Flamenco songs or cante flamenca the most typical of which is called the "jondo", a kind of "deep song" most often come directly from the heart and soul of the singers. It's a kind of song in which the singers sing of the joys, the sadness, the hardships of daily life, the blows of fate they have to endure: their desperation, their impotent anger, their disappointment, their dreams, their hopes and their longings for a better life but above all their deep sense of the powerlessness they feel against the transitoriness of their ephemeral loves, their fugitive joys and the unpredictability and impermanence of life itself, in short of the seeming ineluctability of their destiny. Yet despite everything, their songs also express a kind of undying faith in and an almost primeval and instinctual love of life, a choice which is, in a way forced upon them, in which they appear to have no choice but to choose to affirm their life no matter how miserable, a life punctuated by only a few brief episodes of happiness because the alternative would be even more unpalatable: desolation, agony, grief, sorrow and death, the last of which is never really that far away. That's why whenever they got the chance, they sing with all their might, all their heart, all their soul. That gives their songs a kind of intensity which you seldom find in any other kind of songs. It almost feels as if their need to celebrate is so urgent, perhaps because they feel in their bones that happiness can be so precarious and fragile and it could so easily have slipped through their fingers that they simply haven't got time to polish every words, every nuance and the texture of the sound into the kind of grace and elegance that they could have before they pour out from the deepest part of their soul, not from just their abdomen or even from their lungs.To me, flamenco is the highest expression of the tension of life between love and passion and inevitable separation, between life and death, an art, like bull fighting, in which the Spanish soul manages to snatch between the teeth of death and mortality, an impossible art combining ice and fire, rigidity and grace, sound and motion in the ever changing twists, turns and unexpected reversals of the always rhythmic flow of the music and the movements of the dance, just as in life. It's the dance of life itself that we see, we hear, we feel, we experience, we celebrate.
