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“For thousands of record and concert fans he is Mr. Flamenco Guitar”

By some measures, he is an exceptionally important figure in the history of the flamenco guitar. By other lights, he can be dismissed as a mere footnote. He was a small man I recall as having long fingers and nails that partly determined his sound – strong yet somehow insecure and occasionally sloppy.

Nevertheless he cannot be ignored since he was, for many decades, the most successful flamenco guitarist in the world – if success can be measured by worldwide audience size and the acclaim of non-expert critics, guidelines that are alive and well in our modern world. He was also the first player to make a career of solo playing.

These accomplishments took place outside of Spain because during most of the twentieth century the very idea of solo flamenco guitar seemed absurd in Spain. The instrument was viewed strictly in terms of accompaniment, and while an occasional solo number might be tolerated between the serious acts, the concept of a solo concert or recording was seen as unviable at best, ridiculous at worst. It was a bit like a singerless blues guitar concert or record might have seemed in the United States – a pointless exercise that simply underlined the absence of the essential performer. Spain's flamenco community “knew” that the guitar could never stand alone.

arlos Montoya knew better. He had faith in himself, and faith in the flamenco guitar. He led a historic fight to have this great instrument shine on its own, and he succeeded. Millions of people in America and the Western Hemisphere, and many in Europe, were introduced to the idea of flamenco guitar by Carlos Montoya, and in retrospect this was probably his most significant triumph. He came, saw and conquered – an accomplishment that would have been unique had it not so closely echoed the parallel achievements of Andrés Segovia in the classical sphere.

But....

But the story has another side. It relates to the fact that, in essence, the flamenco guitar music played by Carlos Montoya wasn't top caliber.

He was the first player to make a career of solo playing.

There are various possible explanations for this. Perhaps the most poignant lies in the fact, stated on the jackets of more than one of his recordings, that as a youngster in Madrid, he was rejected as a student by the great genius who virtually invented the flamenco guitar as a serious instrument. And that this man was none other than his uncle, the immortal Ramón Montoya. Liner notes say: "Carlos had to face the fact that his uncle had little or no interest in him, and wished to teach another member of his family on the grounds that young Carlos did not, in uncle Ramón's eyes, have the ability to succeed to his mantle."

What was it in Carlos that led Ramon to prefer another student, as the record jacket says (and for that matter, who was the preferred student who presumably came to naught?).

I don't know, of course. But Carlos Montoya subsequently said he wanted it known he "owed nothing" to his famous uncle – and when you listen to his playing, the truth of that statement becomes sadly evident. By rejecting the many indispensable innovations of his uncle, Carlos was simply left with insufficient resources to create great solo flamenco guitar.

But he tried. A Gypsy “por los cuatro costados”, through and through, he was playing guitar at age eight, learning his first licks from his mother "La Tula" and then from the little-known "Pepe el Barbero" in Madrid, who said after a year that he had no more to show the young Carlos. At fourteen, he was playing in the fabled "cafés cantantes", with outstanding singers and dancers.

Carlos had to face the fact that his uncle, Ramón Montoya, had little or no interest in him

Invited to join touring troupes, he had ideas beyond accompanying in the shadows. At the age of 42, he gave his first solo guitar recital, and never really looked back. Relocating to New York, he went on to give hundreds of concerts worldwide and make more solo records than any other flamenco guitarist. The above-cited liner notes conclude, with what seems to be vengeful glee, "Montoya's uncle lived to see his nephew succeed to his mantle and raise it to a peak which had not been dreamed of in his own prime. Carlos Montoya today is King of the Flamenco Guitar, without peer or rival in the world, a statement impossible to make of any other living instrumentalist".

Not so fast, fellas. Let's look at the record.

A typical recording among the dozens of LP's (I know of 48 separate and distinct records, not counting the many reissues) from his mid-century apogee reveals a core of serious flamenco knowledge surrounded or even submerged by a series of mannerisms and effects. While the basic sound is interesting – often strong and steely - there's a choppiness and disconnectedness that goes beyond funky gypsy to become distracting. And there's also a lack of melodic brilliance that prevents his falsetas from attaining the memorable magic of flamenco's great creators. Pohren writes: “His playing often contains an undeniable gypsy drive and ‘duende’, only to be too quickly destroyed by some absurdity, some flashy misplaced ‘picado’, or sixty seconds of continuous ‘ligado’”.

This reliance on "efectismo" (a useful Spanish term for going for flashy effects at the expense of serious content, often applied to the flashy 60's bullfighter El Cordobés) was on display at a long-ago Montoya concert where I was sitting behind Sabicas and his brother, Diego Castellón. Montoya began his arrangement of the "Saeta and Siguiriya" by crossing two guitar bass strings which when plucked imitated the sound of a snare drum and evoked the sound of Holy Week in Spain.

Well, the audience went bananas. Sabicas and his brother took due note, poking each other and laughing – and sure enough, Sabicas used this same gimmick at his next concert, also bringing down the house. ("Amazing, Maestro," I said fecklessly afterwards. "You made your five thousand dollar Santos Hernández guitar sound exactly like a two-dollar drum.")

For better or worse, Montoya should be acknowledged for pioneering the mixing of flamenco guitar with other music, notably jazz

 

e had a truly astounding left-hand legato. But he tended to overuse it, so that his rondeña (employing his uncle's haunting tuning, but boycotting Ramón's ravishing and definitive falsetas) soon wears out its welcome and becomes an endless liquid gliss. He also tended to lower the string tension of his guitar by a half-tone or more to facilitate the legato, which tended to muddy the overall sound. Estela "Zata" recalls that Montoya would sometimes raise his right hand during long legato passages and point to his busy left hand, milking still more applause from his enthralled audience.

 

 

(At the time, this struck us as disconcerting or even laughable. How could we know that a few decades later, the world's greatest guitarist, Paco de Lucia, would be striving to create a jazz-flamenco mixture, this time with more advanced and abstract jazz rather than the old New Orleans style, and this time to the general acclaim of many hard-core flamenco-lovers.) (You can still count me out – I believe such blending can't work, because jazz in its unlimited immensity could swallow flamenco whole, just for a snack, and not even burp afterwards.)

Summing up, Carlos Montoya didn't cut much ice in the hard-core flamenco community, and we tended to feel sorry for those earnest young people who came to the big city to study with him and struggled to become his protégées, but Carlos was hardly perturbed and his overwhelming impact cannot be overlooked.

 

He was accustomed to being heralded with everything but an actual trumpet flourish wherever he went.

 

 

All in all then, it seems Carlos Montoya is a sort of open-and-shut case – an idiosyncratic guitarist vastly overrated by the ignorant public, rather like Manitas de Plata. But there's another important facet to Carlos Montoya: He was a pretty damn good accompanist. In his formative years, he accompanied great dancers including La Argentina, La Argentinita, Vicente Escudero, El Estampio, Faíco, Antonio de Bilbao, La Malena and La Macarrona. Add his stint with the very young Carmen Amaya, and you may have the greatest lineup of dancers that a single guitarist ever backed.

His earliest U.S. recordings were 78's on the Stinson label. On one, he backs his dancing wife, who earnestly describes all the steps, as if one could learn the art from the record: "Alegrias: ...When you hear 3 stamps, that is the traditional 'aviso' or warning to the guitarist to begin a slow variation. Next we have 4 measures of posturing, then a 'paseo' making time first to the left then right then left again. Now a slow step called 'escobilla'..." Instructions aside, it's a solid dance performance well accompanied – or so it sounds. (Of course, flamenco dance records can be hard to distinguish from field recordings of red-headed woodpeckers at work, but that's another story.)

It's easier to judge Carlos Montoya's cante accompaniment, which can be quite correct and effective. Among them, the recordings with Niño de Almadén and with Porrina de Badajoz stand out – solid, even tasteful backing that elicits good work from each singer.

But though he must have played for many serious singers in his early career in Spain and with touring troupes, those two are apparently the only noted singers he ever accompanied on record. And this interesting aspect of his artistry is far overshadowed by his solo and concert work, which left aficionados unimpressed even before a new generation of virtuosos raised the bar to stratospheric levels.

Not many Spanish authorities have written seriously about Carlos Montoya. Ángel Álvarez Caballero, cited in the Diccionario Enciclopédico del Flamenco, says "In the 1950's, Montoya was already a well-established and celebrated artist, the first to play flamenco at New York's Village Gate. His art evolved rapidly. Without breaking radically with the central tenets of flamenco, he introduced American folk, country and jazz into his playing." A gentle assessment, especially when contrasted to the book's withering dismissal of Manitas de Plata, the other popular sensation in the flamenco guitar field outside of Spain: "Effect-seeking music totally alien to the true values of flamenco".


“I play the way I do because to me, that is exactly the way the flamenco guitar should sound...strange the unknowing public should agree, while the real flamenco aficionados clearly do not” – Carlos Montoya

Maybe Carlos Montoya wasn't so bad after all. And viewed as an echo (or relic) of the flamenco guitar's distant past, there's a certain intrinsic interest in his music. Still, it's hard for me to judge since I happen to really like the solo flamenco guitar – a rare defect in the circles of serious flamenco followers, where it is again outmoded, and even Paco de Lucia surrounds himself with other musicians before venturing onstage.

I recall watching Montoya on television when a serious buff scoffed at one of his musical gimmicks. "Hey," I said, "show some respect. This is the guy who introduced the solo flamenco guitar to millions of people years ago".

"Yeah," was the reply. "And why do you think that nowadays nobody can stand it?" Nevertheless, Carlos Montoya’s impact, particularly outside Spain, was extraordinary, and as America’s flamenco expert, Don Pohren writes: for thousands of record and concert fans he is Mr. Flamenco Guitar.

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Source:

http://www.deflamenco.com/articulos/carlosmontoya/indexi.jsp

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Journalist Brook Zern who has written for Fortune magazine is a life-long guitar aficionado from New York City. His knowledge of flamenco has led him to give numerous conferences on the subject.