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As I sat in the darkish, the anticipation threaded the air like a high-quality electrical present. Suddenly, a highlight switched on, revealing 4 performers in flamenco garb, every one seated at a nook of the “stage”—a small rectangular plank in the heart of the viewers. As the cantaora (vocalist) started to sing, the dancers stood in flip, punctuating her a cappella wails with percussive strikes of their wooden-heeled sneakers. The vibration pulsed by way of the ground into my physique, like a second heartbeat competing with my very own.
And identical to that, I used to be crying once more.
It was my first go to to Jerez de la Frontera, in Spain’s Andalucía area the place flamenco was born. As I absorbed the efficiency at Tablao Puro Arte, my late father’s spirit hovered close by.
Although my mother and father grew up in northwestern Spain, the place the people music is Celtic in origin—suppose bagpipes and Riverdance—they had been each big followers of flamenco, particularly Dad. The style’s exuberant rhythms and mournful sobs crammed my childhood dwelling in New York City. But strive as I’d, I didn’t “get” this music in any respect.
“Why do they sound like they’re crying?” I’d whine as a nine-year-old, as my father placed another record on the turntable. It was difficult to parse the Andalucían accent, which frequently compresses or drops word endings, but the singers’ cries of lament were even harder for me to translate. They seemed to emanate from a knife wound to the gut, and I was having none of it.
Still, I spent hours staring at those vinyl covers, filled with images of handsome men sporting wide-brimmed hats, acoustic guitars like shields across their chests, and elegant women in colorful ruffled dresses, their hair adorned with flowers. I loved the way they looked, but that surface-level appreciation brought me no closer to deciphering the sounds they produced.
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When I started traveling to Spain more often as an adult, I gave flamenco another chance. With age and life experience—hello, heartbreak!—I heard my very own angst mirrored again at me by way of flamenco, and my hesitation receded, changed with a blossoming ardour for the artwork kind. But I remained caught on one factor: I nonetheless couldn’t grasp why it resonated so strongly with my dad.
My father was a sort and beneficiant man, a mentor to many in our diasporic group, however he was closed off emotionally. Suggest that one thing was irking him, and he’d scowl, lips pressed collectively. “I’m fine,” he’d snap. The eldest youngster of a younger widow, with all of the related burdens, he’d grown up poor in a rural group throughout the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s repressive dictatorship, so his reserved method was logical, however as soon as I understood flamenco higher, I struggled to reconcile my father’s guarded demeanor together with his love for the most intensely expressive music I’d ever heard.