Israel Galvàn

The Spain that in 1960s New York Miles Davis and Gil Evans had chiseled into a perfect record, that Spain transfigured into music that still has the eloquence and truth of dreams, finally returns home, to the domicile that comes naturally to it, in the flamenco splendor of Israel Galván. Supernatural dance his, and not only because of the virtuosity of interpreter, but because of the constant search for an excess, a surplus, a disproportion between human gesture and what music, or silence, do not reach to say. Here is Andalusia, dust and light, purple skies and black shadows like bibles. Here is Aranjuez, intoxication of melancholy, the meridian demon, the mourning of gardens. Here are the Holy Week processions, the ritual chanting of balconies, the heartbreaking and proud loneliness. Emotions embodied in the rush of a single polyphonic body. If Gil Evan had succeeded, Miles’s words, in making an orchestra sound like a single guitar, Michael Leonhart’s arrangement and orchestration for the small ensemble conceived by Alberto Fabris, the ingenious introduction into the ensemble of cellos, reveal even more clearly the motion of the rhythms and harmonic constellations, the purity of the melodies, the indestructible force of the ancient Arabian scales that dig, bend and twist in the soul like an Andalusian blues. After all, Spain never moved from here, from this early hybridization of black Africa into a music that after a few centuries would be called jazz.