Las idas y las vueltas

Las idas y las vueltas: Mestizo Music

Colonial Baroque music in dialogue with flamenco

If cross-cultural fusion and the exchange of ideas are the engine that drives musical innovation, the Spanish colonisation of the Americas – with the resulting encounter between European, American and African civilisations – pushed that machine of creation, evolution and the birth of new musical styles to its limits. The exchange of rhythms, melodies and cadences that would later give rise to jazz was, centuries earlier, the very origin of flamenco.

Through the cities of Andalusia and the Americas, songs and dances circulated in fusion and confusion, going out, coming back and going out again, from the Gulf of Guinea to the Caribbean and from there to Triana and the Gulf of Cádiz. It was a true, delocalised, seething melting pot, in which jácaras, folías and chaconas were the common heritage of popular and art music alike: guarachas by Zéspedes that remind us of the tanguillos of Cádiz, medieval romances handed down by word of mouth, fandangos old and new, seguiriyas with passacaglia chords… Music written down centuries ago, into which we can breathe new life today with the spontaneous intuition that good musicians and good flamenco bring us.

Two creative spirits such as Fahmi Alqhai and Arcángel seek out these paths, still unexplored today, through the mutual fertilisation of flamenco and Baroque music, two of the most fertile musical styles. Arcángel and Alqhai engage in dialogue in search of a past and a present shared through music, the universal path to brotherhood between peoples and cultures. Both are artists of unclassifiable personality, rigorously trained in their own fields but experimental in spirit, and in an exercise of freedom they let themselves be carried away by pure musical instinct. Who knows whether – unexpectedly, naturally, intuitively – they might not bring us the first scents of the lost paradise that no musicologist has ever found: primitive flamenco.

Juan Ramón Lara

Las idas y las vueltas

Toná (traditional) 1.29

La Spagna (anon. 15th c.) 3.11

Romance del Rey Moro & Granaína (Luis de Narváez, fl. 1526-1549 & traditional) 4.17

Las morillas de Jaén (anon. c. 1500 from Cancionero de Palacio) 3.47

Jaleos (traditional) 3.54

Vidalita (traditional) 7.01

Folías (various authors, c. 1700) 5.35

Siguiriya (traditional) 5.22

No hay que decirle el primor (Xácara & Bulería) (anon. 17th c. & traditional) 5.30

Guaracha & Guajira (Juan García de Zéspedes, c. 1619-1678 & traditional) 5.58