Ralph Ellison and Flamenco

"'Flamenco', Ralph Ellison's first published music essay, evokes his debt to Ernest Hemingway: the sweat-on-wine-bottle detail, the strings of independent clauses, the deadpan tone that is nonetheless full of passion."



Ralph Ellison's album review of the Third Anthology of Cante Flamenco was published in the Saturday Review on 11 December 1954. He had been traveling and living in Europe ever since the release of his first novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953. One of the best undergrad courses I took at Boston College was dedicated exclusively to Invisible Man, a book I've returned to periodically and found new depth in every reading.

As the story goes, a major fire at Ellison's home in Massachussetts destroyed 300 pages of his second novel in 1967 -- though, according to his new "definitive biography" by Arnold Rampersad, the story is not actually true. Regardless, Ellison did eventually write over 2000 pages of a second novel, but it was never completed. In 1999, five years after his death, Ellison's second novel Juneteenth was published as 368-page condensation of his unfinished work.

Ellison studied trumpet and piano as a young man and attended the Tuskegee Institute on a scholarship to study music. His later writing has the rhythm and cadence of a jazz genius and the passages about music in Invisible Man are some of my favorites, particularly the introduction quoted below, in which the nameless narrator describes listening to a Louis Armstrong record after "accidentally" smoking some reefer:

"It was a strange evening. Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you're never quite on the beat. Sometimes you're ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around."

Which, of course, makes me think of Afrika Bambaataa. As part of the founding trilogy of hip-hop, along with Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash, Bambaataa was the godfather of meta-physical philosophizing about slipping into breakbeats and lookin round. Under the spell of marijuana, the Invisible Man discovers a new way of listening to music:

"The unheard sounds came through, and each melodic line existed of itself, stood out clearly from all the rest, said its piece, and waited patiently for the other voices to speak. That night I found myself hearing not only in time, but in space as well. I not only entered the music, but descended, like Dante, into its depths."

I remember reading this in high school, thinking it wasn't exactly an anti-pot PSA. Ellison then moves into italics for the next section, a powerful sermon about the "Blackness of Blackness". But just before the preacher begins his speech, Ellison finishes his description of the IM's herbally-enhanced listening session:

"And beneath the swiftness of the hot tempo there was a slower tempo and a cave and I entered it and looking around and heard and old woman singing a spiritual as full of Welschmerz as flamenco."

I don't remember this brief reference to flamenco from the first time I read the book -- I probably just skipped past it because I didn't know what "Welchmerz" was either. Coined by German author Jean Paul in 1820, Welchmerz literally means world-pain or world-weariness. It's often described as the sadness felt as a result of the difference between physical reality and the ideal state. It's a perfect word to describe the soul-crushing wail of flamenco singing, called "llantos" or "lamentos ahogados" in Spanish. To a foreign ear, it can sound like a shrieking injured animal, but Ellison recognized flamenco as a "tradition that contains many elements which the West has dismissed as 'primitive,' that epithet so facile for demolishing all things cultural which Westerners do not understand or wish to contemplate." The all-too-common description of flamenco as "animalistic" ignores its highly organized and rigid structure, which because it doesn't correspond to European art music's scales or rhythms, is often dismissed as "primitive". That Ellison had the vision to recognize that flamenco is actually an extremely subtle art of great refinements is a testament to his sharp, open ears. (All mixed metaphors dedicated to Wayne&Wax)

Ellison's writing on flamenco begins with his characterization of Spain as "neither Europe nor Africa but a blend of both." He continues:

"Cante Flamenco is the very ancient folk music of the Andalusian gypsies of southern Spain. Its origins are as mysterious as those of the gypsies themselves, but in it are heard Byzantine, Arabic, Hebraic, and Moorish elements fused and given the violent, rhythmical expressiveness of the gypsies. Cante Flamenco, or cante hondo (deep song, as the purer, less florid form is called), is a unique blending of Eastern and Western modes and as such it often baffles when it most intrigues the Western ear. In our own culture the closest music to it in feeling is the Negro blues, early jazz, and the slave songs (now euphemistically termed "spirituals")."

The discussion of whether flamenco is ancient or modern is a tricky one. Ethnomusicologists usually give the mid 19th century as the birth date for flamenco, though most scholars admit the music's roots go back much further than that. At what point a genre "becomes itself" is a murky game of taxonomy, but there's a good argument that flamenco is not ancient, but actually quite intertwined with the emergence of modernity.

It's also funny that Ellison writes that flamenco's origins are as mysterious as the gypsies themselves, because the gypsy's origins have been proved linguistically to originate in India, particularly the northern Punjab/Doaba regions. He does list the usual suspects for flamenco influencers (Byzantine, Arabic, Hebraic, and Moorish), though he leaves out Afro-Latino. He does make explicit its parallels with African-American music, a point which he goes on to develop further:

"Like Negro folk music, Cante Flamenco (which recognizes no complete separation between dance and song, the basic mood, the guitar and castanets, hold all together) is a communal art. In the small rooms in which it is performed there are no "squares" sitting around just to be entertained, everyone participates very much as during a noncommercial jam session or a Southern jazz dance. It can be just as noisy and sweaty and drunken as a Birmingham "breakdown"; while one singer "riffs" (improvises) of the dancers "go to town" the others assist by classing their hands in the intricate percussive manner called palmada and by stamping our the rhythms with their feet. When a singer, guitarist of dancer has negotiated a particularly subtle passage (and this is an art of great refinements) the shouts of Olé! arise to express appreciation of his art, to agree with the sentiments expressed, and to encourage him on to even greater eloquence... the cantes con baile (dance songs) sound like a revivalists' congregation saying "Amen!" to the preacher"

Flamenco is not a spectator sport. Flamenco's natural habitat (la juerga) is a circle of musicians and aficionados interacting, not a "two-way (performers and audience) ritual of a concert", to use a recent phrase from NY Times jazz critic Ben Ratliff. The participation and encouragement of the crowd (called "jaleos") is integral to the performance. Nothing betrays an hither-to unnoticed square in the room like a misplaced "Ole!" Ellison also makes reference to the often inebriated nature of flamenco performance, an important theme for sure, though one that gets grossly exaggerated by Timothy Mitchell in his otherwise interesting book Flamenco Deep Song.

"Flamenco, while traditional in theme and choreography, allows a maximum of individual expression, and a democratic rivalry such as is typical of a jam session; for, like the blues and jazz, it is an art of improvisation, and like them it can be quite graphic. Even who one doesn't understand the lyrics will notes the uncanny ability of the singers presented here to produce pictorial effects with their voices. Great space, echoes, rolling slopes, the charging of bulls, and the prancing and galloping of horses flow in this sound much as animal cries, train whistles, and the loneliness of night sound through the blues. The nasal, harsh, anguished tones heard on these sides are not the results of ineptitude or "primitivism"; like the "dirty tone" of the jazz instrumentalist, they are the result of an esthetic which rejects the beautiful sound sought by classical Western music."

Flamenco isn't pretty. In fact, it can be quite grating, at times bordering on fingernails on a chalkboard, which is why I'm so confused by "Flamenco Chill" as a genre. Flamenco is gully, gritty music of lament and celebration, not insipid elevator music. To make flamenco palatable to the Western ear by transforming it into breezy electronic beats, marketed under cheesy names like Ibiza Sunset, neuters the music of its strength. Flamenco Chill isn't fusion, it's a eunuch.

"Perhaps what attracts us most to flamenco, as it does to the blues, is the note of unillusioned affirmation of humanity which it embodies. The gypsies, like the slaves, are an outcast through undefeated people who have never lost their awareness of the physical source of man most spiritual moments... In its more worldly phases the flamenco voice resembles the blues voice, which mocks the despair stated explicitly in the lyrics, and it expresses the great human joke directed against the universe, that joke which is the secret of all folklore and myth: that though we may be dismembered daily we shall always rise up again."

Flamenco, above all else, is human. And alive. It reconfirms things about yourself that you already knew. I really love Ellison's conclusion, though the issue of irony in flamenco is complicated. Flamenco rarely reveals it's tongue-in-cheek, but when you catch a glimpse of it, you can't help but laugh with God at the great human joke.




"Flamenco"
Ralph Ellison
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