By half way through this book, I formed a firm image of its origins: Claus Schreiner, the "editor," was probably chit-chatting with one or more of his fellow German flamenco aficionados when suddenly a thought struck him: "I know! Let's all write a book about flamenco!" And so they did. Why it was actually published, however, is a mystery.As an introduction to flamenco for the novice, or even the merely curious, it is a complete failure. I can only think that someone with no real prior knowledge of flamenco would either be entirely confused or bored to tears - or both. The "essays," written by various different people, are disconnected - a result of there being no clear, collective image of either what the book was supposed to be about or the audience for whom it was to be written.
As a work written for serious aficionados or as a contribution to flamenco scholarship, it's worse than a failure because it is not only incredibly biased, but filled with errors, some of which would bring guffaws of laughter from any knowledgeable aficionado. The bias begins with the title: "Flamenco: Gypsy Dance and Music from Andalucia." The authors are quite obviously enamored of the Spanish gypsies - so much so that they ascribe the origin of flamenco almost entirely to them. For many reasons, that's completely absurd. Undeniably, the gypsies played a very important role in the development of flamenco, but they were definitely not the sole progenitors of this art form. (I say this with all due apologies to my former maestro of the guitar, Juan Maya "Marote," a "pure gypsy" from the barrio of Sacromonte, Granada.)
For a published work, it is a toss-up as to whether the quantity of the errors or their gravity is more surprising. A few examples:
- It claims that the Gypsies likely emigrated from northern India around 800 to 900 c.e., when the best scholarship places the date between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries - the time of the Mongol invasions of south Asia and the Middle East, which caused many different peoples to flee to the West.
- It talks of "Hindu dancers" appearing in Phoenician "Gadir," continuing into Roman "Gades"(misspelled in the book as "Grades" - one of numerous misspellings, perhaps due in part to the translation from German to English). Since Hinduism developed between roughly 500 b.c.e. and 400 c.e. - well after the Phoenicians and concurrent with the Romans, who had very little commerce with the Indian subcontinent - such an appearance would be highly anachronistic.
- It claims that "the dances of the Arabs, who occupied Andalusia from 711 A.D. on, had already been influenced by the gypsies who came through North Africa from India, that is to say, these dances, in all likelihood, already contained Indian elements." Ridiculous: The Gypsies of Andalucía could not have arrived there until the late Almohad period at the earliest - some five centuries after the Muslims had arrived. And the use of the word "Arab" is misleading: "Muslim" is a much more accurate term to describe both the conquerors and inhabitants of Al Andalus, since even though the lingua franca was Arabic, ethnically they were composed of Arab, Berber, Slav, and other elements. (For anyone with an interest in this history, I would highly recommend the two volume set, The Legacy of Muslim Spain, edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi, where each essay is authored by a world-class scholar on his/her subject. Check out, for example, Owen Wright's essay, "Music in Islamic Spain," which debunks some of the claims about the musician Zyryab made in Flamenco.)
- It perpetuates another myth by referring to "slaves of African origin" not being "uncommon on the Iberian Peninsula" even before the conquest of Latin America. While certainly there were such slaves, the implication that black Africans were only "slaves" is to view the history of medieval Spain through the lens of the racist slave trade that developed many centuries later. There are historical references in the Arabic sources to entire regiments of black African soldiers - not slaves - appearing in the Iberian Peninsula as early as the eighth century, and repeatedly over the many succeeding centuries. Individuals of partially black African ancestry were included in the ranks of the ruling class in the Muslim periods.
- Even more astounding, even when it speaks of flamenco itself there are glaring errors: "Bulerías, for example, are to this day rarely sung, let alone danced by payos [non gypsies]." This chestnut would bring peels of laughter to anyone in Spain: There's not one professional flamenco artist, or hardly any amateur for that matter, gypsy or not, who does not perform bulerías.
- It even "dis's" the extremely fine dancer, Antonio Gades - and in the process gets it wrong again: "[Antonio Gades] thinks of himself as following in the footsteps of Antonio and Vicente Escudero, but he owes his big break to his excellent collaboration with the Spanish director Carlos Saura on the films Blood Wedding and Carmen." More incredible rubbish: Gades' "big break" - to use the author's term - came in 1964 when he co-starred in Los Tarantos with Carmen Amaya - almost twenty years before his collaboration with Saura. Gades was an icon in the dance and flamenco community when I lived in Spain in the early seventies, at which time he had already toured the world several times with his own company.
A good introduction to flamenco in the English language is still Donn E. Pohren's The Art of Flamenco, originally written almost forty years ago. While somewhat biased (as almost everything written about flamenco tends to be - that's the nature of the beast), it remains an excellent, learned, and very readable exposé of the subject by an American who has lived in Spain for almost fifty years and who has eaten, drunk and slept flamenco that entire time.
Hit and a miss
not good
Bias, Myth and Anecdote Masquerading as Scholarship
Best Flamenco book yet