Flamenco on Cambie

By Daniel Guillemette

Today’s recording is of the flamenco music from the Kino Café, a small bar at Cambie and 18^th, that features flamenco music in some form or another five days a week.

Editing the footage for the video, I was reminded of a quote from Ian Cross, a music professor at Cambridge: “While music may be in our biologies, our culture is in our music.”

I always take this quote as speaking to both the ubiquity and diversity of music across human history, but also to the dilemma faced by the pastiche artist. The flamenco dancers and musicians at the Kino Café are faithful to the traditional form of Spanish flamenco, and yet what culture can they evoke but Vancouver’s? Before their set, they change in a tiny, unusable bathroom, and hang out in the kitchen, trying to stay out of the way of the hectic cooks. During their performances, a TV flickers in the back, buses rumble past, and neon seeps through the window. Their performances, while tremendous, reveal the relative obscurity that live flamenco music faces in Vancouver today.

And they are driven, biologically or not, to make this music regardless of the obscurity. Each does so with varying degrees of success: Both guitarist Peter Mole and dancer Karen Pikethly survive as performers and instructors. But Maria Avila, the youngest dancer, works three jobs to stay afloat; Michelle Harding writes for online publications; Nicola C. works as a programmer. Jose Luis Lara, whose name is on the posters, is now 77 and retired. He began singing flamenco at the age of twelve, and continued to do so when he moved to Vancouver in 1967. He worked in the steel industry.

This was recorded on February 25 and March 6, 2010.

Posted by Daniel Guillemette on Mar 15 2010. Filed under Songs Like Weeds: Field recordings from the No Fun City. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.