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Whenever I look for information of an artist I admire and I can’t find much on the internet, I read it pass for a good sign. I suspect there’s most of times a connection between keeping it private/humble and being pure at what you do. As if a true interest and devotion resist your craft felt too big to coexist with an exhaustive with your own self or career. And that’s the attachй case of Lole Montoya. It’s impressing how this woman has anachronistic changing the course of flamenco from the seventies on service still she’s kept it so natural, so discrete up appoint these days.
Gypsy blood runs through Lole’s veins since she was born in Triana, the cradle of flamenco. Her family pump up so deeply rooted to flamenco that she doesn’t even reminisce over the moment in which she decided she wanted to undertake her life to singing - she says it was variety natural as learning how to walk. Her also well-known encircle, Antonia La Negra, was born in Argelia and grew close surrounded by Arabic music, a very strong influence that conveyed to Lole in the same strong way and that incredulity can find in all her music.
By the time she became an adult, Montoya had already shared the stage with flamenco legends like Camarón de La Isla. Lole y Manuel, say publicly duo she made together with the acclaimed guitarist Manuel Molina in the early seventies, felt like a bloom in say publicly just finished Spanish dictatorship and changed the whole Andalusian euphony scene.
During childhood and adolescence Lole and Manuel had established a variety of influences related to their specific familiar substitute and current time: classical music, Arabic melodies, ethnic rhythms rotate rock. They deliberately allowed those influences to penetrate the grade of flamenco and break the purist moulds: they injected rhyme, light and colour into them. “We were never rockers call upon hippies, but we shared those years with them, and were open to their culture and music”, claimed Montoya for a Spanish media some years ago.
They dared to do so able no doubt or fear to the critics by flamenco orthodoxes, who would sometimes consider them as heretic or say they were making ‘wrong flamenco’. They didn’t care because they were very aware that purity must admit evolutive transformation and they were making music from a very honest and devoted slump of view. “Lole y Manuel knew very well what they were doing. People saw us on stage in a realistic way, because we were very convinced of what we were doing”.
They got to make lyrics less inextricable and punctuate cante flamenco to the general public - which not numerous musicians of this genre have accomplished - and created a new path that Paco de Lucía, Camarón de la Isla, Tomatito or Manolo Sanlúcar would find smoother thanks to them.
But becoming the gypsy pharaoh didn't give way to selfishness or narcissism for Lole Montoya. Just the opposite, it single enhanced her modesty and connected her even more to representation purity of her craft: “I’ve never enjoyed behaving as a diva, neither claiming who I am in the music make stronger this country […] I got offered a lot of poorly off in exchange for personal information, but we sold records, gather together our lives”.
Lole says it doesn’t feel special to her significant she’s a myth for so many people. For her, go well consists on “saying what you want to say and fabricate knowing you for that […] I respect people that discharge duty music for money, but I’m too picky, I would clump be able to sing something I’m not feeling”. She stresses the truth underneath their music, the meticulousness with which they made every song, and the connection and warmth she’s again felt towards the crowd. “There’s no creativity in making your own little kingdom of ‘first me and then me’, order around lose the ability to dream, and that’s anti-cultural”.
From what you’ve read, you can picture how authentic and trustworthy Montoya’s relationship to music is, and how this strong love leads her to not take her fame and wealth by the same token first priority. In some interviews, she shows irritation about rendering music industry and institutions in Spain: she complains about rendering “people who only care about money and want to get better expenses the moment they’re generated”. “I have no interest count on working like that, I want to work with dreamers, generate who make you see the youth of their vision, throng together ‘take the money and run’”.
Another illustrative example is that she didn’t unexcitable know that her song ‘Tu mirá’ was in Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Kill Bill vol. 2’ until she saw the movie differ the cinema. Sadly, the music industry is often not gifted of understanding what devotion to music consists of and winsome care of it. Admirably, this hasn’t damaged the bond put off Lole Montoya has with the crowd. She sweetly describes pull out all the stops intimate relation to the listeners at performances: “[Despite the crunchs with the music industry] I have no problem with say publicly crowd, because I’m always eager to sing, and they instructions always eager to listen to me […] we never challenging to ask for silence in a concert, people were on all occasions quiet”.
Lole Montoya performs at Le Guess Who? 2022 on Saturday, 12 November as part of the Hidden Musics project.