uniquely Gitano artform.
Aficionados distinguish between traditional flamenco — known as cante jondo — and the modern flamenquito pop on the radio, just like heads draw lines between real hip-hop and commercial rap. [canyon]
Hidetomo Nambu was the first musician I met in Spain. While everyone else on the bus from Madrid to Granada was wearing tiny white iPod headphones, we were both wearing big 1970s audiomuffs that cover your whole ear. I assumed he was a tourist, we introduced ourselves in English, and eventually traded headphones to share music with each other.
I was listening to the Orishas, a Cuban hip-hop group. I was suprised to discover he was listening to flamenco guitarist Vicente Amigo. Turns out Hidetomo is actually a flamenco guitarist who had been living in Granada for years. Quick friends, we ended up sharing an apartment above Juan Miguel Carmona’s flamenco guitar workshop. The whole world knows Hidetomo, at least in Granada, where he’s equally famous for both his dedication to flamenco and the deliciousness of his sushi, which he offers as free tapas at Potemkin, a local bar owned by Granada Doaba drummer Richard Dudanski.
Hidetomo was first introducted to flamenco by Yutaro Nagao. Yutaro left Japan at a young age in search of adventure. He went to Thailand, where he trained as a muay-thai boxer, but quit after his first professional fight. He then headed for Spain, intending to become either a bullfighter or a flamenco guitarist. He ended up a guitarist, and quite a good one.
Back in Japan, Hidetomo was a dishwasher-turned-cook working at Spanish restaurant in Tokyo. Yutaro walks into the restaurant and they become friends. Eventually, Yutaro convinced him to visit Granada, and then Hidetomo Nambu fell in love. His passion and affection for flamenco deserves a better pen than mine, so I’ll beseech thee to just trasfer the emotional gist from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s El amor en los tiempos de cólera.
With 30 years old, Hidetomo moved to Granada and dedicated himself to the rather daunting task of becoming a flamenco guitarist. He wasn’t even a regular guitarist at the time, so he had to start from the beginning. Fortunately, Hidetomo is enamored with the process of practice, and doesn’t cut corners.
After studying flamenco in Granada for a while, Hidetomo decided to look for a nice guitar. “I had no doubt that I was going to continue playing for the rest of my life,” he explains, “so I wanted to buy a good one.” He considered various options from different luthiers, but eventually fell in love at first thwack with a yellow rosewood flamenco guitar constructed by Juan Miguel Carmona. Years later, it was JuanMi who saved Granada Doaba by loaning us one of his beautiful guitars after our unfortunate Gibson guitar disaster. All 3 flamenco guitars heard on Granada Doaba were hand-made by Juan Miguel Carmona in his Realejo workshop downstairs from our recording studio
“The iteration of slow chant sublime” TS Eliot
When I returned to America after recording Granada Doaba, I sent an unmastered CD-R to Dmitri Vietze from Rock Paper Scissors and DubMC, both spectacular websites dealing with global music. He replied: “Hey CC - Thank you so much for sharing your music and the letter! I really like the concept of the project and most of the execution. There is one track with vocals which I find very dissonant. Actually, I’m just going to come out and say it: I think the vocals are not in key with the music. What’s the story with that track?”
I quik clicked reply, typed my answer and pressed send. There’s something revealing about how unreflective email can be:
“WRT your queery, we recorded the song “No Te Rebeles” around a preexisting acapella (or “toná” = the oldest form of traditional flamenco song) by Enrique Morente from a classic 1977 album that any traditional flamenco fan would recognize. As the only “mashup” on the album, the track (i hope) explores this concept of “dissonace”
We built the first 1/2’s beat around his voice, using a dissonant guitar loop to heighten the haunting lyrical topic matter (betrayal, death…). His original vocals modulate between the Phyrigian and Ionian scales (both with tonic @Bflat –> http://books.google.com/books?id=EPC-yn0xcIAC&pg=PA67&lpg=PA67&dq=enrique+morente+chacon+no+te+rebeles
Hiphop really dont give a fck bout modulation. We detune our drums for boombaps sake and speed up our vocal samples to 45 rpm cuz it sounds cool. The 2nd half of “No Te Rebeles” presents the other argument, which is that music should be in tune (which it definitely is… verify our violinist’s partiture @ http://www.flickr.com/photos/granadadoaba/3180517287/
Flamenco is structured around distinct song forms called “palos”. There are more than 50 palos, each with a unique rhythmic structure (or compás), emotional attitude, melodic progressions and harmonic mode. There are more than 50 active palos, with hundred of local variations and extinct varities [see: Genealogical Tree of Flamenco Palos]. The oldest form of flamenco song is called toná, an acapella tradition invested by Tío Luis el de la Juliana, a singer from Jerez de la Frontera born in the 18th century. Surpisingly, it remains unknown whether or not he was gitano.
The first flamenco song form to incorporate the guitar was the seguirilla. This palo is usually played in the phygian mode, an alternative way of dividing of the octave, distinct from the Western major or minor scales. Some palos are associated with a specific city or geographical area, such as the fandangoes de Huelva or tangos de Cádiz. The granaína and media granaína are newer palos associated with Granada, invented by maestro flamenco singer Antonio Chacón.
Enrique Morente (b. Granada, 1942) is widely respected as one of the best flamenco singers of all time; many consider him the best cantaor since Camaron’s death in 1988. As a young man, Morente was a devout student of traditional flamenco. He sang orthodox cante jondo on his first recordings, which included collaborations with the great 
guitarist Manolo Sanlúcar.
In 1977, Enrique Morente collaborated with fellow Granada native Pepe Habichuela on an homage album dedicated to maestro flamenco singer Antonio Chacón. Though he was undoubtedly a fundamental figure of in the development of flamenco at the beginning of the 20th century, Chacón had been relegated the the footnotes of flamencology because of the prevailing attitude that considered non-Gypsy flamenco as impure. This was a somewhat personal battle for Morente, who is also “payo” or non-Gitano. Morente married a Gitana flamenco dancer, which is why his daughter Estella Morente, a well-known flamenco pop star, is sometimes presented as an example of evolving attitudes towards Gitanos in Spain.
Is flamenco Gypsy music? Yes. No. Is hip-hop African-American music? Yes. No. There’s a global range of influences in the gestation and evolution of flamenco and hip-hop. But they were both born as the musical expression of (mostly) a single race. From those roots, hip-hop made it to Spain and flamenco made it to Japan.
While I lived with Hidetomo, he practised guitar 8-hours a day, every day. When I got sick of listening to Andalusian scales, I’d walk downstairs to see JuanMi in his workshop and learn about flamenco from the source. JuanMi has been making flamenco guitars by hand for 25 years. I watched him spend weeks shaping a single guitar, producing only 10 instruments during my year living with his family. Deservedly so, his masterpieces sell for more than €5,000.
Because my teacher was biased, I ended up listening to lots of Granada flamenco. One of the first albums JuanMi gave me was Enrique Morente’s Homenaje a Don Antonio Chacón, which features an tradition tonas from the Chacon repertoire called “No Te Rebeles.” Renacting the evolution of flamenco from an acapella tradition to a multi-instrumental song, we added layers of guitar and violin to his acapella, building a new beat around his words. The guitar stabs at the beginning of the beat of “No Te Rebeles” are sampled from “Siempre por los Rincones,” a seguiriya from the same Chacón homage album.
A few weeks after submitting my Fulbright application, I was sitting in a hotel conference hall with Wayne Marshall listening to a musicology presentation about key changes in Shania Twain songs. The whole thing was as complicated as Mississippi, all of it way beyond my musical knowledge. I’ve been actively involved with music my whole life, but I’ve never really been able to play an instrument. Some violin lessons, a few piano ditties, the guitar chords, but I just don’t get it. Never did, never will.
“Can you read music?” Wayne asked me, pointing to the hand-out, separating the wheat from chaff. Rather asking why all of Shania Twain’s songs have the same beat (stomp-stomp-clap), I leaned over and asked Dr. Marshall if hip-hop songs ever modulated. As a DJ [and a dancer], I’m fairly sensitive to even slight changes in tempo, but the tonic could reposition itself from E major to c# minor and I’d just keep dancing none-the-wiser. Wayne said he couldn’t think of any key changes in hip-hop songs. I ask why that didn’t happen. He said because hip-hop was largely produced by people without any formal training in music, who were making up the rules as they went along. That made me feel better. I love hip-hop.
In 1995, Enrique Morente appeared in Carlos Saura’s film Flamenco singing a traditional siguiriya and also recorded his most controversial album: Omega, a fusion project with Spanish punk rock group Lagartija Nick featuring lyrics from Federico García Lorca’s book Poeta en Nueva York.
I was born in Hollywood and Enrique Morente is the first celebrity I have ever asked to be photographed with.
Jaime Heredia “El Parrón” y su hija Marina Heredia
Tú no te rebeles gitano
aunque te maten tu gente
ay, yo tengo echao juramento
de pagarte con la muerte.
Vinieron y me dijeron que tu
había hablao mal de mi
mira mi buen pensamiento
que no lo creía en ti.
Flamencologia : Anselmo Gonzales Climent (1955)
Geografia del Cante Jondo : Domingo Manfredi (1955)
El Cante Andaluz : J. M. Caballero Bonald et al (1956)
The Art of Flamenco : Donn El Pohren (1962)
Mundo y Formas del Cante Flamenco : Ricardo Molina y Antonio Mairena (1963)
“Tenemos la suerte de que la discografía flamenca es de las más importantes que existen en el mundo de cualquier género de música. El primer disco de flamenco se grabó veinte años antes que el primero de jazz, y el jazz se inventó en el país donde se inventó el fonógrafo. Hay una riqueza grabada que no existe en casi ningún otro género del mundo, pero se ha pasado por épocas más cercanas a nosotros en que las compañías han grabado flamenco porque no pagaban a los artistas y no les costaba nada, dándoles categoría.” José Manuel Gamboa