Transcript
Hi, I’m Dan Garcia and now we’re going to talk about what really flamenco is. The flamenco is a style of music that originated in the South of Spain, probably around the 18-19th century. It’s a style of music that derives from singing. Okay, it began with people singing, like the gypsies in the South of Spain chanting deeply, what we call cantaordo. It’s like deep singing, you sing from the gut, like really expressing sorrow.
Then after the singing came the clapping and the percussion and then came the dancing. The guitar is probably the last instrument that was introduced in traditional flamenco, probably in the late 19th century. So flamenco is a very broad word. Flamenco encompasses a lot of different styles. We have dozens of what we call palos flamencos, which are flamenco styles, inside the word flamenco.
Okay, every region in the South of Spain has its own style of flamenco and its own palos. A palos is different from another palos, usually in the key you play it in, the rhythm, the harmony, and the tempo. These are things that differentiate one palos from another. There’s dozen and dozens of palos, but there’s a couple that are the most common ones.
A very popular palos flamenco right now is rumba, which is a style you hear a lot by bands like Ketama or Gypsy Kings, and this has made flamenco a world-wide phenomena these days, and that’s terrific. But sometimes rumba takes over the word flamenco. Okay, it’s important to understand that flamenco is much more than just rumba. Rumba is one style of flamenco and there’s many other styles of flamenco that we’re going to explore in these videos, also.
So other styles of flamenco are for example, bulerias, soleares, ana marias, tangos; not to confuse them with Argentian tangos and many more, sevillas, and I could go on and on. All this is flamenco. Now we have to make a distinction between traditional flamenco and the more modern and popular flamenco. They’re all good. They’re all flamenco and I hope you enjoy them all.
