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Maestros

Paco de Lucía: La Guitarra que Cambió Todo

Six strings, one revolution

Francisco Sánchez Gómez, from Algeciras, took the flamenco guitar from accompaniment instrument to concert virtuoso instrument in a single career, and along the way introduced the cajón, jazz harmony and Latin American rhythms into the flamenco vocabulary.

#cádiz #guitarra #siglo-xx #fusion

By Diego Morales

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Maestros

Camarón de la Isla

The voice that broke and remade flamenco

José Monge Cruz, born in San Fernando in 1950, recorded for two decades, died at forty-one, and is the only flamenco singer most non-flamenco listeners can name. His influence on the form is impossible to overstate.

#gitano #jondo #cante #siglo-xx #fusion

By Diego Morales

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Compás

The 12-Beat Compás Explained

Why flamenco rhythm sounds the way it does

Flamenco is built on three rhythmic families: simple binary, simple ternary, and a 12-beat cycle that exists almost nowhere else in Western music. Here is how it works, and why beat one isn't always where you think it is.

#12-beat #palmas #baile #guitarra

By Diego Morales

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Historia

The Golden Age, 1860–1910

Cuando el flamenco se hizo arte

The fifty years between the rise of the cafés cantantes and the First World War produced the figures, the repertoire, and the recordings that still define the canon of flamenco.

#sevilla #siglo-xix #cante

By Diego Morales

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Historia

Cafés Cantantes: Where Flamenco Got a Stage

How the 1860s commercialised an oral tradition

Until the mid-19th century flamenco lived in private. Then a singer named Silverio Franconetti opened a café in Seville, and within twenty years the entire art had been professionalised, theatricalised, and irrevocably changed.

#sevilla #siglo-xix #andalucía

By Diego Morales

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