The death this week of Paco de Lucía, a flamenco guitarist, has robbed Spain of one of its best-known20th-century musicians. He died at the age of 66, a couple of months before the release of his latest album, "Canciones andaluzas" ("Andalusian songs"). It is a work that is expected to typify, once more, his life-long effort to revolutionise this most galvanising of musical forms.
Born Francisco Sánchez Gómez in Algeciras, on the southern tip of Andalusia, De Lucía demonstrated an extraordinary talent from a very early age. It was a talent honed by his father, who would make him practise for up to 12 hours a day and whose management of his son's early career has earned him comparisons with Leopold Mozart. De Lucía duly left school at the age of 11 and was soon playing in public to help support his family.
Flamenco was developed by Asian gypsies who came to Spain in the 15th century and absorbed the sounds of the indigenous cultures, particularly in Andalusia. Over time, they created songs—“cante”—with a characteristic rhythmic accompaniment. After the associated rise of dance (“baile”) in the 19th century flamenco became the colourful, but often sombre, spectacle seen today. In the 1950s and 1960s, though, its dignity was rather forgotten, thanks to the rise of a sort of flamenco-for-tourists on Spain’s eastern and southern beaches that did tremendous damage to what had become a disciplined art form.
De Lucía was instrumental in changing things. By his mid-20s, a clutch of albums culminating in “Fuente y caudal” (“Source and flow”, 1973) had given notice of a guitarist of astonishing technique—compellingly percussive but note-perfect—and with an ear for lavish melody. Based on harsh gypsy songs, flamenco had never been known for its bright tunes. Yet De Lucía coaxed from the guitar sounds and chord progressions that had not been heard in flamenco before, or indeed in any other genre. His fingers worked over the frets with electrifying speed, and as he gave flamenco back its dignity, other players, singers and dancers found they could start to be taken seriously again.
One of these was José Monje Cruz, otherwise known as Camarón de la Isla. He was a gypsy singer from near Cádiz, with a haunting voice of huge range. De Lucía mentored him to a point where, by the 1970s, the two were a kind of Lennon and McCartney of flamenco, and Spanish superstars. Camarón was sadly undone by drugs, and died in 1992 at the age of 41. But their partnership, with its rich recorded legacy, remains the pivotal one of modern flamenco.
De Lucía’s first big hit was “Entre dos aguas” (“Between two waters”), a rumba that starts his 1973 album. Delightfully modern, its liberating jauntiness helped it become a kind of anthem for the end of Spanish fascism. Moreover, its thrumming bass, bongo drums and the very fact that it is a rumba—in other words Caribbean and not from flamenco’s true family of song forms—typified the character of De Lucía’s music, and that of thousands who tried to copy him. For much of the 1980s and well into the 1990s, he recorded and performed internationally with a jazz-based sextet and collaborated with jazz-rock musicians such as the pianist Chick Corea, and guitarists John McLaughlin and Al Di Meola.
Purists were quick to denigrate these excursions away from the flinty soil of traditional flamenco, but by this time De Lucía was a world star, loved by audiences. His credentials as a pioneer were as solid as those of Miles Davis or Bob Dylan.
He was very self-critical, ticking himself off in rare interviews for never hitting the musical targets he had set. But he should not have worried. His music stands: a man of few words and intensely private, De Lucía spent almost 50 years cajoling virtuoso and highly individualised perfection from an ancient form. Listen to albums such as "Almoraima" (1976), "Castro Marín" (1981) and "Cositas buenas" (2004) and you hear struggle, yearning, poetry and, always, the sound of Andalusia.
Correction: "Entre dos aguas" features bongo drums, not conga drums as we originally wrote. This was corrected on March 3rd.