My Personal Story

by Steve Kahn

At sixteen I was a high school junior in an affluent community in California, independently studying classical guitar and a bit of flamenco on the side. It was 1959, and except for the threat of nuclear holocaust, the world was relatively peaceful; and at least in America, life was good. Five years later in Portland, Oregon, as a Physics major in college, I heard quite by accident the raw, compás-driven Flamenco of Diego del Gastor: an obscure, middle-aged gypsy guitarist living in the small Andalucian pueblo of Morón de la Frontera.

A classmate of mine, Chet Creider, had just returned from a year studying flamenco guitar in Spain and was performing at an informal student get-together. By then I was already familiar with the music of Sabicas, Melchor de Marchena, Perico el del Lunar, Morao and others whose commercial recordings I owned. But the music that Chet played that night was something entirely different. It didn't just speak to me; it took hold of my soul and screamed at me, and this I could not ignore.

Why it affected me in so strongly, I don't know. It was formally elegant and emotionally profound. It felt deeply rooted in the human condition and spoke volumes in a single note; intensely personal yet unpretentiously universal. It was the Blues and Jazz wrapped in an Indian Raga. I had no musical tradition of my own and embraced this as if it was mine. I was hooked.

Although certainly not the first American to discover Flamenco, Chet was one of the first in a new wave of musicians to explore Flamenco in depth by actually living among and studying with the gypsy artists in Andalucia. I credit D.E. Pohren, an American from Minneapolis, for bringing awareness of pueblo Flamenco to the rest of the world at the time. As a young guitarist, he lived among the gypsies and played professionally. As an entrepreneur, he opened a flamenco club in Madrid in the early 1960s, hiring great musicians directly from the pueblos. As a writer, he published several serious books on Flamenco that have become standard reference guides for foreigners the world over. In 1965 he purchased an old hacienda outside of Morón, and transformed it into the "Finca Espartero", a guest ranch for foreign enthusiasts who wanted a taste of non-commercial Flamenco with the flavor of the Andalucian countryside. It was through his books that I learned respect for what he called Flamenco Puro.  Don Pohren died on November 5, 2007.

I continued graduate studies in New York City and met David Serva, perhaps the most accomplished and well-known American Flamenco guitarist working today. Although David had spent time with Diego in Morón and understood his style intimately, he played an eclectic style all his own. I studied with David for a while before taking a three-month leave of absence from my doctoral program in Physics to find Diego del Gastor, and absorb what I could of his charismatic persona and musical genius.

Three months in Spain became two years. The more I learned, the more I wanted to learn. I just couldn't leave. Even with the lure of cultural and political change at home, there was nothing that even remotely compared to the intense high I was experiencing. Although I had no aspirations of becoming a professional guitarist, the time spent in Morón would prove to be as inspiring forty years later as it was the day I arrived.

In May of 1967, four days after the first hippie "Be-in" in New York's Central Park (a seminal event which ushered in the Love Generation), I stepped off the bus onto a deserted cobblestone street in the heart of Morón de la Frontera, a quiet, blindingly white village, 75 kilometers east of Sevilla. There was an American air base somewhere nearby. Other than that, the life and culture was in a world unto itself, not much changed from any agrarian society in the 19th Century. Tap water stopped flowing around noon. Heat in the winter was provided by trays of carbon coals tucked under the table. Refrigeration and hot water were luxuries for the affluent.

There was no crime. Yet many of freedoms we took for granted in America were still denied to the Gypsies and others who fought for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War. It was definitely Franco's Spain. In this environment, Flamenco managed to flourish, as the poetic expression of Gypsy life. It was art. Rooted in the past, structured by tradition, it drew upon the collective energy of those who performed it as well as the intimate audience that would listen.

When I stepped off the bus that afternoon in Morón, as if by plan, Diego del Gastor was walking down the same street, unaware that another American had traveled 3,000 miles to make his acquaintance. I didn't know what Diego looked like, nor how I was to find him.  I asked a couple of young Gypsies about him and they just looked up and pointed to a man coming toward me -- a thin, noble presence in a thread-bare black suit, white shirt buttoned at the neck, thin blond hair loosely brushed to one side, with bright energetic eyes and a knowing, welcoming smile. At his sides were a little girl and boy, walking along with him, his fingers gently resting on their heads. There was a Zen-like magic to that moment which I've never forgotten.

Paco del Gastor, one of Diego's young guitar-playing nephews, had just returned from military service and Diego arranged a fiesta for that night, in the spartan street-level apartment across from Casa Pepe that he had helped me rent. Casa Pepe was the local flamenco-friendly bar where I would spend many days and nights, when not sequestered in my room practicing. The fiesta was an awesome event with about 15 people, several guitarists and singers and me, whose presence everyone seemed to either accept or ignore.  It was an incredible first night and set the stage for my unforgettable life in Morón.

The spirit of that evening was repeated many times with other artists including Manolito de la Maria, Francisco Mairena, Luis Torres, Juan Talegas and others. This was before Flamenco artists became celebrities, and the price of private performance prohibitive for students on budgets.  Diego usually negotiated the fees, and it was frowned upon to discuss money matters openly; yet I never felt the fiesta was just about money.

Diego's son-in-law Fernando was a great festero and would come by often to sing and talk Flamenco and share copitas. I also met the local artists: singer Luis "Joselero" Torres, festeros Fernandillo, Anzonini and Andorrano, and Diego's guitarist nephews, Paco and Juan del Gastor, Diego Torres Amaya and Agustin Rios. Occasionally I would pay Joselero to sing for me so that I could practice accompanying cante. I remember being invited to several weddings, countless fiestas and even a funeral, and never felt awkward. 

I was not the only foreigner in Morón at that time interested in Flamenco. Chris Carnes and his wife Maria Silver had been there for at least a year, and were very serious students of guitar and cante, both being accomplished musicians in their own right. Over the next year I met a handful of other young aficionados, including Robert Haynes, and Jill Snow, who subsequently married the Lebrija guitarist Pedro Bacán. 

Among the foreigners there were two distinct camps. Pohren's Finca Espartero was a few miles outside of town, and I rarely saw any of his guests in Casa Pepe. They kept to themselves, hired artists for their own fiestas and didn't socialize with the hardcore group in town.

Although formal guitar lessons were rare, getting together to make music was not. Sometimes Diego would just show up at my place to talk and play my guitar. He enjoyed the company of foreigners and was nourished by our attention. We in turn, brought him translations of Kafka and Eric Fromm, which he eagerly consumed, and hosted fiestas whenever life got a little dull. During the winter months we spent a lot of time together, sharing our common interests and celebrating holidays.

Sometimes we would pool our finances to hire cantaores from neighboring towns and bring them to Morón for fiestas that would last for days. One of the most memorable for me was the wedding party following my marriage to Virginia Gilmore, my college love, who took time off from her studies in Paris to visit me in Spain. She, too, stayed.

It was a small fiesta, including friends of ours and Diego's, and the great cantaores, La Fernanda and El Perrate, both of Utrera. It started in a bare dirt floor farmhouse on the edge of town among the olive groves, with food and drink from Casa Pepe, and segued to a Morón café around seven in the morning. The aire was so warm and celebratory that it felt like family. I recorded the music, which was absolutely extraordinary. The whole experience seemed to happen outside of time and beyond the cultural, ethnic, political and class distinctions that might otherwise have kept us at a distance.

Back in the States I dropped out of academia to become a commercial photographer. Forty years later, I'm still shooting pictures and playing the guitar. In 2002 I was invited to be one of three photographers in an exhibition illustrating a conference on Flamenco at the Angel Ganivet Institute in Granada. The curator had seen my photos of the Flamencos on the Internet. The event, "Sinmysterios de Flamenco", attracted much public attention and brought me back to Andalucia. Inspired by the success of the show, I began wondering about the many candid photographs of the gypsy artists I had seen while in Spain years ago; photos tacked to walls or yellowed and gathering dust in broken glass frames. Some of these documents we made while living there, evidence of a remarkable period of cultural exchange.

This curiosity was the beginning of the Flamenco Photography Project, a four-year effort on my part to locate, restore, digitize, archive and publish photographs, audio recordings and films made by foreigners who came to Andalucia in pursuit of Flamenco between 1960 and 1985. It's been quite a journey.

The fiestas were the high points of the musical experience. A few of us had tape recorders and made audio recordings. In most cases discretely taping the music was accepted by the artists, and often encouraged by them. We also took photographs; mostly amateur snaps, like one would take on vacation of family and friends.  But many of these images were extraordinary in content as well as in their own artfulness. Technically, the quality of these documents varied widely, and not all have survived.

Looking back on those years I realize that we had privileged and unprecedented access to the inner circles of Flamenco life. We were not a political or social threat to the Gypsies, and were passionately supportive of the music. An anomaly in the fabric of daily life, we were a compliment to the artists' world, creating an unusual place for ourselves in the social sphere. 

Aside from the monumental government film project, "Rito y Geográfico de Flamenco" in the 1970s, and the occasional radio recording of festivals, foreigners were making the only informal documents of flamenco art at the time. The Flamenco Photography Project has archived over one hundred images by twelve photographers, six original fiesta recordings, and two films.

Although the phenomenon of the "foreign invasion" of the 1960s and 70s ended with political and economic changes in Spain, non-Spaniards still venture to the Meccas of Flamenco, continuing to enjoy the music and photograph emerging artists. Yet the Flamenco lifestyle and Spanish culture in general has changed so dramatically over the years that the kind of experience we had during those two decades just isn't possible now. Moreover, the flow of cultural and musical influence has reversed course; Flamenco has embraced Jazz and even Hip-hop as major influences, and we now have "Flamenco Nuevo", born again as a wholly commercial, non-gypsy "world music" genre.

I'm grateful to have been included in that unique period of the history of Flamenco, and to be able to pass on the memories and documents to those who have only heard a few stories and tidbits of the music of that era; time for a retrospective that honors these brilliant artists. I've committed more than four years of my life to preserving and sharing these treasures with the world.


Steve Kahn
New York City, January 2008