On Thursday and Friday nights, the forces of flamenco are unleashed at Tapas Papa Frita. The guitar slashes, the vocalist wails. At the center of the stage, the dancer pounds his heels and claps his hands. The customers--who come for the blood-red wine, the little plates of marinated mushrooms, the savory paella--bounce in their seats. On a good night, the polyrhythmic racket, which competes with the clatter in the open kitchen, can be ungodly. The Gypsies call the sound duende--a profound, almost devilish expression of soul.
Like many performers, the state's foremost male dispensers of flamenco-style duende have day jobs. Gypsies they are not. Guy Frankel, the guitarist and singer, works as a tour guide for the Pink Jeep Tours company in Sedona. Charles Calleros, the dancer, is associate dean of the Arizona State University College of Law. By day they lecture on red-rock geology and civil-rights law. By night, as Gaetano and Carlos, they raise duende at Tapas Papa Frita. If there can be a raucous Spanish restaurant on posh East Camelback Road, there can be jeep jockeys and contract experts who do flamenco. This is America. "SOME PEOPLE DO MUSIC. I play piano. But I've never heard anything like dancing. And flamenco! It's safe to say it's quite unusual among law professors."
Paul Bender, former dean of ASU's law school, first saw Charles Calleros express himself artistically at a variety revue produced by law students. Bender says that Calleros played trap drums for the show. The next year, Bender recalls, Calleros danced. "Very few faculty members would put themselves in that position," Bender says. "They tend to be pretty stuffy in terms of hobbies. I don't know of any other law professors who do anything quite as colorful. "And the fact that he does it publicly! It's one thing to play piano at home, but to be semiprofessionally involved as he is . . . "
Unlike law professors, Pink Jeep tour drivers are known for having colorful, sometimes eccentric, backgrounds. "Most of 'em migrate to Sedona first," says Shawn Wendell, owner and president of the company. "Because of the arts district here, because of the beauty of the place. We have a core that's been here three, four years." A couple of the drivers are from Australia, Wendell says, one is a retired detective from New York state. There are former business executives, a cowboy, a flamenco guitar player. "Basically, we look for a kind of animation," Wendell says. "They don't have to all be cowboys; they don't have to be all guitar players. It's like people working for Disneyland. They have to turn on to people."
One of the deluxe tour options offered by the company is a special jeep trip that ends in a wilderness cookout. Guy Frankel often is called on to entertain the groups. His guitar playing and singing, framed by the dazzling setting of red rocks and the deep sky at dusk, tends to go over big with the tourists. "They're very amazed," Wendell says. "MY DAD WAS a professor at the University of Miami. He just decided to quit teaching, buy a camper and take off. We sold the house and traveled in Europe for a whole year before we ran out of money."
Guy Frankel and his folks settled in Seville, Spain, in the Barrio de Santa Cruz. "The very heartbeat of flamenco," Frankel says. "We lived in a little house, right on a square, La Plaza de Dona Eviera. Every night there was flamenco music going on. "There was a group of benches and a fountain in the middle of the square. People would come to the old quarter, which is the old Jewish ghetto, and they would be dancing and singing and clapping hands and playing guitar. "I kind of fell asleep to this music for five years. My window was right on the square. I always feel that it was osmosis."
Still just a kid, Frankel was able to study with flamenco masters. "Every once in a while, you'd get some real purist singers and guitar players who were a little hesitant at passing on their tradition," he says. "Because of my age and my innocence, I was accepted."
There were no texts in Frankel's flamenco education. The guitar and vocal techniques are handed down, teacher to student.
Frankel studied for about three years. Then, his family moved back to the states. As a teenager, Frankel turned his musical attention to rock 'n' roll and pop music. After living in Mexico for several years, Frankel settled in Sedona with a small family of his own. "I like to be outdoors," he says. "I was already pretty familiar with a lot of Southwestern information, the geology, the Indians, the history. The Pink Jeep Tours is just a very good job. Very flexible, too."
In time, Frankel began to perform at Sedona restaurants. About four years ago, Charles Calleros got word of the new player and contacted him. Ever since, Frankel has performed, off and on, with Calleros and other local flamencos.
Frankel is a rarity--a flamenco guitarist who also sings. "It's very hard to sing," he says. "You could never study it and become a flamenco singer. You could duplicate it, but you couldn't have that duende."
"CONTRARY TO widespread belief, the Spanish Gypsies were not the sole creators of the mysterious art called flamenco. Rather, it is generally agreed that flamenco is a mixture of the music of the many cultures that have played important roles, directly or indirectly, throughout the centuries in Andalusia, the most important of these being the Muslim, Jewish, Indo-Pakistani, and Byzantine." So writes D.E. Pohren, author of The Art of Flamenco, a text published by the Society of Spanish Studies in Seville. Flamencologist Pohren says that the golden age of flamenco came and went in the last half of the last century, but that it's been around as an art form for at least four hundred years. Flamenco was born, of course, out of repression. At the same time Spain's Jews and Muslims were asked (firmly--the Spanish Inquisition was doing the asking) to convert to Christianity, the country's Gypsies were asked to settle down and acquire useful occupations. (This was, after all, the sixteenth century--well past time to get serious about a career.) Some did, some didn't. Rebel elements of the different cultures united in roving bands to fight the hated Inquisition. Flamenco, the story goes, was their blues. Pohren postulates that the very word "flamenco" was created by a mispronunciation of the Arabic words felag (fugitive) and mengu (peasant). However, a complete explanation of the musical, lyrical and spiritual origins and meanings of flamenco and its various stylistic divisions is almost impossible, at least without genealogy charts and a detailed map of southern Spain. For contemporary journalistic purposes, it's safe to sum up and say: continues to reflect the manic- depressive nature of its first practitioners. The romantic, wildly percussive brand of flamenco made popular by the various entertainment media is only part of the fun. Slower, more brooding cantes (songs) are performed, as are hyperdramatic, arialike vocal solos, which are sometimes done without dancing. Typically, though, flamenco requires the participation of at least three artists: a guitarist, a singer and a dancer. "There are a lot of flamenco guitar players who are very good but who won't do solo," says strummer Frankel. "The true hard-core flamenco guitarists won't do solo. That's not what it's meant for. He wants a dancer to play for, and he wants a singer he can accompany. It's part of the tradition."
There are flamenco "standards," traditional tune structures that are known and played by most performers, each of which starts from a distinctive compas, or rhythm. Improvisational rhythmic embellishments are added over the compas, passionate vocalizing occurs, and pretty soon duende--the soulful emotional expression that is the ultimate goal in all flamenco performances--is achieved.
"Duende," writes Pohren, "is the exposure of one's soul, its misery and suffering, love and hate, offered without embarrassment or resentment." Obviously a niggling purist, he adds, "It is a cry of despair, a release of tortured emotions, to be found in its true profundity only in real-life situations, not in the make-believe world of theatres and nightclubs and commercial caves as a product that can be bought and sold and produced at will."
"I HAVE ALWAYS HAD an affinity for music. While I was quite young, age four or five, I responded to rhythm and blues on the radio." Charles Calleros was born in Sacramento, California. He got an economics degree at the University of California-Santa Cruz and a law degree at UC-Davis. He's directed legal-writing programs for several of Arizona's biggest law firms. He serves as chair of ASU's Campus Environment Team, a group formed after a racial incident along the school fraternity row in 1988. A drummer, Calleros says his favorite form of music is "American blues."
"I got into flamenco about ten years ago, when my wife's sister came back from Spain," he says. "She brought back with her some flamenco records. We were so taken by the records, we kind of jokingly said, what we really have to do is learn how to dance flamenco. A week later in the newspaper was an ad for flamenco dance lessons. Well, of course, we had to do it, to follow up on the joke. We drove through the snow from Reno to Sparks, Nevada, every Saturday morning to take flamenco dance lessons, my wife, her sister and I."
Calleros moved to Phoenix and began studying with Lydia Torea. He still studies with Torea, and has accompanied the instructor and members of her troupe in numerous performances, including a key tavern scene in the opera Carmen, as performed by ASU's Lyric Opera Theatre in 1987. Calleros' wife, Deborah Driggs, an attorney, stopped performing flamenco just before the birth of the couple's second child. Calleros' wife's sister, Pamela Driggs, now sings in Brasilia, a band that also performs at Tapas Papa Frita. Liliana DeLeon and Octavia Jones are two of the regular dancers who join Calleros and Frankel as performance partners at the restaurant. While there are, apparently, plenty of female flamenco dancers on the local scene, Calleros seems to have a corner on the male market. "I have the luxury of being the only regularly performing male flamenco dancer in the state of Arizona," says Calleros. "It's like other forms of dance. For some reason, our culture has not encouraged men to be interested in dance. Those few men who are into dance get lots of opportunities."
"WE HEARD THROUGH a friend that the restaurant was opening up last August. As soon as we heard, we gave a call to Jose Gutierrez [manager of Tapas Papa Frita]. `I've got a person who learned to play and sing flamenco on the streets of Barrio Santa Cruz in Sevilla when he was nine years old.' That's all I had to say."
For Charles Calleros, the odd melding of nighttime flamenco dancing and daytime law professoring is as natural as breathing. "It's actually a nice complement," he says, adding that his students usually don't learn about his avocation unless they find their way to the restaurant. "It's becoming fairly high profile," says Calleros, referring to a recent Mesa Tribune piece on his moonlight job. "Law students, by and large, don't have time to go down and see it. But they know about it."
For Frankel, the Tapas Papa Frita engagement (which may have to end in the fall, when Calleros leaves to become a visiting professor for one semester at Stanford University) is an opportunity to revisit the sounds of his youth. It's not unusual for audience members, many also with roots in Spain, to join in the singing and dancing. "I've been able to bring up songs that I haven't heard since I was a little kid; the same songs I was doing when I was thirteen years old," he says. "It's such traditional music, such a beautiful music. Even though the songs are twenty years old, they're still just as forceful and strong." "Flamenco! It's safe to say it's quite unusual among law professors."
There are no texts in flamenco education. The guitar and vocal techniques are handed down, teacher to student.
Rebel elements of different cultures united in roving bands to fight the hated Inquisition. Flamenco was their blues.
"The true hard-core flamenco guitarists won't do solo. He wants a dancer to play for, and he wants a singer he can accompany."
"We drove through the snow from Reno to Sparks, Nevada, every Saturday morning to take flamenco dance lessons, my wife, her sister and
