Las idas y las vueltas

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

Through the cities of Andalusia and the Americas there circulated, in fusion and confusion, cantes and dances that travelled out, back and out again, from the Gulf of Guinea to the Caribbean and from there to Triana and the Gulf of Cádiz: a genuine, placeless, seething melting pot where jácaras, folías and chaconas were the common heritage of popular and learned music alike. Guarachas by Zéspedes that remind us of tanguillos from Cádiz, medieval romances handed down by word of mouth, fandangos of then and now, 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 common past and present through music, the universal path to brotherhood between peoples and cultures. Both are artists of unclassifiable personality, with a training that was first rigorous in their own fields but an experimental spirit, and in an exercise of freedom they will 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 ever found: primitive flamenco.