Pontificating by the outsider at this point: as someone who has dabbled in guitar, and who has lived with rock'n'roll musicians, I can tell you this - playing flamenco guitar is a bitch. It uses 4 fingers on the right hand, enacting strumming, rolling, picking, and percussion, and most of the time, it requires that someone knows how to read music. Not just guitar charts, but straight-up music, which in and of itself is a challenge. There is more than one "middle c" on the guitar, whereas on the piano, there's one "middle c", for example. A teacher invariably becomes necessary - or a close tutorship with someone, somewhere along the line.
I believe the above is why most rock'n'roll musicians just scratch their head and go "Oh," upon hearing flamenco guitar. They 'hear' the virtuosity involved, but if it is not the way one was taught (and most often, self-taught), it is a transition few can make with any competence. Even if a rock'n'roller can switch to picking, it is usually with 3 fingers, not 4 - flamenco requires the full complement.
All that being said, I often find flamenco dry - excellent, but dry. In order to get my attention, it has to incorporate the old gypsy passion.
Thanks for these clips - only watched a few so far, but they have that strong flavour I like for flamenco.
I see flamenco guitar style as basically classical. Which is curious as classical guitar is a quite recent development, as is the guitar itself. I don't see any reason that flamenco guitar style had to develop that way - the classical style is not in itself essential to flamenco. But it has become synonymous now.
My theory is that western rock-style guitarists are just as fascinated by flamenco as by western classical guitar styles, in that they require such dedicated attention to technique. But I don't feel they have ever aspired to play that way.
The reason is, my theory goes, because of the electric guitar. The electric guitar completely changed the instrument. Acoustic guitar is predominantly a percussive instrument - high attack and short sustain. So it is natural for acoustic guitarists to hit a lot of notes to keep the momentum rolling.
The electric guitar softened the attack and dramatically increased the sustain (as did the steel string acoustic guitar). Electrification and compression transformed the guitar into something akin to wind or bowed instruments, especially the saxophone and violin.
This meant that the musician focused on the sustain of the note, and it also shifted the style closer to 'single-line' melodic structures like with voice. Instead of jumping back and forth and across strings in complex mosaic patterns, the line of playing kept to simple shifts within closely contained 'boxes' of notes - mostly only within a three or four tone range.
One reason for this was to focus on emotion through a simplified structure, in imitation of blues singing. But I hold there was another reason.
Electric guitar style arrived at the same time as the drug culture. Under the influence of drugs, the complexity of classical style guitar is far too chaotic - there is a reduced ability to grasp many things, but an enhanced ability to grasp simple things - especially simple and poignant.
The stoned listener actually travels on a 'flight path' of sound, much like a large bird's flight path. Complexity is a distraction. Hendrix's style was the epitome of this technique. They say his music was blues in basis, but I don't accept that - he came out of the blues but his playing held much closer to the poetical lyricism of the North Indian classical raag. They also follow a single-string approach, with multiple small melodic phrasings and micro-tones from note bending.
So although Western rock guitarists look jaw-droopingly at the complexity and gusto of flamenco, they have never wanted to do that themselves - they watch it much like watching a fast sport.
The stoned listener experiences something very close to an eagle's flight. They don't want it intricate, as that brings them out of the trance. They want strong and beautifully long flowing movements against a landscape backdrop, where the emotion is driven by both the timbre and colour of the electric guitar's distortion effect, and the way it relates to that background landscape (provided by the rhythm section and keyboards of the band).
If you ever see those film clips taken from a plane as it flies over huge mountains and vast drop-away vistas: that is the feeling the drug-induced modern musical traveller highly prises. This is also why jazz has never taken off as much among this audience, because it is too complex and nearly impossible to play stoned. Unless you are talking of Charley Parker's style - but even there his melodic structures are too gratuitous, and insufficiently simple and soaring.
This brings up another fascinating subject - the political sub-text of music. The style I have just been describing is highly individualistic - the classical male hero who stands against the world. I became quite bothered by this, as I realised, stoned or not, I preferred to listen 'flight-path' music. 'Community' music doesn't have a lead instrument - it is a carpet pattern of sound, where every instrument is of equal significance.
I moved to playing this style but felt bereft of the strong flight-path lead to which I could aurally glide on in a sound-imagination world.
In my latest CD, Trance, I tried to combine both. Except for the first piece, which is more flight-path traditional, albeit greatly pulled back to an egalitarian acknowledgement (ie the lead guitar leaves a lot of space for the other instruments to feature). But most of the other pieces offer a choice of shifting leadership figures within a complex background. I tried to retain the simplicity of some leading instruments, while applying the complexity to the landscape.
I accept that few listeners will ever go for this, but it represents the evolution of my own ear and inner world. So at least it serves my journey.
