A distinguished traveler, the Khalsoum Professor of Ethnomusicology and Comparative Literature, writes:
Dear Ben,
When I was a young man, there was no music that pleased me, that excited my sense of sound, of taste, of smell, of vision, of passion, as completely as that of flamenco. I sought out the pure, the rough. I traveled with the gypsies of Spain and North Africa. I ate with them, traded stories, shared cold skies and hard ground. I joined the chastened company of Cervantes, who learned “there is no gypsy girl twelve years old who does not know more than a Spanish lady of twenty-five.”
As the dabble of youth turned into the study of a lifetime, I was honored with invitations to flamenco juergas, solely as an aficionado, but certainly thanks to my familiarity with the gypsy music of Spain and elsewhere. While the purpose of the juerga is to trade repertoire, performance, and anecdote, the ancestry of flamenco often squeezes its callused rump into the firelight and demands its share of wine and debate.
The dust is blown from the familiar genealogies—that flamenco was brought to Spain by the gypsies in the fifteenth century; that flamenco grew out of the Arabic music of the Moors. Each camp has its worthy share of intellectual knights and emotional squires.
It was on a recent trip to Córdoba, however, that a tour guide (one of those free-lance linguists who ruminate just inside the portico of the Mezquita) pulled me into just such a discussion. We had crossed the ocean of marble and alabaster columns of the mosque of Abd-ar-Rahman II, circumnavigated the pungent Basilica of Charles V, and were standing in the echo chamber of the mihrab of Caliph Hakam, when the wail of a saeta, the flamenco call to the Virgin, filtered through the stone lattice of the outer wall.
“There is a little-known fact about flamenco, Señor,” he said, pulling me into the shadow, “that is familiar to all knowledgeable Spaniards but shared with very few outsiders. As you seem to be a man of some considerable acquaintance with flamenco and skepticism about the state of the world, I would like to invite you into our community.”
I followed him out of the Mezquita and through the alleys of the Judería to a cup of Moroccan coffee at the low, dark tables of the Bar Abulafia. I expected little more revealing than where an Anglo tourist might find flamenco danced in the altogether.
“The fact is, Señor,” he continued, “that the true flamenco, the Cante Jondo, is of neither Islamic nor gypsy parentage, but is the bastard grandson of the passionate sadness of the Spanish Jews.”
I sipped my coffee, a delaying tactic I employ when my leg feels heavily pulled.
“You may not believe tonight,” he continued. “You will believe tomorrow.”
He opened with the etymology of Cante Jondo—not Deep Song, as I had always believed, Song of the Roots, of the Earth. Rather, Cante “Yom Tov,” Song for the Good Day—Holiday, in Hebrew. The saeta, the flamenco verses to the Virgin we heard through the lattice of the Mezquita, was born from the womb of the Kol Nidre, the Aramaic song of lamentation sung on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. In the Kol Nidre, the conversos, the Jews forced to convert by the Inquisition, sang to Yahweh, the God of the Israelites. They begged him to wipe them dry of their spurious baptism, and renew their Covenant with the God of their fathers. The remorse, the sense of shame, heated by the full-lipped fire of the Sephardic tune, became the trademarks of the saeta. The guttural “Ayyyy” to Yahweh became the rough gitano “Ayyyy” to the Virgin. The wail of the Jews, cornered in their house of worship by the gangsters of the Inquisition, became the wail of the gypsies, cornered in a cave in Granada, a town dump outside Columbus, a council flat in Manchester.
That evening, I sought out a little-known flamenco tablao, in the shadow of the yellow lights off the Avenida del Generalísimo. Garbage muffled the sounds of the street. A heavy-skirted mother squatted on the doorstep, nursing her child with one arm, grabbing for my pants leg with the other. The gypsies inside the tavern sang five notes and whined for money. I refused to pay, and the lights went out. On the walk home, I digested the message. I was stopped three times by the Guardia Civil, and had my pocket picked in the vestibule of my hotel. Was it always this way? Had I never noticed?
I know little but flamenco, I live for nothing but flamenco. Never again will I listen to flamenco. If not for tenure, I would die.