Laura Ramírez I Huelva, (EFE).- The musician and anthropologist Raúl Rodríguez (Seville, 1974), son of the singer Martirio, has just finished with his latest album “La Razón Eléctrica” the trilogy on the sounds of the Afro-Andalusian Caribbean and defends creativity as the “mother of tradition” and that the ability “never lose sight of to continue inventing music, lyrics and motifs for a new world”.
In an interview with EFE before presenting “La Razón Eléctrica” in Trigueros (Huelva), Raúl Rodríguez analyzes this work in which he delves into the mechanisms of shared creativity in a map that connects flamenco with other forms of music.
‘La Razón Eléctrica’ comes after ‘Razón de Son’ (2014) and ‘La Raíz Eléctrica’ (2017), three works that “are halfway between anthropological research and musical experimentation” and that have allowed him to discover the multiple connections that flamenco has with these other types of music.
“As soon as one digs a little, one finds a common foundation both in rhythm, as in harmonies and in melodies; in letters and in type of stanzas; in the type of dance, in the ritual of the music and in the way of generating a rite around the music”, he explained.
creation model
Finding all this has allowed him to experience “a model of creative growth and learning to compose and develop new music that is related to that story, which is what interests me.”
A new music that still doesn’t have a name, something that he admits is what he likes the most: “I think that music is ahead of the names they have. These arise as a result of other interests, from when one already sells the music or puts it on the market, but in the creative moment things have no name and that is the most beautiful thing, that is, that feeling that it belongs to many memories. lost but not yet catalogued”.
But beyond that aspect, it is a music that “drinks” from all the sources it has studied and always starts from a flamenco rhythmic cell to which it adds elements that enrich the idea it wants to convey on a poetic level, “focusing on in making music that has the capacity to contemplate that framework of the Afro-Andalusian Caribbean as the true generator of our culture”.
And this because he understands that “we must not think so much that music belongs to the countries in which we find ourselves right now as to a historical framework of 500 years, at least, of a common environment, of a common cultural system in which that we have shared many things and that can give us reason to build music that can be understood on all those shores”.
To achieve that common bond and materialize that connection of sounds and rhythms, it has the peculiar sound of the ‘tres flamenco’, an eclectic instrument of its own creation that is a hybrid between the flamenco guitar and the Cuban tres.
Kiko Veneno, Martirio, Chavela Vargas…
The public, so far, has had a “very good and surprising” response to this new creative conception of Rodríguez: “People like my music and thank me for the attempt and effort.”
An effort in which he will not stop because he considers that with ‘La Razón Eléctrica’ his work does not end, on the contrary, after 30 years as a professional, he begins. “I feel like who is starting. As if I had just finished unconscious field work thanks to having also worked with artists such as Kiko Veneno, Martirio, Chavela Vargas and Santiago Auserón, which has given me the basis to begin to understand how this creative mechanism of imagination works, how ideas They go looking for each other as if they were small living organisms that seek their reproduction”.
And all this to “contribute things that make it possible for the tradition to continue advancing without having to break it”, a job that he considers necessary because it renews the songbook, the ideas and the way of thinking.
Things that materialize in songs with which he wants us to “think differently so that we also react and behave in a different way, contemplating that the world is something much broader than our specific national or temporal environment”. EFE