The Brooklyn Rail

Rosalía, the thirty-three year old Catalan-born Grammy Award winner whose latest album LUX rose to the top of the charts and many end-of-year polls, has reintroduced flamenco to the global mainstream, much to the consternation of purists in Spain. Her music is not so much representative of flamenco per se than of a new generation of non-gypsy performers who maintain an ambivalent relationship with a genre often considered to be outdated back home and, to borrow a phrase from a 1960s publicity campaign for the Francisco Franco dictatorship, “typically Spanish.” Mainstays of arts festivals at home and abroad, artists like Niño de Elche and Rocío Márquez lack Rosalía’s commercial clout, but have access to public money denied gypsy practitioners who eke out a living in taverns.

Niño de Elche—the kind of moniker adopted by singers and bullfighters for centuries—was born Francisco Contreras Molina in 1985 in Elche, Spain’s twentieth largest city, often overshadowed by the more tourist-friendly neighboring Alicante. He moved as a teenager to Seville with the intention of becoming the new Miguel Poveda. Poveda started out playing to tourists in the historic El Cordobés on Las Ramblas in Barcelona before gaining widespread prominence by winning the top prize at the Unión Flamenco Festival (a temple of purity where contestants are judged according to orthodox parameters), becoming the most commercially and critically successful exponent of orthodox flamenco, with his music included, for example, on the soundtrack to Pedro Almodóvar’s 2009 film, Broken Embraces. Niño de Elche had the vocal potential, and frequented taverns and festivals to hone his craft (to a far greater extent than contemporary rock or indie, it is almost impossible to become a flamenco star without first impressing demanding audiences in intimate settings). The plan was derailed as he came into contact with the city’s avant-garde and grew more experimental.

This fledgling talent came under the influence of the Seville-based visual artist, Pedro G. Romero, a theorist and mentor to a new generation of avant-garde flamenco practitioners (he had introduced Rosalía to the fourteenth-century romance which inspired her breakthrough 2018 sophomore album, El Mal Querer). Remarkably prolific, Niño de Elche has now released over fifteen albums, a book of poetry, and collaborated with multimedia practitioners in performances and museum installations. His projects include Vaconbacon, Cantar las fuerzas, an immersive show inspired by a 2009 exhibition of Francis Bacon paintings; a 2020 sound installation for a Eucharist play inspired by the avant-garde cinema of José Val del Omar at Madrid’s Reina Sofia Museum of Modern Art; and music for a 2024 theatrical reimagining of Federico García Lorca’s verse collection, Poet in New York.

Niño de Elche has cited figures as varied as jazz trumpeter Phil Minton and Faith-No-More/Mr Bungle vocalist Mike Patton as inspirations, incorporating influences from a diverse array of genres, ranging from Krautrock to indie. In 2019, he released Fuerza Nueva (the name of a far-right party, which attempted to sabotage the nascent democracy following Franco’s death) with Los Planetas, icons of the Spanish indie-pop explosion of the 1990s, in which they recuperated and deconstructed hymns associated with reactionary organizations— such as the Spanish Legion—from the dictatorship period. Elsewhere, he has performed improvisational pieces with Sufi musicians and poets, with the four epic compositions comprising the experimental La Exclusión (2019) album sounding like a mash-up between Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and New York punk rock noise terrorists Suicide.

In 2021, he flirted with a new mainstream audience through a guest appearance on the flamenco-reggaeton hit, “Tú me dejaste de querer” by C. Tangana (a thirty-five-year old rap-trap-flamenco performer and household name throughout the Spanish speaking world.). Niño de Elche appeared in the video and joined C. Tangana on tour, playing to arena-size audiences across Spain and Latin America, but showed little interest in capitalizing on the limelight to graduate into more lucrative commercial circuits.

Flamenco critics have been merciless in their criticisms, despite the precedent of canonical figures, now beyond reproach, such as Enrique Morente or Camarón de la Isla, similarly chastised for musical promiscuity. Social media has exacerbated tensions, with various adventurous flamenco artists insulted and threatened on-line. Admittedly, tedious repeated accusations of Niño de Elche as the emperor’s new clothes from conservative critic Manuel Martín Martín hardly justified the artist’s X response that he wished his nemesis, who has cancer, dead.

Niño de Elche releasing a trilogy of flamenco albums—the second of which featured “Seguiriya madre” (2022), a duet with Rosalía—while declaring the genre dead only exacerbated longstanding accusations of cultural appropriation. Gypsy commentators are often on shaky ground when claiming a moral patent over a genre whose evolution does not belong to them alone. Conversely, the formative contribution of gypsies has not always been recompensed with symbolic or economical capital. Titling his latest album Cante a lo gitano (2024)—Gypsy Style Song—was an unnecessary provocation.

The fourteen-song collection pays homage to Manuel Torre, the gypsy singer instrumental to Lorca developing his theory of the duende, the tragic grandeur underpinning the most visceral and pure flamenco. Counterintuitively, gypsy musicians and audiences tend to feel more at home in flamenco tourist traps filled with foreigners in Madrid, Barcelona, or Seville than in the more formal settings where Niño de Elche often plays. I saw him deliver a sublime performance last spring in the beautiful modernist theatre of Reus, the birthplace of Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi. In front of a well-heeled middle-aged audience, his playing with gypsy iconography—gaudy gold leaf and a stick used to mark authority and rhythm—didn’t ruffle any feathers.

I was as moved by the music as I was by a sense of injustice for the sometimes world-class flamenco musicians living on the poverty line in nearby Cambrils. It also seemed unfair that the under-capacity bourgeois audience, myself included, had access to heavily subsidized ticket (around $20), when the cost to see the kind of musicians—Niña Pastori, El Capullo de Jérez or Los Chichos—popular with gypsy audiences can be prohibitive. Listening to a world class talent ought not to be a guilty pleasure, but the ideological and economic ecosystems of flamenco render the iconoclastic Niño de Elche as one. Appreciate his music, but do delve deeper into flamenco music!