PURO FLAMENCO

 

On 22 January 2010, the Auditorium of the Colegio Mayor San Juan Evangelista was the venue chosen for a deserved tribute to the Almeria singer Alfonso Salmerón. The reason was to celebrate the fifty years in flamenco of an artist who is rigorous in the more orthodox songs and at the same time open to the ‘new nuances’ that enrich his musical world, the reason for which he has collaborated with, for example, José Carreras and Herbert von Karajan (Marcos Escánez).

Despite having achieved a certain professional stability and always brimming over with life, his restless spirit pushes him to investigate new musical formulas, aways from the deepest orthodoxy, and with the sole aim of giving greater importance to the meaning and presentation of cante jondo. He is outstanding in songs with beat, such as alegrías, bulerías and tangos, and in the songs from his land, fundamentally the taranto, which he performs with great emotion, offering them to his audience impregnated with all the love he still feels for his native land. We can also appreciate his fondness for seguiriya and soleá, songs in which he feels particularly comfortable.

The artist is coming to this year’s edition of Suma Flamenca as Puro Flamenco, in the styles that are most representative of his singing. In addition to the palos already mentioned, there are tonás, fandangos, caracoles and martinetes. With them, and accompanied by guitar and box, he will complete a recital that summarizes that career of fifty years, the anthology of an artist who looks back now on all he has done just as when he recorded his latest disc 50 años de flamenco.