Webster - Duende: a Journey In Search Of Flamenco

Contents

About the Book

When Jason Webster heads off for Spain in search of duende, the intense emotional state part ecstasy, part desperation so intrinsic to flamenco, he has no idea what to expect.

What he finds is a kaleidoscope of experience and excitement: From the tyranny of his guitar teacher, practising for hours on end until his fingers bleed to his passionate affair with Lola, a flamenco dancer (and older woman) married to the gun-toting Vicente, which causes him to flee Alicante in fear of his life. In Madrid, he falls in with Gypsies and meets the imperious Jess. Joining their dislocated, cocaine-fuelled world, stealing cars by night and sleeping away the days in tawdry rooms, he finds himself spiralling self-destructively downwards. It is only when he arrives in Granada bruised and battered, after two years total immersion in the flamenco lifestyle, that he is able to put his obsession into context.

About the Author

Jason Webster was born in San Francisco in 1970 and grew up in England and Germany. After living for several years in Italy and Egypt, he went to Spain where he learnt flamenco guitar. He currently lives in Oxfordshire and Valencia. This is his first book.

DUENDE

A Journey in Search of Flamenco

Jason Webster

For Rafa,
and the duende moments with him
that inspired me

To protect the identities of those
involved, some of the names of
people and places have been
changed.

Duende... A mysterious power that everyone feels but that no philosopher has explained.

Goethe

Dismal Spanish wailings punctuated by the rattle of the castanets and the clashing harmonies of the guitar.

Aldous Huxley

The truth marries no-one.

Spanish proverb

prologue

OFTEN WE END up doing what we almost want to do because we lack the courage to do what we really want to do. For years I lived in Italy because I wanted to be in Spain.

As a teenager, Spain had captivated me. Touristy photo books showed a technicolour land of cathedral-like blue skies, dark, open-faced women with bright red carnations in their hair, and the delicate columns and lines of the Alhambra and the Great Mosque in Crdoba. It seemed ancient, mysterious, exotic; a mythical country of semi-madness where men in tight trousers fought deadly beasts and people spoke in earthy, gutteral sentences that gave great philosophical importance to everyday tasks such as buying the milk. Outside my window, the Fens of East Anglia stretched an eternal grey in every direction; a flat, wet desert of inbred farmers and plump girls on bicycles, where the only possible excitement was trying to persuade Blind Bob, the barman at the Red Lion, to give me a drink despite the fact that I was underage. In the books, Spain and its people were always beautiful and warm and passionate. It felt like a lost home. One day I felt sure I would go and live there.

But things got in the way: a chance to live in Italy and the beginning of a self-destructive relationship; university to study Arabic; a year living in Egypt eating beans and running away from over-zealous papyrus salesmen. In my ignorance I thought I was being drawn to the Mediterranean in general. I was wrong. I never found the human warmth and openness I sought and expected to find the Italians were too busy worrying about how they looked, the Egyptians about the next meal. It was, and always had been, Spain.

Then a chance to remedy things came unexpectedly: after four dry, affectionless years, my Florentine girlfriend left me on the day of my last exam. Bound by the addictive ideas of first love, the plan had been for me to go and join her in Italy once my degree was over: after a relationship built on phone calls and holidays, we could finally be together. But after so much time spent dreaming of an end to our separation, the opportunity to make it real proved too much, and the self-destructive streak in her took control just as my time at university came to an end. No more girl, no more Italy, no more university, no more Middle East.

Suitably heartbroken, I realised that my chance to make a break for Spain had finally come. Loveless and eager for adventure, I was free to escape the mistakes Id made and explore the passionate world that had inspired me as a teenager; a world I felt I should have been experiencing all along. Spain, I felt, was calling me . But I was keen not just to float around. I wanted something to do there.

All that university stuffs self-indulgent crap! a drunken busker assured me in a pub one evening after offering to rearrange my nose.

I mean, what the fuck are you gonna do with your degree if youre ever up shit creek? You cant eat a degree. At least I can play Streets of London and earn a few quid that way.

He hit a nerve. After four years study, all I could offer were five different words for camel and the classical Arabic term for masturbation. I desperately wanted a skill, to be able to do something with my hands after years of sitting in libraries concocting meaningless arguments to impress my tutors with. But bricklaying and plastering had only limited appeal. I wanted something more creative.

The busker took pity on me and asked me to buy him a drink.

Tell you what, he said as I handed over a large brandy and soda, you should take up the guitar, learn a few chords, like me.

I had never been particularly musical, although the guitar had always appealed to me. But at the age of nine, inspired by a man in a pork-pie hat in a ska band on the television, I temporarily forgot my deep-felt ambition and took up the saxophone instead. It was a mistake from the start: the instrument was bigger than I was, then my teacher had a nervous breakdown and fled to a hippy commune in Scotland. Finally my saxophone was stolen by the school thief. I gave up music after that.

Playing an instrument, however, was precisely the kind of skill I wanted to learn now. I realised all the wrong choices I had made could be cancelled out at once. I was free to live in Spain and to pick up the instrument I had always intended to. All at once it became clear: I should learn flamenco guitar, the musical heart and essence of Spain. It was colourful, exciting and wild everything my life wasnt. The decision itself was deceptively simple. With almost no idea about flamenco, or where it might lead me, I decided to start straight away.

It was a frightening thing to do, though leaving everything, a structured life, the network of friends and comforts of an environment I knew well. University life was easy and sheltering. That was precisely why so many of those apparently wise and wrinkled old dons wandering around the quads seemed so childish once you got talking to them; bickering and flirting just like the post-adolescents they were teaching. At university you could live all the adventures you wanted in your head just by going to the library and reading about exotic places, while still enjoying cycling around town with a flowing scarf and snuggling by a fire with a pint in a warm pub in wintertime. I began to have doubts.

You should think about staying on to do some research, my tutor said when I saw him in the street. Whatever you do, dont just take off somewhere. Have you thought about a life in academia? I can just see you as a lecturer.

I bought a ticket and a guitar and caught a plane the next day.

A journey and a quest lasting several years lay ahead of me, an experience that would change me for good. There was far more to flamenco and to Spain than I could ever have imagined.

chapter ONE

Por Fandangos

Yo como t no encuentro ninguna,

mujer, con quien compararte;

slo he visto, por fortuna,

a una en un estandarte

y a los pies lleva la luna