CÁDIZ: Special report

After going through a certain period of distancing from the roots, traditional flamenco in Cádiz is timidly beginning to come back to life and there’s renewed interest on the part of young people that is frankly encouraging. If the Madrid regional community has just inaugurated “Suma Flamenca”, its first flamenco festival, and Málaga founded its ambitious “Málaga en Flamenco”, now Cádiz has jumped on the bandwagon just in time to honor the memory of its most important flamenco figures, an authentic pillar of this art, Enrique el Mellizo, and there are plans for a Flamenco Convention or Congress in Cádiz next year.

El Mellizo died one century ago, on May 30th 1906, the same year they tore down the city’s massive ramparts. This man whose personality profile is always drawn as melancholic and distant, who would spend hours looking out to sea or listening to the choir at the cathedral, must have thought it was the end of an era, and perhaps it was exactly that.

We’ve taken advantage of the centennial to compile a series of articles related to Mellizo and flamenco in Cádiz, this little corner of the world that once was the epicenter of flamenco and went on to see glorious years with Aurelio Sellés, Pericón de Cádiz, Manolo Vargas, La Perla de Cádiz and others, only to fall into a sort of artistic hibernation from which it is now beginning to emerge thanks to the efforts of many flamenco artists and local followers of the art.

Coordinated and edited by Estela Zatania

• Interview with Carmen de la Jara
  
• An afternoon of cante with Santiago Donday by Pierre Lefranc
  
• Mi Cái: A summary of the current scene in Cádiz
  
• Review of the tribute to el Mellizo at the Gran Teatro Falla
  
• Enrique Jiménez “El Mellizo”. Vida y obra de un compositor jondo (Spanish only)