Lately it seems common practice to remix flamenco and to fuse its earthy vocals, emphatic rhythms and intrinsic clapping with jazz, or hip-hop or electronica.
But this fiery, passionate genre has roots all its own, and “A Flamenco Christmas,” a new program featuring Chicago’s Newberry Consort and Houston-based Arte Puro, seeks to do the opposite — go back in time and explore the form’s centuries-old origins and influences.
“Flamenco is very old, and it evolved in some really interesting ways,” said Liza Malamut, Newberry’s artistic director, who curated the offering with Spanish-born percussionist Jesús Pacheco. “What’s really cool is that it has overlap with a wide range of traditions, everything from Roma folk music to what we think of as ‘traditional’ Spanish polyphony. You hear a lot of the same sounds even when you are listening to a Renaissance chant as you will hear in a flamenco melody.”
The unusual program, which will be presented Dec. 5-7 in three locations around the Chicago area, is built around the zambomba tradition in Pacheco’s hometown of Jerez, Spain, one of the birthplaces of the art, where neighbors old and young gather around a fire to sing Christmas “villancicos” or carols to the rhythms of flamenco.
“A Flamenco Christmas” continues a series that Newberry began in 2018 as an exploration of centuries-old Mexican Christmas music and later expanded to include examples from other parts of Latin America.
These Latin-themed concerts have quickly become an annual tradition and have allowed the nationally known early-music group to reach beyond its usual audience base.
“What’s really exciting about it for us, and the reason we’ve kept doing it, is its really strong tie to the Chicago community,” Malamut said, “We tend to get extremely large and really diverse audiences for this show. People come out who normally don’t even go to early music concerts.”
After performing on Newberry’s last two sets of yuletide concerts, Pacheco began discussing with Malamut possible ways they could further collaborate, and he proposed a flamenco concert.
“Originally, we were not thinking it would be a Christmas program,” Malamut said, “but the more we talked about it, the more it made sense. There are a lot of traditions in flamenco music that are related to Christmas.”
The concert combines traditional selections played by flamenco ensembles today with music from the 16th to 18th centuries from Spain, Portugal and Latin America. The performers — 15 in all — are divided into two groups, which will perform independently and together. One, assembled under the auspices of Arte Puro and co-directed by Pacheco and his wife, mezzo-soprano Cecilia Duarte, is a traditional flamenco ensemble or “cuadro flamenco.”
Pacheco will play percussion on the piece alongside vocalist Celia Corrales, guitarist Misael Barraza-Diaz and Houston-based Ana María Barceló, a Puerto Rican flamenco dancer who has studied extensively in Spain and regularly appears across Texas and the surrounding region.
Barceló will perform on a traditional raised wooden platform known as “tablao,” which provides the kind of resonance needed for the rhythmic stomping that is an essential part of flamenco dance. “We are not only dancers, we are also musicians,” Barceló said. “We do music with our footwork, with our bodies as instruments of percussion.”
The Newberry’s 11-member early-instrument ensemble will include Duarte and three other singers as well as Dušan Balarín on “vihuela” (a flat-backed lute) and baroque guitar and a traditional wind section consisting of “chirimía,” a predecessor to the oboe (Kathryn Montoya), two sackbuts or historical trombones (Malamut and Andrés Guzmán) and “bajón,” a bassoon ancestor (Rachel Begley).
In the 15th century, the nomadic Romani people brought the origins of flamenco to Muslim-ruled Andalusia, where the style matured and evolved in the Spanish region’s rich musical milieu, with its Middle Eastern, Northern African and Sephardic influences.
After the emancipation of the Roma, flamenco became more mainstream in Spain and by the 19th century, it took the spotlight in singing cabarets and migrated into the worlds of theater and opera.
“The flamenco that is performed today, it’s only 60 or 70 years old, with some iterations going back to the beginning of the 20th century,” Pacheco said. “It’s fairly modern.”
If “A Flamenco Christmas” proves popular, as a Malamut expects it will, don’t be surprised to see it back on Newberry’s schedule soon. “That’s always a possibility,” she said, “If people love the flamenco, I don’t see why it wouldn’t come back in the future.”