Skopje Jazz Festival, Round Two: Spaniards!

Round 2: Juan Carmona Grupo / Miguel Poveda

I love flamenco, but I have now discovered that an entire evening of it is about an hour too much. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy both performances - they were both absolutely exhilarating - but flamenco performers tend to be a bit intense, especially on the vocal side.

Juan Carmona and his group started the evening off - a full lineup of three guitars, percussion, flute and vocals, as well as one member of the group who would occasionally step out from behind the microphone and bust some flamenco dance moves. As you can imagine, the crowd went wild whenever this happened. The set itself was extremely dynamic - lots of light and shade - and Carmona himself proved to an amazing guitarist who was willing to work with his band rather than dominate them. I’m no flamenco afficionado (I get as far as Ketama and that’s about it) , but you didn’t need to be to enjoy the set.

I’m not sure the same could be said for Miguel Poveda. Poveda, a younger musician than Carmona, is an acclaimed vocalist in a very traditional style. In this case, traditional means voice and guitar, plus two members of the band whose role is to provide the clapping. I kid you not, they don’t play any instruments and they don’t sing; they just clap. It sounds a bit ludicrous until you see how essential that is to the performance (although it still sounds a bit ludicrous even then) but it underlines how seriously they take traditional flamenco.

It was during this set that I realised that I had a relatively low tolerance threshold for flamenco. Poveda is a phenomenal vocalist, and it was fascinating to hear the echoes of Arabic styles in his vocal delivery and shades of Qawwali in the intensity with which he performs. Without understanding Spanish, however, it’s next to impossible to follow the narrative that flamenco lyrics provide; for me that reduced my enjoyment of the performance, since the tempo and timbre of the songs tended to be quite similar. At the end, Poveda stood up and moved away from his microphone to the front of the stage, singing directly to the audience - a great way to end, but after he left the stage I breathed a sigh of relief and stumbled off into the Skopje night, still reeling from the intensity of the performance.

(Thanks to Beastmaster112 for posting these clips on YouTube.)