The double-bass player Renaud García-Fons, with a watchmaker’s precision, sets the pace making the arc jump against the strings of his instrument. If you look closely, you will notice it has five strings, one more than usually does. But what García-Fons do to his double bass has nothing ordinary. It sounds like a telegraph spitting out a Morse code message, keeping the pace of the “garrotín”, a humble music we don’t know where was born, if in Asturias, Lleida or Sacromonte. Nevertheless, a “garrotín” has never sound like this, and neither did a “rondeña” or a “malagueña”, or anything played by Dorantes and García-Fons together.
The “Lebrijano”’s nephew and the French double-bass player, who performed their second concert in the San Miguel Jamboree Jazz Festival, achieved something unusual, a kind of artistic bilocation. It is like if they could be in two places at the same time: in the center of flamenco and absolutely out of it, attacking it from other music, like Scientifics from the most different disciplines who face up an unexplainable phenomenon. “Now we will perform a “bulería”, but we will do it our way”, Dorantes said. “In our style”, affirmed the French one. And we don’t say their flamenco seem an artificial product at all, but that it sounds like something which is getting invented right now. Something we can’t name appropriately.
They showed some of the experiments that takes part of their first album together, “Paseo a dos”, in the Jamboree. It is a catalogue of new questions for flamenco with its corresponding answers. According to each piece’s architecture, the double bass told the melody and the piano turned into a guitar to accompany it or vice versa, in a game not very harsh but extremely subtle. The understanding was so precise that the pianist and the double-bass player seemed one; although, we saw two different personalities when they performed separated: Dorantes much more passionate, García-Fons much more warm, as if he was feeling it inside. Or outside, where Dorantes and García-Fons seem to travel, pianist and double-bass player, the first from Lebrija, the second one from Paris, the most unlikely flamenco inventor’s couple we know until today.
Elperiodico.com
Roger Roca
14/11/2016
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