Diálogos de viejos y nuevos sones

Roots music such as flamenco is a constant growth of new branches from the trunk of tradition, an endless interplay between the new and the old.

Fahmi Alqhai and Rocío Márquez, each from their own place on that eternal trunk, intertwine their musical leaves in search of the points where the cantes still sung today meet their origins, some handed down to us by oral tradition and others read in old manuscripts: flamenco cantes that travelled from Andalusia to the folk music of the Americas and back to Andalusia, but also chaconas and canarios that crossed the Atlantic to be written down in the first books for the Spanish guitar, back in the 17th century; ostinato songs by the great Monteverdi alongside ancestral seguiriyas, with their chord progression – always identical to itself – that came from that same Italy of the Seicento; cantes from Alosno alongside cants del ocells…

Juan Ramón Lara