50 Fun Facts About Flamenco

Flamenco developed within the gitano subculture of which Spanish region?

Andalusia: there Romani newcomers, Moors and Sephardic Jews lived side by side for centuries, and flamenco grew out of the slow fusion of their music.

UNESCO's 2010 heritage listing says flamenco is handed down through what?

Families and local clubs: the listing credits dynasties, families and flamenco clubs with keeping the art alive, for it began as a private, family affair long before anyone paid to hear it on a stage.

Which flamenco song of devotion, its name the Spanish for 'arrow', is sung to the floats of Holy Week processions?

Saeta: a lone voice, often from a balcony, sings it without accompaniment straight at the statue of Christ or the Virgin being carried through the street below.

In Spanish, the word 'flamenco' also means a native of which region of northern Europe?

Flanders: nobody is sure how the word for a Fleming came to be attached to the music, though one old guess is that the gitanos were taken for northerners, Germans and Flemings being lumped together.

What are the shouts of encouragement that spur on a flamenco performer called?

Jaleo: the verb behind it, jalear, is also the Spanish for urging on hounds in a hunt, and fellow performers and audience alike do the same for a singer or dancer.

What is the most serious, deepest class of flamenco song called?

Cante jondo, 'deep song', deals in death, anguish and despair; its family includes the martinete, born in the blacksmith's forge and sung to nothing but a hammer on an anvil.

What is the Spanish word for the rhythmic cycle or metre that is fundamental to flamenco?

Compás comes first in flamenco: melody and harmony matter less than the beat, and a guitarist's first duty is to hold it steady for the singer and the dancer.

How many beats make up the rhythmic cycle that underlies flamenco's most serious song forms?

12: in one common pattern the accents fall unevenly, on beats 3, 6, 8, 10 and 12, so the ear hears two slow threes followed by three quick twos.

Which fast, festive flamenco form usually brings a gathering to a close?

Bulerías began life as a quick, upbeat tailpiece tacked on to slower songs, and proved so popular that the ending became the main event.

Alegrías lyrics often mention the Ebro and the Virgen del Pilar, hinting at roots in the jota of which Spanish region?

Aragon: the usual account is that the jota took root in Cádiz during the Peninsular War, when the besieged port housed Spain's parliament, and local singers remade it in flamenco rhythm.

The guajira palo grew out of cultural exchange between Spain and which country?

Cuba: guajiras are 'round-trip' songs, born when Spanish music crossed the Atlantic, mixed with the tunes of Cuban country farmers, the guajiros, and sailed home again.

Which serious flamenco form, said to have given rise to the lighter alegrías, is sometimes called the mother of all the others?

Soleares earn the title for the lighter forms said to descend from them, though the name flatters: older song types came before them, and the fandangos were taken over from Spanish folk music.

What is a flamenco dancer's percussive footwork called?

Zapateado, from zapato, 'shoe': it is the dancer's showpiece, a drum solo played with the feet, and by tradition the man's speciality, while women danced more from the arms and upper body.

Which musical mode, sometimes simply called the flamenco mode, gives the music its distinctive sound?

Phrygian: its second note sits only a semitone above the home note, and falling back through that narrow step is what makes a flamenco guitar run sound so recognisably Spanish.

In flamenco, what are a guitarist's short melodic passages between the sung verses called?

Falsetas are flamenco's answer to the licks of jazz and blues: guitarists learn them, invent their own and string them together to build a whole solo.

What is a flamenco singer called?

Cantaor: dancers draw the crowds today, but flamenco began as the singer's art alone, a voice over a beaten rhythm, with the guitar and the dance added later.

Which flamenco venue takes its name from the Spanish for a boarded stage floor?

Tablao: these supper-club stages replaced the old cafés cantantes in the 1960s, when Spain's tourist boom made a nightly flamenco show good business.

Singer Silverio Franconetti, back from years as a picador in Uruguay, opened the most famous café cantante in which city?

Seville: cafés like his Café Silverio gave flamenco performers a living for the first time, though many felt the commercial stage watered down the older, graver songs.

What is the mysterious, ineffable charm or spirit that great flamenco performances are said to have?

Duende: in everyday Spanish the word means a goblin or household spirit, which is why performers speak of being seized by it rather than of having it.

Which poet and which composer organised the 1922 deep-song contest in Granada?

Federico García Lorca and Manuel de Falla feared that commercial stage flamenco was killing the old songs, so they held the contest in the gardens of the Alhambra and kept the prize money for amateurs.

Diego 'El Tenazas' Bermúdez, the elderly surprise winner of Granada's 1922 flamenco contest, is said to have reached the city how?

On foot: the long-retired singer is reported to have walked for three days from Puente Genil, some hundred kilometres away, and went home with a first prize.

By the usual account, why did Spanish promoters of the 1920s start billing flamenco shows as 'flamenco opera'?

Opera was taxed less, at 3 per cent against 10 for variety shows, so the story goes that promoters simply renamed their bills; others think the grand title was meant to make flamenco respectable.

Where was the first academic chair of flamencology founded in 1958?

Jerez de la Frontera: despite the title, the Cátedra was a circle of local scholars rather than a university post, formed three years after an Argentine writer coined the word 'flamencology'.

The fringed silk shawl swirled by flamenco dancers is named after which Asian port?

Manila: the shawls reached Spain on the galleons that sailed from the Philippines, but the silk was Chinese, which is why they bloom with Chinese-style flowers and birds.

Despite their Spanish lyrics, the Gipsy Kings, who took rumba flamenca worldwide with 'Bamboléo', come from which country?

France: the band formed in Arles and Montpellier, among the children of Spanish gitano families who had fled across the border during the Civil War.

"Entre dos aguas", Paco de Lucía's best-known piece, is usually taken to refer to what?

Algeciras, where two seas meet: his home port has the Mediterranean on one side and the Atlantic on the other. The phrase also means being in two minds, and the tune was improvised to fill out an album.

Which two guitarists joined Paco de Lucía on the album Friday Night in San Francisco?

John McLaughlin and Al Di Meola: all but one track was taped in a single night at the Warfield Theatre, and the record went on to sell more than a million copies.

Paco de Lucía, who never read music fluently, shut himself away to learn which classical work for a 1991 recording?

Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez: he learned the solo part in seclusion with a classical guitarist as coach, and the composer himself said Paco played it with far more feeling than was normally heard.

The cajón, now standard in flamenco, was originally an instrument from which country?

Peru: Paco de Lucía heard one at a diplomat's party in Lima in 1977 and took it home to Spain, where the plain wooden box soon became a fixture of flamenco groups.

Flamenco 'villancicos', sung by whole families to the growl of the zambomba drum, belong to which time of year?

Christmas: villancicos are flamenco carols, and the parties where they are sung are themselves called zambombas, after the friction drum, often just a flowerpot with a skin and a stick, that keeps the beat.

Paco de Lucía died in 2014 after falling ill on a beach in which country?

Mexico: he had earlier made his home on its Caribbean coast for five years and still kept a house at Playa del Carmen, the resort where he was rushed to hospital.

Why was singer José Monje Cruz nicknamed Camarón ("shrimp")?

He was blond and fair-skinned, so an uncle called him 'shrimp' and the name stuck; the blacksmith's son was singing at inns and bus stops for coins by the age of eight.

Which guitarist accompanied Camarón de la Isla for the last 18 years of the singer's life?

Tomatito, 'little tomato', inherited the name from a father and grandfather who both played guitar as Tomate; Paco de Lucía spotted him, and he was still in his teens when Camarón took him on.

On his 1989 album Soy Gitano, Camarón de la Isla sang with which kind of ensemble?

A symphony orchestra: London's Royal Philharmonic played on the record, one of the experiments, like his use of electric bass, for which the singer was at first sharply criticised.

Which award, given only five times, is the most important prize in flamenco singing?

Its winners are Tomás el Nitri, Manuel Vallejo, Antonio Mairena, Camarón de la Isla and Fosforito.

Flamenco dancer Carmen Amaya was born in Somorrostro, a district of beach shacks in which Mediterranean port?

Barcelona: she was dancing in taverns and bars at the age of four, and in 1959 came back a star to see a fountain named after her unveiled on the seafront beside her old neighbourhood.

What garment did Carmen Amaya sometimes dance in as a symbol of her strong character?

Guitarist Sabicas left Spain with her during the Civil War and later settled in New York.

Which flamenco dancer was founding director of the Ballet Nacional de España in 1978 and filmed Carmen and Blood Wedding with Saura?

Antonio Gades, a lifelong communist, received Cuba's Order of José Martí from Fidel Castro six weeks before he died, and his ashes were laid to rest on the island.

Which Córdoba-born dancer's 1995 show Pasión Gitana (Gypsy Passion) made him a global star?

Joaquín Cortés had joined Spain's national ballet at 14 and was dancing solo roles at 16; for Pasión Gitana his friend Giorgio Armani designed the costumes, and the show toured more than forty countries.

Dancer Sara Baras and singer Camarón de la Isla were both born in which Cádiz-province town?

San Fernando stands on an island in the Bay of Cádiz and is known locally simply as La Isla, which is where Camarón 'de la Isla' found the second half of his stage name.

Which Granada singer's 1996 album Omega fused flamenco with Lagartija Nick and Leonard Cohen songs?

Enrique Morente began as a choirboy in Granada cathedral; four decades later he was singing Leonard Cohen's songs over the roar of a rock band from the same city.

Rosalía's 2018 album El mal querer, which recast flamenco with pop and hip-hop, was also what?

Her baccalaureate degree project at the Catalonia College of Music: each song is a chapter drawn from Flamenca, a 13th-century Occitan romance about a jealous husband.

Pastora Pavón, often called the greatest woman singer in flamenco history, was known by what nickname?

La Niña de los Peines, 'the girl of the combs': the name came from a tango she sang as a girl, inviting the listener to comb their hair with her combs, and it stuck for life.

Castanets take their Spanish name, castañuelas, from their resemblance to what?

Chestnuts: a pair looks like the two halves of the nut's shell. A dancer wears one pair on each hand, the lower-pitched marking the beat while the higher rattles out the trills.

Which US city is home to the National Institute of Flamenco and a flamenco festival billed as the most celebrated outside Spain?

Albuquerque, New Mexico: its Festival Flamenco has drawn the art's leading names from Spain since the 1980s, and the city's university teaches flamenco up to graduate level.

Which worldwide 1990s dance craze began as a song by Los del Río, a Spanish duo singing flamenco-flavoured pop since the 1960s?

Macarena: the duo wrote it after watching a flamenco dancer perform at a private party in Venezuela, and a Miami remix later kept it at number one in the US for 14 weeks.

What is embedded in the toes and heels of flamenco dance shoes to sharpen the sound of the footwork?

Small nails, hammered into the toe and heel so that every strike rings out; flamenco guitars are built to be loud partly because they have to be heard over those nailed shoes.

Which Spanish king's 1783 decree made the gitanos full subjects while banning their customs and even the word 'gitano'?

Carlos III chose assimilation a generation after the Great Round-up of 1749, when thousands of gitanos were jailed in an attempt to end them as a people.

Which singer from Chipiona, nicknamed 'La más grande', alternated the flamenco bata de cola with daring evening gowns?

Rocío Jurado sold more than 16 million records moving between flamenco, copla and big ballads, and the gowns were part of a deliberately European image, down to the hair and make-up.

By tradition, how is the beat kept at a flamenco gathering when nobody has a guitar?

Palmas or knuckles on a table: hand-clapping is an instrument in its own right, with sharp claps to drive loud footwork and soft, cupped ones, the sordas, so as not to drown a singer.