Duende : A Journey Into the Heart of Flamenco

by Jason Webster

Release Date: 18 March, 2003

Edition: Hardcover

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Yo! This is a personal story, not a manual

I think the problem that some of the thumbs-down reviewers had with this book was that they got sidetracked by the subtitle, "a journey into the heart of Flamenco." They apparently thought that it was going to be a didactic work. (The author is an Oxford graduate, so we must use words like "didactic"). Instead, it's a very personal story, a "tell all" about the author's experiences as a foreigner (i.e., non-Spaniard) trying to lead a flamenco life, and I don't find that it was represented as anything other than that. And insofar as that story goes, it was generally well written

What is clear is that Jason Webster came to Spain in search of flamenco without doing any prior research or study, not even having touched a guitar previously - rather odd for an Oxford grad, but maybe that was part of what he was running away from. That's what got him into all the strange and sometimes funny scenes he relates because seemingly every flamenco aficionado he ran into was a self-proclaimed "expert" who told him something different.

Poor Jason also came to the wrong places: Valencia and Alicante on the southeast coast of Spain, two venues that are well outside flamenco's incubators: southwest Andaluc�a (C�diz, Jer�z and Sevilla province in particular), and Madrid, the capital where most of the best artists end up because it provides the best means of earning a living. That's just about analogous to someone coming to the United States in search of jazz and blues but starting out with a flat in Des Moines, Iowa, then moving on to Butte, Montana. He did get to Granada, which has a much smaller but increasingly thriving flamenco scene, but only after a good deal of trial and error - and then he went back to the southeast coast anyway. And that was after living in a poor suburb of Madrid without ever visiting the thriving dance studios where he could have met and learned to play with some really good artists instead of stealing cars and doing lines of coke.

Those missteps probably lead the author to the main title, "Duende." Many an experienced flamenco groans when they hear that word. Federico Garc�a Lorca started the craze for "duende" back in the twenties, and Donn Pohren enshrined it for all English-speaking aficionados through his work, "The Art of Flamenco", first published in the early sixties and which for many decades was the only book in English on the subject. "Duende" literally means an elf or gnome, and can include poltergeists as well. It did imply "soul" or "spirit" within some circles in flamenco, but overuse caused such word inflation that its original meaning was greatly devalued, and many flamencos came to avoid it. "Aire" was the principal word used instead of "duende" when I lived in Spain in the early seventies, and now one also hears "pellizco" which may or may not mean the same thing. "Duende" is today more often used by promoters in the tourist trade rather than artists. Of course, the use of that word in the title might well be due to the publisher rather than the author, but that would be consistent: "Duende" once again being used to sell something rather than describe it.

The one serious bone I might have to pick with the author, however, is his intimation that drugs are an integral, even necessary, part of being a flamenco. True, drugs became very pervasive in the post-Franco era, but they have never been anything close to "necessary." For over a hundred years flamenco did quite well fueled solely with nicely fermented grape juice, perhaps a bit of distilled spirit, but that was it. Weed, coke, hash are strictly optional and mostly detrimental. He seems to have swallowed the drugs-are-necessary idea hook, line and sinker, but the fact that the particular Gypsies he hung out with had to steal cars to make ends meet attests to their lack of success as professional flamenco artists. Drugs and thievery are dead ends, not roads to the heart of flamenco or anything else. Yes, Camaron de la Isla, one of flamenco's greats, used lots of drugs and smoked like a house on fire. He also died at the age of 42. (But if you do enough drugs you just might see a few duendes.)

The back jacket cover says that the author still lives in Valencia. If he harbors any hope of writing a sequel, he better start thinking about moving to where there's at least a flamenco road to follow.

The Heart of Flamenco

The book is may be a good start for the author, but so far not a bestseller. It describes in a wonderful fluid way the mentality of people doing Flamenco, not the art on it's own. The question about Duende becomes a more philosophic one and left the reader a bit unsatisfied with the resulting interpretations. At last is it a good story about the difficulties which any outsider has to experience when settling down in Andalusia to become a true Flamenco. The book is great as a first reading for guitarists interested to enhance their skills in playing and experimenting with the right people in Spain. I hope Jason Webster writes his next book with more "Duende"!