Hello all, and happy continuing Black History Month!
I’m recovering from hand surgery and typing is a little tough, so I’m keeping this week’s entry short and sweet.
What country do you think of when you think of flamenco music?
Spain, right?
And maybe you remember this guy?
This, of course, is Paco de Lucia, Spanish musician turned international sensation. You may remember his “Entre dos aguas,” or when he soloed in the Concierto de Aranjuez, or the concert he gave with Carlos Santana in Barcelona. But aside from his virtuoso picking, he is also famous for introducing the cajón to flamenco music.
The cajón is a musical instrument that looks like a box you sit on top of and hit. And that’s essentially what it is. Musicians can tap, slap, and slide their fingers and hands around in different ways to produce different notes and effects, percussion to supplement flamenco’s clapping and stomping.
But did you know that this instrument, now ubiquitous in flamenco, only became a part of the genre in 1977?
It’s a pretty good story.
Paco de Lucia had been on tour with his sextet in South America and was invited as guest of honor to a party at the residence of the Spanish ambassador in Lima, Peru. Among the other guests in attendance was Chabuca Granda, beloved living legend of Peruvian criolla music. She performed that night, her wildly popular ”La flor de la canela” (“The Cinnamon Flower”). Accompanying her was Caitro Soto, on the cajón. De Lucia was instantly fascinated with the instrument, and after playing briefly with Soto later that evening, was resolved to incorporate it into his own area of musical expertise—flamenco.
At this point, the story strays from hard fact and diverges into competing myths. One version has it that de Lucia asked how he could get ahold of a couple of these wonderful new (to him) instruments and Soto arranged it, selling him one—for 12,000 pesetas (equivalent to roughly 650 euros or 750 dollars in today’s money)—which he turned over to the sextet’s percussionist Rubem Dantas, who in turn introduced it to his home country of Brasil. In another version, the 12,000 pesetas buy de Lucia two cajones, one for Dantas and one for himself. But in my favorite telling, when the smitten de Lucia approaches Soto at the end of the night and asks him straight up to sell him the cajón right out from under his rear, the perspicacious Soto says sure man, provoking thankful delight, then quotes him a wildly impossible sum with a laugh and a twinkle in his eye. De Lucia goes home empty handed and has to wait for arrangements to be made for the purchase and shipment of cajones later on from Spain.
Whatever the truth of the matter may be, the cajón did eventually find its way back to Spain, where Paco de Lucia incorporated it into his “new flamenco” style with great success. The cajón was modified somewhat for Spanish music, mainly through the loosening of boards and the addition of internal snare wires to add a more vibration than the original Peruvian instrument. To his credit, de Lucia was always upfront about where the instrument whose spread he was so often acknowledged for really came from, and while many others began calling the modified Spanish version the “cajón flamenco,” he worked to preserve and promote the more accurate name—“cajón peruano.”
So this well-known flamenco instrument the cajón is actually Peruvian. But it’s not just Peruvian. The cajón is Afro-Peruvian. Peru, like many countries in the Americas and the Caribbean, was involved in the Atlantic slave trade. African slaves were brought to the country in the first half of the 16th century by Spanish conquistadors as they worked to establish and expand their imperial dominion there.
At the time, the Catholic church forbade the playing of drums, as they considered the black slaves’ talking drums both excessively pagan and potentially threatening to them, fearing they might be employed in clandestine communications. Being unable to play actual drums, and drums being an important part of their African culture, the enslaved population turned to everyday objects—spoons, gourds, etc.—for percussion instead. The cajón likely arose from people using boxes designed for storing and transporting goods as secret, technically lawful instruments, something to bang out a beat on but that could be hidden in plain sight from the authorities. Documented references to the use of cajones—literally “large boxes”—for music making exist in Peru from around 1840.
It would not be for another 100+ years that the instrument would spread beyond private all-black gatherings to the mixed Criollo music scene in the 1950s. And not for two decades more that Paco de Lucia would begin making it known outside the country. Many Americans will know the instrument only as one part of a flamenco ensemble, as something European. But the cajón is not European, it’s Afro-Peruvian, and until really very recently, in fact for the vast majority of its existence, it has been played exclusively by black people inside Peru.
This is by no means the first time an element of black musical culture has spread to global popularity. Nor is it likely to be the last. But it is a cool example, one I myself was unaware of until I came to live in Peru, and one some of you readers might not have known about, either. So I hope you enjoyed this brief history of the cajón, and I’ll leave you with a few fun clips. Till next time!
The song that was performed (and originally composed) by Chabuca Granda that fateful night in 1977.
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One of Caitro Soto’s famed compositions.
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Paco de Lucia—now with cajón! Burghausen International Jazz Week 2004.
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Cajón accompanying Pepe Habichuela’s “pure flamenco” style.
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Antonio Carmona, tearing it up on the intro to this contemporary flamenco piece.
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Bringing it back around to the origins: “¡Perú . . . sí . . . negro!”