Anthropologist, researcher, creator of a new instrument but above all a musician. Through music, Raúl RodrÃguez has explored the links between the great Atlantic cultures in the musical trilogy that he closes with La razón eléctrica, an album and a book that offer a journey through European, Arabic, African and American folklore. A journey for which he has embarked on tres flamenco, the original Cuban three-string guitar that Martirio’s son has adapted to the Andalusian sound to turn it into a standard of bewitching music with which he wants to cross cultures and borders. He presents his work in a small Catalan tour that will take him to Sala Milano today before visiting the Nova Jazz Cava and La Bisbal d’ EmpordÃ
How did you come up with the idea of ​​the tres flamenco?
It was a strange idea, I saw the first tres players, the people who played the tres among the soneros who came in the nineties, especially Faustino Oramas El Guayabero, and the first characters who came playing are old in the meetings of Cuban and flamenco son. Santiago Auserón began with Jesús Cosano in Seville, before the Buenavista Social Club in 1994. Later, my mother [Martirio] came into contact with Compay Segundo, she went to sing with him in Cuba in 1997, and there I asked him to bring one. As soon as he brought me that tres I started playing the Cuban son, and I realized that I wasn’t going to have time or life, at least in this reincarnation, to learn what the Cubans played. My luck is that I didn’t have a teacher, because there was no Cuban in Seville who could teach me, there was no YouTube or video tutorials. I started to realize that I couldn’t play the Cuban 3 the way it’s played in Cuba, that I would need a lot of experience there and there was no one to teach me, there wasn’t even a specific standard tuning because there were three tunings.
And it was lucky for you
I can’t play son, I thought, but I know flamenco a little and I can play it. I can insert that instrument into the music I’m learning, the music of Morón de la Frontera, the flamenco of Morón and the school of Diego del Gastor and thus play a double game. I bring an instrument to this flamenco tradition and I bring a repertoire to that instrument.
It fits well with the flamenco sound
Very well, that’s when we started working with Son de la Frontera. In the first years I had a great time and I had a very strange feeling, because I had to learn everything, the new techniques, different tunings that I began to try, and then put the whole subject of flamenco falsetas and the accompaniment into the instrument. Over the years I began to develop this one I have, built by Andrés DomÃnguez as a flamenco tres, that is, already with mixed construction techniques for a tres guitar with strings, also flamenco guitar and lute, with another tuning more similar to that of the guitar although it maintains the traditional string, where the lowest string is the bottom one.
How many years have you been playing the tres?
It will be about 20 years now. I already used it in Son de la frontera, in 2004. That’s when I gave it a more concrete form, to a type of reading that was a Cuban tres playing flamenco. Now with this one it’s not so simple, because it’s not a Cuban instrument playing flamenco, nor is what I’m doing strictly flamenco, nor is the instrument strictly Cuban. As it is a new instrument, I work without a passport, making music that does not have a denomination of origin, as has happened to me in the three works that I have done solo.
Try to create a new sound based on global folklore
We have had many problems with the definitions of music, we are very caught up in questioning where music begins or where it ends, if it is called this way or that way, and I think that we are wasting time there as an audience and as an artist.
But you are not helping either when you call your creative Anthropomusic trilogy of back and forth cantes
It is a mixture of anthropological reasoning and experimental music, it is creative because it seeks creation, new composition and not so much the rereading of the old repertoire. It’s about that trip, that ability to go back and forth that music has.
A nivel sonoro se nota lo arabizante y lo africano
In flamenco, the African has not been considered as one of the main sources of nutrition. We are very clear about the Sephardic source, the Arabic or Andalusian source, the Castilian and Gypsy sources, even the American source. But practically nothing has been reported about the presence of an Afro-Andalusian culture. Only in recent years, with regard to a documentation that is already very overwhelming and qualifying.
Maybe there is a racism issue
I think we are high enough to go beyond the screen. In the cities we live in, in today’s world we live with people from all over the world. If in music we can get a little ahead and advance a little way, we are helping others.
You affirm that flamenco allows you to synchronize with other cultures
Flamenco has information from lots of different cultures, Andalusia has been a melting pot, a meeting place for many cultural points of view throughout history. He has been able to receive knowledge from Europe, Asia and Africa as well as have the door open to America.
And flamenco is an amalgamation of all of them
People tend to think that flamenco is a pure, finished and closed kind of music, but my impression is that it is constantly being made, that it is made up of patches with many different cultures. If we consider it that way, we have the opportunity to use flamenco to be able to express ourselves in our own language by talking with others. Because it has so much musical and rhythmic richness, in verse and in sound, that there is always something from other cultures that one can relate to.
Also with the African sound
If we consider that it also has a relationship with the African diaspora, it opens up the possibility of us developing very consciously with other music derived from that same diaspora such as Cuban son, New Orleans blues, jazz, of course Mandingo music and even with fado or music that has a more or less tangential relationship with the slave population of each of its ports.
When you compose, is there an intention to promote this message of unity?
To say that in reality we are probably much more alike than we are told. Flamenco is very modern, the form it has is from the last 150 or 200 years. It is thought of as pure but my impression is that the wealth it has precisely in its impurity, the multiculturalism it has.
In La Razón Electrica there are many instrumental pieces
I started singing in the last 10 or 15 years, but I have a lot of chances to develop the instrument into an instrumental vein, like I do with other artists. On the other hand, I like to do introductions for songs, I like to do Codas and it’s logical that if you put them in a row, the song will last a long time. That’s why I make separate pieces so that whoever is only interested in the song can go directly to it.
Each has a function
The function they have is explained in the book, one of them helps me to talk about the king of Mali Abubakari II, who set up the fleet called Farafina to try to cross to the other side of the sea and reach America. I make a likeness to my instrument, because it’s a kind of ship that can travel a bit beyond the coastline to see what can be found. In another piece I talk about the small superpower that is playing string instruments, and at the same time about the slavery one feels when one is imprisoned in such a powerful relationship with the instrument. I speak through the crazy strings, that play on words between sanity and madness. While in Pisar las brasas I do an instrumental string talking about the treatment that should be given to traditional music.
In the songs with lyrics you talk about the journey and the discovery
The best part of the profession of a musician is the journey, it is also the most laborious, because it allows you to discover yourself in the mirror of others, it allows you to really learn from other worlds. Starting to travel without fear or certainty that one is going to find anything. I have been lucky in these years to be in Mali, in Madagascar, in Senegal, in Equatorial Guinea, in Veracruz, in New York, in California, and everywhere I take my flamenco tres and try to have a dialogue with the musicians. that they are there, so that I can learn and that I can also leave something of myself in that place.
His songs are not, in any case, experimental
It is the work that I want to dedicate myself to, what anthropologists do is cultural translation, trying to make one culture understandable to another, no. In this case, I also want to make the process of creation understandable from within, the plot, how the ideas are linked. And sometimes it’s easier to do it in the form of a song than to explain it.
But even so, he has published a book next to each album
I really like this format and there are already three, it is a mixture of knowledge with enjoyment, theoretical, scientific research within social science, and the musical part. In addition, the work of art must also be demystified, explained so that people do not think that it really comes from the gods or was given by the earth. People do it and I think it has to be explained, and the clearer it is explained, the easier it is to understand art and the importance of art in the world we have.
What will you perform at these concerts in Catalonia?
We will make the repertoire of the new album and we will recover some songs from the previous ones with a lot of nerve, with a lot of excitement because the new repertoire always puts you on your guard. I have practically recorded the entire album myself, now we have to expand their ideas in that trio format.
How do the songs change live?
Change the energy, and also the ideas. I do not consider myself a virtuoso in any field, I work from the craft, and when I record the records I like to find ideas that are valid knowing that I am not a great bassist, a great percussionist or a great instrumentalist. That’s why I look for arrangements, ideas, formulas and synthesis of rhythms that work well in a live performance. And when people like Juanfe Pérez or Jimmy González come along and play wonderfully well, that grows, it expands because what I plant on the records are tiny seeds that they develop by making them grow.
