The meeting with Miguel Poveda is at the Majestic hotel, where in December 1935 Federico García Lorca received a tribute from the leadership of Catalan culture for the premiere in the city of the play “Doña Rosita la maid or the language of flowers”. “There are tons of photographs of Federico in this hotel, he stayed here, but there is no plaque that remembers him,” laments the singer, sitting on a sofa in the reception, while pointing to the plaque that does exist in tribute to Antonio Machado , another illustrious guest of the Paseo de Gracia establishment. “That Machado is there is wonderful, but that they also put Federico in there.”
The Granada poet is the protagonist of Poveda’s latest work, where he sets music to Poema del cante jondo on the album of the same name (Universal). Throughout 12 songs and accompanied on guitar by Jesús Guerrero, the singer from Badalona distills with his privileged voice the soul of the verses written in 1921 with his stories of gypsies, Andalusia and that popular song despised in his day, admired today by the whole world. “I had the need to make a traditional flamenco album, but I was disappointed that there would be little of me,” says Poveda, who was lucky enough to find a copy of the collection of poems during a move. “I took it to my nightstand and suddenly the project took a turn, I had wonderful material.”
It is not the first time that Poveda has crossed paths with Lorca, “he is a lighthouse, a guide and maximum inspiration”, a voice that resonates in the live performances and that already starred years ago on the album Enlorquecido. Now he returns to it in the company of Jesús Guerrero, a guitar about which he dares say little at first, “it already speaks with his touch on the album,” he says before explaining how he met him during an end-of-year performance in the Manuel Betanzos academy in Seville, “then I worked with Chicuelo, and when he couldn’t work with Jesús, sometimes I would have them both play together.”
Since that first meeting with Guerrero, 14 years have passed in which both artists have matured, to the point of being able to collaborate on an album created in the Cádiz native’s studio in San Fernando, next to the house where Camarón was born and lived. “We bring together many qualities because Jesus is fond of singing, he knows when he has to remain silent, when to show himself and he has warmth when playing. I find a home in him, when I launch my song and he answers me with complete logic to everything I have done, it is a very close dialogue.”
“Everything I hear and read about Lorca on a human level and what I interpret draws me to a very special being, a very strong magnetism with a lot of love,” says Poveda of his reference, “he seduces me, in addition to the artist and the playwright, the poet, the musician and even the cartoonist, his personality. Lorca has a very strong desire to love and be loved, he is on the side of the disadvantaged, of popular music when the avant-garde ruled,” he comments, and remembers how this son of a wealthy family created the theater company La Barraca, “he goes the peoples of that black and empty Spain to recite texts by Calderón de la Barca, to introduce culture where it does not reach, not only for the chosen ones.”
The selection made by Poveda pays tribute to legendary singers such as Silverio Franconetti or Juan Breva, in addition to remembering Lorca’s link with religion through La saeta, “although he had attacked the church in a very brutal way, he had his God and “It gives a lot of respect to the images of Christ, the Virgin, Holy Week.” On other occasions, he chose the poem “because when I read them music sounded in my head” while images of Andalusia were drawn, of the gypsies and of that cante jondo that, when the collection of poems was published, looked “like those drunks who sing in taverns.” ”. That is why he points out that the album is not a tribute to Federico, but “a letter of gratitude for having gotten involved with maestro Falla to value that art.”
Poveda’s connection with Andalusia comes from when he was a child, from the Badalona neighborhood of Bufalà, “except for my parents, almost all the rest of my neighbors were Andalusian, we are children of immigrants.” His mother, a flamenco fan, and a singer aunt took him to the flamenco clubs, “my upbringing is 100% Andalusian without Giraldas, without Torre del Oro or Alhambra, but Andalusian.” His relationship with the gypsy world comes from his childhood, thanks to one of his aunts, married to a gypsy whose brother was a singer, “he taught us to dance when I started flamenco.” On the other hand, his cousin, who accompanied him in his musical beginnings, is a gypsy on his father’s side, “a very handsome gypsy with green eyes, dark, who sang rumbas, he was my first guitarist.” Nothing to do with the gypsies who appear in Lorca’s poems, persecuted and marginalized, to whom he reaches out his hand despite being the son of a family with money and land, “he had access to an education, he had a piano and friends like Falla.” However, he felt an affinity for gypsies, he found something exotic and great in them, he empathized when they were mistreated because he said that he was just another gypsy.”
Poveda also empathizes with the marginalized, “whether they are gypsies or not, with anyone who may suffer contempt not only in terms of race but also sexuality or belief, anyone who is humiliated makes me empathize and want to help them because in some way I have “I felt similar things,” he says. “I have not been a persecuted gypsy, but I have been questioned in my youth for being homosexual, and I have been afraid.”
Not fear, but responsibility is what he felt when embarking on this new work, rooting himself again with the flamenco that he went to look for when he moved to Andalusia, an art that is still alive and in full condition. “There was a time when flamenco was like a mountain devastated by a fire, in a very short period of time it was left without its most representative trees, Paquera, Bernarda y Fernanda, Chocolate, Camarón, Paco de Lucía, Morente, Valderrama “Imagine the desolation,” he remembers. “But suddenly you see some green stems that bloom and give you hope, there is Israel Fernández, María Terremoto, Marina Heredia, Arcángel or Estrella Morente”, and Poveda, of course, who once again has allowed herself to be pierced by that Dagger that wrote Lorca, and that enters the heart, “a knife that flamenco gives you, and that touches you everything.”
