1999 was the closest thing to an annus horribilis for me. I was more solitary than ever, I became particularly irritable, enflaqué to be in the bones. Then I got involved with strangers, obsessed with death, and walked to his side of that year and the next perhaps only to understand a proverb I read in La Celestina: "Lost is the one who lost after walk." I ran my steps leading to a lost corner of the Mexican province, Rincon de Guayabitos, where, so to speak, I hit bottom. Three years ago, like millions of people around the world celebrated the appearance of album Buena Vista Social Club . Among the group of musicians brought together by Ry Cooder, from the beginning I was moved particularly Ibrahim Ferrer: his voice, his biography, his infinite tenderness.
Soon after, in 1999, it became his first single disk, of which my favorite song is the powerful "This book can", which has the charm of being an exact tracing the version recorded by Benny Moré and Banda Gigante in 1957. The producers of the radio link came up with the start of the original version with the continuation of the other and the result is the film footage of those that begin in black and white and color change without the eye to perceive the trick. In this album echoes much of what I experienced that year and in particular the end of the century days when my track is lost among strangers at a spa thought the Nayarit coast.
Benny recording can be heard in http://bit.ly/9tkgEM
version Ibrahim Ferrer, http://bit.ly/9jJm1q
In 2001, in agreement with Sergio Autrey, who a year earlier I had bought eighty percent of the shares of the publishing house that was Conversely, I decided to close the magazine I founded in 1992. Shortly after I went to Spain with the intention of taking a sabbatical. I told in this place that the road to Madrid, where you plan to install, I was invited to honor a former teacher in a village in the mountains of Asturias, where I realized that my destiny was not in the land but eventually my mother and three of my four grandparents. I rented a studio at the Plaza del Sol, in the heart of the old Oviedo, and a year later I moved to an apartment in a building facing the Campillín.
Besides mine, I had at least one other " home ": a bar in the corner of Old Town called The Parages , where I spent some of the most memorable evenings of the time. Although I always had sympathy for Dylan, this song, which identify with those nights, was what made me a fan: his guitar, beautiful backing vocals by Emmylou Harris, violin ... In that same disc is which for me is the most beautiful song in the history of rock: "Oh sister". However, if I am inclined to "Mozambique" is because it resonates better than any other Susana laughter, conversations with Bolo or Pancho and the fierce loyalty of Thomas, as part of my happiest memories of about five years I lived in the old Vetusta.
The song can be heard in http://bit.ly/d8zUJK
In 1991, thanks to a proposal by the poet David Huerta, I was invited to spend a year at Bucknell University in the state of Pennsylvania to work as an adjunct professor (teaching assistant ) of the Department of English. Perhaps the most famous graduate of that university on the banks of the river Susquehanna is none other than Philip Roth.
to Madrid I met Xavier Pascual Aguilar, * since one of my best friends, who I caught his boundless, voracious and almost reckless love of music: They Might Be Giants, The Stone Roses, Paul Weller, Hoodoo Gurus, The Smiths ... the end of that school year I had become almost as addicted as him, I prepared to enter (once back in Mexico) to musical world of Sergio Vela, who had known a decade earlier in high school and who have been close friends since then.
recently, Sergio, perhaps the person most knowledgeable of music in Mexico ( www.sergiovela.com ), gave me a wonderful box full of discs of Haydn, Liszt, Beethoven , Respighi, Strauss, Chavez ... I have not even finished reviewing. Although it might put some other example I have chosen this duet of the famous number 78-cantata called something like Jesus, Thou my soul because I identify with the general air of the piece and I love the interplay of voices full of charm and alternating contrapuntal.
The duo can be heard in http://bit.ly/cuN40Z
During the time I lived in Oviedo somewhat cooled my enthusiasm for flamenco . Could not be otherwise, considering that great is the lack of interest in the phenomenon jondo in the frozen north. But the music of southern origin as a child I felt terrible ended up playing an important role in my hobbies perhaps because it represents a part of my roots, my maternal grandfather was a Andalusia. There's something about the beauty and character of my mother who is not exactly his native Asturias, which is in my brother and my two sisters and can not only come from Andalusia.
Beyond my Mexican nationality, something that must have influenced I have felt, despite what was generally comfortable in Oviedo, Asturias and outside Asturias. Could it be that I identify as Hispanic in southern Spain before? It is no one can doubt the powerful allure of the great Camaron de la Isla, who knows him and his voice and jondura brought flamenco to modern sensibilities, it's hard not be passionate about his work . After a couple of records I stole from my father in the late eighties, during the last decade I have made a long and joyous flamenco recordings. If you choose "real street" is because the fandango de Huelva is a "stick" and easily recognizable, which makes it suitable to start a taste of the mysterious genre, and especially in Huelva was born precisely because my grandfather, José María Figueroa Monís. Perhaps because of all that, better than anyone else this music is for me the Spain that, without being fully aware of it, for years slept under my skin.
The song can be heard in http://bit.ly/aDt7TK
Despite its name vallejiano, my Otilia not born in Santiago de Chuco or Lima ( http://bit.ly/bv99D5 ) but in Oviedo, in 1944, where eighteen years later she met my father, and after a brief courtship they were married and nine months and one day later, Mexico where they ran to settle, had me. One of the oldest pictures I have of my Otilia is that of the fledgling English with dazzling guitar in his arms with his grace in the northern English emigrants serious among them came to live in a repertoire were songs that she and they brought with them to America, but also the Mexican who learned in Spain even before their migration and has never ceased to play with their pronunciation from there, adding a nuance of phrasing invaluable here.
In 1997, using the easy access to new technologies and yielding to an old idea made his first record, Go and show me a site This experience then repeated twice: Oty sings Asturias in 1999, and Things of the Heart - perhaps his best work, in 2006. Some friends helped me to frame my Otilia talent (in the photo is a gala dance in the late eighties to raise funds for the fight against breast cancer) in these three albums that followed, as the photographer Adolfo Pérez Butrón or designer Soren Garcia Ascot. When preparing this list, I asked him what meil of songs from his latest album was put on the show, and she who first told me the one I chose, he snatched the word itself and wrote: "Would you be nice" by José Alfredo Jiménez. One way Hispano, and therefore very own, to make a passionate end.
The song can be heard in http://bit.ly/cxdcQw
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In the first five readers to write me a comment on this post to oralapluma@gmail.com I shall send by mail A copy of Matters of the heart , the latest album from my Otilia.
emissions The Soundtrack of a life can be heard Sunday at six o'clock in the afternoon by Horizon, on 107.9 FM (or www.imer.gob.mx ). Mine, which was aired Sunday September 7, is http://bit.ly/d8nuPB
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