It is supposed that during the Flemish kingdom of Karel V (Carlos I in Spain) some kind of popular confusion between flemish and gypsy culture led the people to use that word for the gypsy music. The word Flamenco in Spanish originally meant Flemish. Flamenco culture originated in Andalusia (Spain), but has since become one of the icons of Spanish music and even Spanish culture in general. It can be very musical and very lyrical, but without that rage and sweetness you aren’t complete.Flamenco is a song, music and dance style which is strongly influenced by the Gitanos, but which has its deeper roots in Moorish musical traditions.
“I can hear when a guitarist hasn’t played for dance, because there’s no rage, there’s no anger, there’s no power.
“I can tell when a guitarist hasn’t played for singers, because there’s no sensitivity or sweetness,” he said. “There are times when a guitarist, wanting to show off, completely destroys the emotion of the lyrics, or ruins a final flourish.” Cortes agrees. “The guitar comments, but it also creates,” Lorca said. In 1932, Federico García Lorca published an essay about cante jondo (deep song), the oldest, most haunting strand of flamenco. “It wasn’t like he was coming over to give me a lesson-it was just sitting around, and I’d ask, ‘Why do you slow down in this section?’ or ‘Why do you emphasize the phrase this way?’ ” Sabicas, in particular, was a frequent visitor to the Cortes house, and after a traditional Gypsy meal guitars would invariably come out. “But inside was a Spanish Gypsy family from eighty years ago.” Within this insular world were two other teachers, the legendary flamenco guitarists Mario Escudero and Sabicas, who both eventually settled in New York after fleeing Spain during the Spanish Civil War. “From the front door out into the streets, we were in America,” he said. “If he usually takes in air fast, that means he’s going to probably come in fast on the next phrase.”Ĭortes grew up following the rules of his father, who insisted on maintaining Gypsy customs in their modest house in South Ozone Park, Queens.
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“My father taught me how to look at the singer and the way he’s breathing,” he said later.
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Cortes watched the pair intently and then, turning his gaze toward the singer, began the song’s finale, a series of beautiful falsetas-brief, melodic phrases-that underpinned the dancers’ climactic movements.
Facing each other, they drew close and pulled apart in a tight circle with exacting, provocative gestures. After an elegiac instrumental introduction, a male and a female dancer emerged onto the tiny stage.
He began the first set with a stark, mournful soleá, one of the oldest, most haunting flamenco forms, accompanied by a cajón (a boxlike percussion instrument played with one’s hands), castanets, and a singer. Recently, Cortes took the stage with a goatee and long, curly black hair suggesting a seventies-era fan of Led Zeppelin (which he was). On most Saturday nights, the Society’s plain space is transformed into an Andalusian tablao: white tablecloths, chorizo tapas, and aficionadas dressed in billowy black dresses with red carnations in their hair. Cortes now performs weekly at a makeshift club called Alegrias, on the second floor of the Spanish Benevolent Society, on West Fourteenth Street in Manhattan.
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