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| The flamenco year 2007 cds, books, Dvds… Books for resisting the crisis Juan Vergillos We climb down the stairs to the basement. It was so dark I had to clutch the arm of my adolescent grandson to keep from making a false step. We turned on the light and made our way to some half-broken dusty cardboard boxes. I opened one of them. It smelled of dampness and the smell of rotting cardboard was a powerful memory. “Look son, this is what I wanted to show you: when I was a boy recorded music was distributed on these round plastic disks called records”. My grandson was amazed and unbelieving. Then I woke up. That’s the dream I had about the future of records. An apocalyptic dream, backed up the by lack of ingenuity, greed and victim complex of large record companies. They say rich people also cry, but this is too much. The recording industry works, like all free markets, according to the law of supply and demand. And if people don’t buy records, it’s simply because there aren’t high-quality products. Look at the re-releases: the big companies keep drawing from their archives in order to avoid paying royalties, and they present old recordings as is, without the least bit of documentation, all that information they have at hand in their warehouses. How is it possible you buy a record of Manolo Caracol, and on the CD it says it was made in 1987, when our singer had been pushing up daisies for three decades? And so it goes…why buy a musical format that’s not to be trusted, and is obviously much more expensive than a pirated recording? Is the idea to make prices go down for everyone except the actual consumer? That’s impossible, as the market is demonstrating. The only solution is to offer high-quality products, well-produced and documented, which is not the case these days. And, logically, they should record people who have something to say, not the umpteenth carbon copy of the worst of Camarón. Record companies are to blame for the crisis, but we all pay the consequences. Anyhow… who said there’s any kind of crisis? Thanks to this situation, many artists are making their own recordings, and even distributing them, their own work, and that was the way some of the year’s best records came to us. Thanks to throwing off the yoke of the recording companies, “Casa-cueva y Escenario”, badly produced and worse in the execution, despite some hilarious moments of high emotion on the part of Estrella herself, as well as Isabel la Golondrina (someone please record this woman fast, she’s a boom waiting to happen). In the absence of decent documentation by historic record companies, flamenco fans have looked to the experts. Books. The flamenco book publishing market is surprisingly active, thanks mostly to the work of companies like Almuzara which this year has offered, among other titles: “Flamencos de Gañanía, una mirada al flamenco en los cortijos históricos del Bajo Guadalquivir”. A new publisher, Norte-Sur, announced a new collection devoted to the classics of flamencology. We readers are fortunate indeed.
The flamenco year 2007. Una geografía flamenca para 2007
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