Rabble Without A Cause
Wednesday February 16th, 2011 with Bernard Stepien
Flamenco Jazz of Gerardo Nuñez and Chano Dominguez

Jazz and Flamenco have a long common history. The most obvious image of their marriage can be found in Gil Evans/Miles Davis Sketches of Spain in the late '50s. John Coltrane during the '60s got involved too. Olé was the result. But in it's constant evolution there was yet another fusion that occurred and ironically during the Jazz Fusion period with Chick Corea's notorious Spain. Further back, Jazz, an off-spring of blues has a distant but determining ancestor in western African music of the griots. That same music trickled its way through Spain along the caravan routes crossing the Saharian desert. All that remained to do was to formally reunite Jazz and Flamenco. This officially occured in the '70s when Flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucia teamed up with Jazz saxophonist Pedro Iturralde. Nowadays in Spain, Flamenco Jazz is a big thing. Any visit to a Spanish CD store will confirm that. There has been a Jazz Flamenco project around for a couple of decades now that is called Jazzpaña that actually started with the involvement of Gil Evans but unfortunately his death arrived before the first concert was staged. Currently there is a version II of this project led by pure flamenco guitarist Gerardo Nuñez and jazz/flamenco pianist Chano Dominguez. The later explains his art as follows: “In jazz you improvise with a structure in the background and in flamenco [the improvisation] is part of the form. In flamenco, in a soleá, or in a bulera, the guitarist doesn't know what the cantaor is doing until the moment comes, and the cantaor doesn't know the falseta (variation, or melodic phrase, interspersed between successions of chords) that the guitarist is going to play for him.”