FLAMENCO ARISTOCRACY

Behind Carnegie Hall, the next door to legendary NY sheet music store Pattleston’s, Juan Orozco’s was the most beautiful guitar store in city, its wall lined with superb Spanish tiles, guitars ensconced in rich wooden cabinates, and far and away the best guitar hang-out in town.

Classical and flamenco guitarists from all over the world visited to make contacts, exchange ideas, out-do each other, play all the superb guitars on display. Always a melodious hub-bub.

One Saturday afternoon virtuoso guitarist Mario Escudero walked in the front door accompanied by members of the Jose Greco Dance Company, performing in New York. A hush came over the room, followed by an awkward silence.

The situation tickled Escudero. His face lit into a dazzling smile, he winked and said, “The Aristocracy has arrived!”

When l was fifteen, l asked my guitar teacher - and idol - how old he was when he first took the stage. Escudero’s face abstracted as he assembled distant memories - “l was five or six and l was bad! My mother and father were a song and dance team traveling throughout France in a musical revue.

“Every time the company’s director came into the dressing room, l started crying, and said l wanted to be in the show too. ‘Pay no attention to him,’ my mother said and slapped me into the corner of the room.‘But what will do in the show?’ asked the very charming director, and l said, ‘Play the guitar!’

“‘Well, let me hear what you can do with that guitar, Little Boy.’”

That night, El Niño Mario Escudero took the stage for the first time. The director of that revue was Maurice Chevalier. Thus is born Musical Aristocracy.

Immediately in demand, Escudero accompanied the greatest flamenco dancers and singers - Carmen Amaya, Jose Greco et al - in their World tours, until the problem arose that Escudero’s solos often garnered more applause than did the Star dancer’s. I’d grown up with the story that Mario had once broken a guitar on the feet of a famous dancer who came on stage to dance while the audience was demanding an encore from Escudero.

I never really believed that though - there are lots of tall tales in world of flamenco - till once in the late 60s, while accompanying a rehearsal for a  Spanish Dance Company in Carnegie Hall, an old Spanish pianist (who played the “classical numbers”) said to me, “Hey kid, who taught you to play like that?” ………. “Escudero! He’s crazy! I saw him break a guitar on _____and walk off the stage!”

Escudero enjoyed success as a concert and recording artist for more than two decades, but poor management and terrible gypsy-styled business  decisions prevented him from achieving the recognition he truly deserved. Eclipsed in his fame by boisterous showmen, Carlos Montoya and Manitas de Plata, the sophisticated, technically brilliant playing of Mario Escudero receded from public view.

As adults, Mario and l maintained a quiet friendship, and l returned to study flamenco in the evolved style he had developed over the years. I especially  wanted to learn his composition Ímpetu, an altogether new take on the traditional flamenco rhythm bulerías. This particular piece had a life-changing effect on the teenaged Paco de Lucía, who learned it from Escudero and went to create a new and revolutionary style of flamenco soon after.

One afternoon, completing the piece in our casual lesson, Mario said to me, “Let’s listen.” He held a double LP set, with a plain white cover - l couldn’t help but think of the Beatles “White Album” - and saying nothing more, he played his last recording for me.

Nothing like this had ever happened between us - Mario never liked to call  attention to himself. As we listened, Mario maintained a wistful smile, now and then pointing and saying, “I’m rushing here.” I didn’t hear it. What l did hear was the culmination of a truly great guitarist’s artistry.

I heard all the music he’d taught as a teen, but also heard miraculous, kaleidoscopic transformations as ideas developed with apparently limitless invention, adding layer upon layer of harmonic sophistication which is just not expected in flamenco guitar. The technical brilliance of the playing is truly breathtaking, but the listener is often too distracted by musical sophistication to even notice the impossibility of Escudero’s virtuosity.

And then there’s the rhythm - the compás which is the heart and soul of flamenco. Today flamenco has become a very loud art. Complex flamenco rhythms are hammered into our ears by percussion instrumentation which often includes rock drum kits, always amplified to 11.

In all of the guitar solos on his MHS recording, one hears Escudero’s melodic and harmonic brilliance unfold in a torrent of rhythmic propulsion. The complexity of flamenco’s rhythmic structures impressed upon us not with noise, but with the dynamism of great guitar playing, a lifetime spent amongthe greatest artists of flamenco history.

I am personally thrilled that the Musical Heritage Society now presenting this historic recording -this wonderful memory for me - to the World again. Being heard by the music loving MHS audience should go a long way to restoring Mario Escudero - true Flamenco Aristocracy - to his rightful place in musical history.