CÁDIZ: SPECIAL REPORT

INTERVIEW WITH
Carmen de la Jara

The singer talks about El Mellizo, the centennial and her beloved Cádiz

Text & photo: Estela Zatania

Carmen Sánchez de la Jara (Cádiz, 1955), from the historic neighborhood of La Viña, prize-winner at Mairena del Alcor, is a cantaora and expert saeta singer with a clear sweet voice and purely Cádiz temperament and personality. She’s also a versatile artist with six recordings that include pieces inspired in Lorca, Turina and Argentine tango, but she is considered a flamenco singer, and her extraordinary capactiy for learning and studying the art backs up that label.

The most intense week of the Enrique el Mellizo centennial celebration, Carmen found time to have a coffee with us on the Calle Ancha of Cádiz to talk about the centennial in which she’s played a pivotal role, and about flamenco in Cádiz in general.

Carmen, you’re more or less the person who set the tribute to Mellizo in motion...
Yes, because, I don’t know, it was really burning me up when I saw that in Cádiz and at the Mellizo club they’d done their few days for Mellizo, and the Cátedra center another few days of conferences and so on, with no help from anyone, but no one had taken the singers into consideration. So I said “what’s going on here?...isn’t anyone going to sing Mellizo’s cante and do something nice for him at the Falla theater?” Mellizo is very important, so the president of the Cátedra asked me if I could organize it and I gave him a few ideas, but the final organization had to be done at the institutional level. So he said fine, let’s get this thing moving, you speak to the Culture department here in Cádiz. I went and spoke to Castillo with the president of the Cátedra and I told them we wanted to do a show in honor of Mellizo with the traditional cante of Cádiz, and my singer friends all said “Carmen, we’re with you all the way”, and nobody’s getting paid. The profits are for a series of things, for mementos of the occasion for all the collaborators, to pay for the theater because it’s very expensive, for the amplification, the catering... Then I had the idea of bringing Fosforito, because he’s always sung a lot of Cádiz material and Mellizo, he holds the Llave de Oro del Cante (“Golden key of cante”) and I wanted him to be here, and he came with Gonzalo Rojo from the National Foundation of Flamenco Art... All that meant lots of expense, I don’t know if we’re going to cover it all, we’ve put a very modest price on the tickets. Another part of the money is for a book the Cátedra de Flamencología is going to publish about Mellizo with the help of the local government, it’s already written, all about the era of Mellizo.

I’m a little annoyed because I would have liked to see the yearly Flamenco Convention (Congreso de Flamenco) dedicated to Mellizo this year, or even have been celebrated in Cádiz, but at least they should have remembered it was the year of Mellizo, because his picture hangs in every flamenco association and club in Spain, you always see Manuel Torre, Camarón, Antonio Chacón and Mellizo, everywhere. You might also see la Niña de los Peines, Antonio Mairena, or some singer who passed through, but the basic images are those, because Mellizo is one of the pillars, a true creator, and it isn’t every day you come across someone like that.

Carmen de la Jara

Do you think singers in Cádiz remember Mellizo?
I think the Catedrá de Flamencología de Cádiz is doing some very important work, and not everyone realizes it because maybe it doesn’t get that much publicity or support from the institutions to keep it going, but it’s very significant that investigators come to Cádiz from other areas, and they tell us things about Mellizo, about his children, about Aurelio, el Viejo de la Isla...all the historic singers of Cádiz. Because you look at Jerez and they already have it all in order, they’ve analyzed their singers, everything is in the right perspective historically, and in Cádiz we need this, the Cátedra is a little forgotten, there are a lot of members but it was never well-known, but since the centennial has begun to be talked about, now everyone knows we’re attending the conferences at the Cátedra and we’re learning about many things, getting information from Internet, communicating with a diversity of sources, discovering the oral tradition, learning about this one or that one and what they sang...

Mellizo was a contemporary of Manuel Torre, and he never recorded because he was extremely withdrawn, but he’s being exhaustively studied, and now we know that all his cantes, not of Aurelio or Perición or Manolo Vargar or La Perla, but anything which is Mellizo’s has an unmistakable stamp. They’re investigating that marker of his, there are a series of very high notes, and very low notes. The soleá of Mellizo, la siguiriya, las alegrías, la malagueña… If you examine them you see they share the same characteristics, repetitive in the beginning, and then lengthened…it’s different from other cantes, even his malagueña has nothing to do with malagueña and should have been called something else, another cante from Cádiz, his malagueñas aren’t like the traditional ones, it’s a very moving and beautiful style, the gypsies don’t sing the malagueña of Chacón or La Trini or anyone else, only Mellizo’s. If Mellizo’s heirs collected 5 cents every time one of Enrique’s cantes was reproduced, they’d all be multimillionaires.... because it’s not only the malagueña, there’s the saeta, the siguiriya, the montañesa, the solea of Cádiz, the tangos tientos, alegrías....

Estatua conmemorativa

“The carnival really has a stronghold in this corner of the world, but flamenco mustn’t be lost here because this is the birthplace”

He also created the tientos… He took tangos and made them more solemn, wrote his own verses, I’ve got lyrics of his at home, for siguiriyas, soleá, he could have taken the verses of Manuel Torre of Chacón, but he didn’t. And always based on his own personal experience, because he had many problems with his children, his daughter had tuberculosis, or when one of his sons was going to be sent to fight in the war in Cuba and it would have been four years. Since he had no money to pay so his son wouldn’t have to go to war, don Antonio Chacón put together a festival in Cádiz and said that all the money they took in was for Mellizo so his son wouldn’t have to go to war...Torre sang, and Chacón, the two most important singers of the era, and that’s all documented. Mellizo hasn’t been studied enough, all we have is that photo when the poor man was ill. He’d working in the bullrings and the slaughterhouse, and sang as a sideline, he liked to create new things, and to go to the cathedral and listen to the bells and the Gregorian chants.

The only important historic singer we have from Cádiz, aside from el Mellizo, is Paquirri el Guanté, a soleá specialist. Mellizo also sang his soleares, so beautiful and very similar to one another, but with different twists. Mellizo’s material is very clear, he’s always sitting looking at the sea, always crying and coming up with verses like “Ay mi pesar, como las oleaítas del mar que van y vienen...” [My troubles are like the waves, always coming and going...] I’m studying his original verses to see if I can do something on my own dedicated to Mellizo, I’ve been doing a lot of investigating so no one will be able to say “no, that’s wrong”.

Cádiz has been going through the doldrums in flamenco, no new stars have surfaced…
I’m delighted this centennial has come about because there are a lot of people from Cádiz who are traveling with companies, really doing a fine job, so maybe what was needed is what’s happening right now, the Cátedra is bringing young people together and giving them a place where they can study. In recent years there have only been four or five of us singing traditional Cádiz cante, but Cádiz mustn’t be forgotten, and although I experiment with other kinds of music, it’s the flamenco of Cádiz I like best.

What’s Cádiz flamenco like?
We’ve got everything, Cádiz is the place that has the widest variety of cantes, no matter what they say, I’ll defend it to the death because look, you’ve got the whole cantiñas family of cantes, which is already a mouthful, at least five or six completely different forms, then there are the ‘ida y vuelta’ forms, soleá, siguiriya, tangos, tientos... El Mellizo...when they brought the remains of Agustina de Aragón from África, they came on a boat from Ceuta to Cádiz, they rendered every sort of honor, they put her in the cathedral and afterwards they carried her to the train on their shoulders. When Mellizo saw all the ritual and honors he made an alegría for the occasion, the verse and melody. Cantiñas already existed, that’s very old, but the actual alegrías come from Mellizo, and of course tientos. He made his verses with a Cádiz form and feeling, there are many tientos from other places, but that was after Mellizo’s time.

Are there informal singing get-togethers in Cádiz?...fiestas?...do people sing spontaneously?
Oh yes, people gather at the clubs and associations, certain places, of course. And at home too. The Peña La Perla is a very important meeting place, when one person isn’t singing, someone else is, or the Juan Villar peña, or Mellizo’s...there are always little parties. We’ve got very few peñas, Cádiz is small, we used to have a lot of things, like Jerez, the taverns, now the flamenco bars are closed. Now they’re going to open the flamenco center, it’s going to be very important, an old market in the most flamenco neighborhood of Cádiz, La Mercé, and it’s nearly finished, we’re going to be able to exchange ideas and take advantage of many opportunities, but most of all, we’re going to do things to encourage young people, that’s the great concern, that the young singers aren’t following in the footsteps of those who are now famous, we mustn’t lose the roots of Cádiz. Now I see people starting to dance, sing and play guitar really well, and they’re taking an interest in the soleá of Cádiz for example.

There’s a political thing that’s very clear and I have to explian. They say “we’ll give the carnival to Cádiz, and the flamenco to Jerez”, but you can’t just live from the carnival, Cádiz is unique in flamenco. The carnival is very old, the song about the “duros antiguos” dates from the eighteen-hundreds, Mellizo’s time. The problem is carnival today is different from the way carnival used to be, there was lots of tanguillo and it was Cádiz folklore. In Cádiz we’re always looking out to the sea, it’s right on our doorstep, we don’t have any countryside, so we look at the open sea and we laugh at ourselves, jokes flow all day, the wit we’re famous for, the chirigota and the carnival really have a stronghold in this corner of the world, but flamenco mustn’t be lost here because this is the birthplace, no one can argue with that.

• Cádiz: Special report