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Written in fRoots issue 379/380, Jan/Feb 2015


RAÚL RODRÍGUEZ
Razón De Son
Fol 100FOL1079 (2014)

Raúl Rodríguez, founder of the 2008 BBC world music award-winning Son de la Frontera, has developed the Cuban trés - like a guitar but with its six steel strings separated into three courses of two - into a flamenco instrument.
     With this project his compositions explore and also create connections between flamenco and Spain’s American colonies, to which sea routes from the 17th century passed through the Andalusian ports of Seville and Cadiz.
     The result is a download-beatingly elegant nine-inch-square 56-page illustrated hardback book with detailed explanations in Spanish and English of the origination process of the songs and instrumentals on the CD tucked into a (contrastingly flimsy) plastic slip case inside the front cover.
     In this context the paired steel strings of the trés give it a sound comparable to a 12-string guitar, or sometimes a Portuguese guitarra, flat-picked and very different from the nylon-strung finger-picked intricacy and rasqueado of flamenco guitar. Rodríguez’s voice has a husky flamenco-ish timbre, but while it has flamenco ornamentation his singing is more narrative, less declamatory.
     To condense from the profuse information in the book, the rhythmic and melodic forms here come from his own blend of flamenco buleria, the guajira music of the Cuban countryside, the fandango which arrived in Spain from the Indies, Mexican elements, southern Spanish village music and more. Joining the trés and the voices of Rodríguez and others, the instrumentation, much of which he plays himself, includes guitars, bass, and percussion featuring the thump and rattle of cajón, now a core flamenco instrument but which originated among the African slaves in Perú and was only brought to Spain in the late 1970s by Paco de Lucía.
     So, not sounding like a flamenco album as such, nor flamenco-fusion; it’s a researched, more integrated development, with a lot of rhythmic variety and non-flashy energy in songs that one can imagine taking root in repertoires at both ends of the Spanish-speaking world.

     www.folmusica.com



© 2014 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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