A Short Introduction to Spanish Music

Nine albums and one Tiny Desk performance for newcomers to Spanish music (plus a short primer on Latin American music in Spanish too)

Rosalía in a concert in Mexico, Secretaría de Cultura de la Ciudad de México, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

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Also, please note that today’s column discusses alternative music with adult themes. Some of the lyrics might contain profanities. The music (and the videos) might not be suitable for small children or an office setting.

When the COVID-19 pandemic started, C. Tangana - possibly the only Latin trap star with a philosophy degree - had a rap album recorded and ready to roll. However, he felt that it wasn’t what the world needed at the time. He decided to put it on ice while he worked with Catalan producer Alizzz (who is named after grunge band Alice in Chains) to develop more universal music.

The two called on La Húngara and el Niño de Elche (Spanish flamenco singers), the Gipsy Kings (the famous rumba band from France, who have family roots in Catalonia in Spain) and Kiko Veneno (a Spanish rumba singer) to collaborate with them on tracks that would combine the rhythms of flamenco and rumba with Latin trap production. They also worked with a number of international stars who had influenced them over the years, including Andrés Calamaro (an Argentinian singer-songwriter), Eliades Ochoa (a member of Cuban supergroup la Buena Vista Social Club), José Feliciano (a Puerto Rican musician), Jorge Drexler (a Uruguayan singer-songwriter) and Toquinho (a Brazilian bossa nova guitarist).

The result was El Madrileño (2021), a homage to Tangana’s home city of Madrid, as well as Latin music in general and flamenco, rumba and flamenco-fusion in particular. It is a true masterpiece. Tangana, who specialises in sing-song rapping, might not have the greatest voice in the world, but he knows how to tell a great story and he surrounded himself with talented vocalists.

To promote the album, Tangana and Alizzz also recorded a Tiny Desk performance (2021), featuring el Niño de Elche, Veneno and La Húngara, as well as Antonio Carmona of flamenco-fusion group Ketama. The performance features salty lyrics in Spanish, plus an unexpected hat tip to New Order. The album itself is as sexy and self-aware as you would expect from someone who embraced Latin trap in his youth and also earned a philosophy degree. It is a fantastic entry point into music in Spanish.

A number of the best tracks deal on El Madrileño with desamor (heartbreak, which, rather magnificently, is seen as being the opposite of falling in love in Spanish). Tangana had been in a relationship with another Spanish vocalist, Rosalía, between 2016 and 2018. They had met when he was 25 or 26 and she was 23 or 24.

Tangana had co-written eight of the 11 tracks on Rosalía’s breakthrough album, El mar querer (2018), which is the second album on today’s list. This album successfully combines Latin trap production with flamenco styling; and is inspired by an anonymous 13th century novel written in Occitan (a sister language of Catalan). Rosalía, who is Catalan and studied flamenco singing at a Conservatory in Barcelona, sings in Spanish. El mal querer is a concept album about a toxic relationship.

The album, which Rosalía co-produced with el Guincho, is beautifully executed. The two traditions, flamenco and Latin trap, sit well together, although by bringing them together, the record belongs to neither and creates its own category. At a touch over 30 minutes long, it is an accessible listen, with no filler tracks whatsoever.

After paying tribute to the great Costa Rican singer of Mexican rancheras, Chavela Vargas, with a cover version of one of her most famous songs in 2020, Rosalía’s next album, Motomami (2022), took her deeper into Latin American music, particularly alternative reggaetón. She produced it herself alongside 11 other producers, including el Guincho. The record features guest vocals from Dominican rapper Tokischa, as well as Canadian superstar the Weeknd. Despite this nod to the mainstream, and its confessional lyrics, the album is deeply experimental and resolutely fails to stick to any conventional genres. It received rave reviews, although - to my ears - it falls a little short of her previous album.

Let me pause for four paragraphs now to give some background to any readers who are wondering what I am talking about. What is flamenco? Or rumba? Or flamenco-fusion? Or Latin trap? Or reggaetón? Let’s start with flamenco, a folkloric art form nurtured for centuries in the south of Spain, particularly Andalucía, by gitanos of Romani ethnicity. It can be a conservative art, preserving ancient musical traditions from India (the homeland of the gitanos about 1,000 years ago) and al-Andalus (Muslim Spain, which survived in the south of the country up to 1492, with Morisco converts to Christianity gradually integrating into the mainstream), as well as ballads from Spain’s Old Christians plus (allegedly) a style from the Jewish / crypto-Jewish community.

Flamenco is divided into palos, or categories of songs with their own guidelines to facilitate improvisation. La rumba flamenca - often shortened to rumba - is one of the cantes chicos (minor songs). Rumba is known as un cante de ida y vida (round-trip songs, which moved from Spain to Cuba and back again during the Spanish Empire). The style picked up Afro-Cuban influences during its stay in the Caribbean. There was a strong rumba catalana scene in Barcelona, led by gitano singers, including Peret, singing Cuban-influenced songs from the 1950s onwards. It was popularised internationally by the Gipsy Kings. From the late 1970s, some flamenco artists began to combine the guitar virtuosity and improvisational techniques of traditional flamenco with influences from jazz, rumba and world music. This is flamenco-fusion.

Hip hop (also known as rap) first emerged in the Bronx in New York in the 1970s, based on kids rhyming over beats borrowed from the breaks found in disco music, as well as funk and soul. Hip hop from Atlanta, Georgia, often deploys minimalistic drones and multilayered synth rhythms. The word “trap,” which refers to drug dens, began to be used to refer to this style from the 1990s. It went mainstream from about 2011. Trap music began to take off in Puerto Rico from around 2007, gaining prominence from around 2014 or 2015. Latin trap features heavy use of autotuned vocals and has become extremely popular throughout the Spanish-speaking world.

Reggaetón (big reggae) also has its roots in Puerto Rico, as well as Dominican Republic and Panama. It developed from the late 1980s, but gained prominence in the 1990s. It evolved out of Jamaican dancehall, which itself evolved out of reggae; but imported strong hip hop influences too. Reggaetón is one of the most popular styles of music in the world today; and there has been crossover with Latin trap in recent years.

Flamenco can be an intimidating art-form for newcomers, particularly el cante jondo (deep songs). If you want to explore the more accessible side of flamenco-influenced soul in a little more depth, I recommend Mi niña Lola (2006) by Concha Buika as a good starting point. The singer was born in Mallorca in 1972 to political exiles from Equatorial Guinea (a former Spanish colony in Central Africa) and grew up in Son Gotleu, a barrio (neighbourhood) of Palma de Mallorca, where many immigrants rub shoulders with gitanos on a daily basis. She worked with producer Javier Limón for the album, which is soulful, emotionally direct and accessible.

If you are interested in exploring flamenco-fusion, Lágrimas negras (2003) by Bebo Valdés & Diego El Cigala is very listenable*. The album was also produced by Limón, alongside Fernando Trueba. Valdés, a Cuban pianist who later passed away in 2013 at the age of 94, joined forces with flamenco singer El Cigala (the crayfish - a singer born in 1968) for a Latin jazz album. The vocals give it a strong flamenco feel, without actually belonging to that genre; and it deploys Afro-Cuban rhythms.

The five albums we have mentioned before were all recorded in the 21st century; and four of them seek connections between ancestral Spanish music and the wider Latin world, with a particular emphasis on Afro-Latin beats, while the remaining album showcases talent from the African diaspora. Tangana’s album is a good example of this search for connection. The first song begins with horns from an Easter Week procession in Cadiz before cutting to the minimalist beats of Latin trap.

The background to this crossover is massive immigration to Spain in the 21st century from Latin America, Africa and further afield. As I have mentioned previously in this blog, the number of immigrants in Spain has gone from fewer than one in a hundred when I first moved to Madrid in 1991 to almost one in five now. Many young Spaniards are growing up with friends with roots elsewhere. The conversation that Rosalía and Tangana have established between Latin trap and flamenco makes perfect sense in the context of a fast-changing society, as does an African singer who grew up with gitanos belting out flamenco-influenced songs; and a flamenco singer jamming to Afro-Cuban rhythms.

Although flamenco has its roots in Andalucía, it spread all over Spain as poor migrants moved from the countryside in the south to big cities like Barcelona, Bilbao and Madrid from the 1950s onwards. Flamenco-fusion band Ketama perfectly captured the dynamics with a song from 1991 urging the band’s cousins in Andalucía to move to Madrid.

It was very different a few decades back. After the Civil War and the awful post-war repression, the dictatorship decided to promote international tourism in the 1960s. A telling slogan - “Spain is different!” - was widely used. Sevillanas (folk music from Sevilla in Andalucía that has been influenced by flamenco over the years) was heavily promoted during these years. In fact, the popular image of flamenco dancing outside Spain, with colourful dresses and castanets, usually refers to sevillanas. The music sold to tourist as flamenco is often in reality sevillanas, coplas (folk music from Andalucía) or rumba. The real thing is much less commercial or accessible to newcomers.

Two genius flamenco artists, gitano singer Camarón de la Isla (1950-1992) and non-gitano guitarist Paco de Lucía (1947-2014), revolutionised el cante jondo (profound flamenco songs often about the darker side of life) with nine albums between 1969 and 1977. The records all emphasised emotional depth, artistry and purity. They are all amazing, although my personal favourite is Rosa María (1976), which is the sixth album on today’s list. The power of Camarón’s voice combined with de Lucía’s virtuoso improvisional skill is difficult to describe using the written word.

After demonstrating the power of flamenco purity, both artists later pioneered flamenco-fusion. The singer broke new ground with La leyenda del tiempo (1979), which is just attributed to Camarón rather than using his full artistic name. It includes a rumba song written by Veneno; and explores the roots of the gitanos in India by using sitars. It is a powerful and moving record. Five of the ten tracks are based on poetry by Federico García Lorca, who was killed by Spanish nationalists in the Civil War for being gay. He had promoted el cante jondo in the 1920s and 1930s.

If anyone ever tells you that Jimi Hendrix was the greatest guitarist ever seen, the correct response should be to ask if the other person has ever listened to don Paco. Live… One Summer Night (1984) by Paco de Lucía Sextet is a fantastic introduction to the man’s improvisational genius in a live setting. He happily played alongside a percussionist, a bassist and a musician who swapped between the flute and the saxophone (all considered non-flamenco instruments by purists), with some jazz influences. They songs expand and contract.

The final album on my list is Básico (2002) by Antonio Vega, which is also a live album. After Spanish dictator Francisco Franco died in 1975, the country’s music scene sprung into life, with a golden age for rock and pop bands between roughly 1977 and 1990. The scene had a dark side, as Spain also lived through a heroin epidemic in the 1980s; and many talented figures ended up dying far too young, including influential flamenco singer Camarón.

One interesting band was called Nacha Pop, which produced six studio albums between 1980 and 1987. Its leader, Vega, went solo afterwards and recorded five further studio albums. A genius lyricist, each album he recorded had at least one or two great songs. He pulled many of them together in a live album recorded in 2002. It appears gentle, but if you speak Spanish, a close listen will reveal dark lyrics.

I was lucky enough to meet Vega a few times in the early 1990s due to a strange quirk of fate. I spent a year living near the Retiro park in Madrid on the road to Vallecas. My flatmate at the time was older than me and her boyfriend was Vega’s guitarist. He invited me to see Vega’s band rehearse and to go backstage after a gig. As a fan of noisy American guitar music at the time, I wasn’t quite ready for dark poetry set to gentle music at the time, although Vega’s art has steadily grown on me in the following years. Sadly, the singer had developed some seriously bad habits, along with many of his generation, and died much too young in 2009 at the age of 51.

I have tried to keep this list to nine albums and one Tiny Desk performance to keep it user-friendly for newcomers to Spanish music. If you want to dig deeper into Spanish music, though, let me mention a few more albums that were in my longlist. Flamenco singer José Mercé brought modern production techniques to an ancient style. Aire (2000) is excellent. If you are interested in flamenco-fusion, Enrique Morente’s 1996 collaboration with rock band Lagartija Nick, Omega (2016 reissue), was ground-breaking at the time. I also recommend Bari (2002, remastered in 2010) by Ojos de Brujo and De Aki A Ketama (1995) by Ketama.

Once you have attuned your ears to flamenco, rumba and flamenco-fusion, it is also worth having a listen to Sephardi folk music sung in Ladino (an old dialect of Spanish). These songs survived in countries like Turkey and later Israel, while also picking up influences from contemporary flamenco in recent years. I recommend La Judería (2005) by Yasmin Levy.

Manu Chao is half-Spanish and has lived in Barcelona for many years. He began his career with French rock band Manu Negra. He discovered Latin beats on a tour of Colombia and then recorded two essential albums, Clandestino (Esperando la última ola…) (1998) and Próxima Estación… Esperanza (2001). He offers multi-lingual songs, left-wing social commentary and global beats, particularly reggae.

Spain has never been particularly strong in post-punk, but there are some gems out there. My kids are huge fans of Depresión Sonera and El arte de morir muy despacio (2022) is excellent. Radio Futura led the way. La ley del desierto / La ley del mar (1984) is a good introduction to the scene.

Finally, if you want to dig deeper into the wider world of Latin American music in Spanish, it is easy enough to look up the work of the artists who collaborated on Tangana’s El Madrileño. I would start with the Afro-Cuban masterwork, Buena Vista Social Club (1997), if you haven’t heard it before. The documentary about the project is good too. The original idea was to get Cuban stars to jam with musicians from Mali. This project, nurtured by Ry Cooder, eventually became Afrocubism (2010), which is much more obscure, but also excellent.

Afro-Cuban music inspired the global salsa scene. Ray Barretto’s Indestructible (1973) is a good starting point to explore this music. He was an American percussionist of Puerto Rican descent, who is probably most famous for his collaborations with the late Cuban Queen of Salsa, Celia Cruz (here’s a rumba track). Barretto’s album is so good that when flamenco singer El Cigala recorded an album of salsa covers, he also called it Indestructible (2016).

If you want to geek out, you should know that salsa music is based on la clave, a syncopated framework for free improvisation in Afro-Latin and Afro-Caribbean music, including some early rhythm and blues (R&B). It derives directly from the African bell pattern. Brazilian music, which has similar rhythmic patterns to those in Cuba, is probably beyond the scope of this essay, but please start your research with Tribalistas (2002) by Tribalistas.

Pianist Eddie Palmieri and his elder brother Charlie - Americans of Puerto Rican descent - have recorded music that spans both salsa and Latin jazz. I recommend the brothers’ Harlem River Drive (1971) album, which is based on a short-lived band of the same name. It explored the point of crossover between Latin music and funk in New York. The pianist also has a great Tiny Desk (2016).

In the 1990s, the younger Palmieri joined house producers Masters at Work for their Nuyorican Soul (1997) album, which paid tribute to the forward-looking and experimental Latin music of the 1970s. As with El Madrileño, going through the work of the guest musicians, in this case spanning artists from Puerto Rican bandleader Tito Puente to the godfather of disco Vincent Montana Jr (bandleader of the Salsoul Orchestra), would be an educational experience.

If you have never listened to much hip hop, Illmatic (1994), featuring Nas’ multi-syllabic internal rhymes about growing up in Queens, New York, over beats borrowed from funk soul and jazz, would be a good starting point. Watch out for the cornet solo from Nas’s dad, jazz musician Olu Dara, on one of the tracks. The rapper has said of his dad: “My music is the child of his music. It’s obvious.” We might be going a little off-topic now, but if you haven’t listened to much jazz, you need to stop what you are doing and go and listen to A Love Supreme (1965) by John Coltrane right now!

To see how hip hop transmuted into trap in Atlanta, Georgia, and surrounding areas, I would recommend Culture (2017) by Migos, the second album from a trap band that formed in the suburbs of the city in 2008. Latin trap can be a little superficial at times, but Monarca (2021) by Eladio Carrión (an American rapper whose family moved back to Puerto Rico as a kid) is an introspective take on the style. The album is worth a listen so you can see how trap music has evolved as it has spread outside Georgia and through the Caribbean and from there the Spanish-speaking world. If you don’t want to commit to a full album, Carrión has a Tiny Desk performance from 2024.

Latin trap’s sister style reggaetón tends to be party music and can be a little tiresome over the course a whole album. However, alternative hip hop band Calle 13 of Puerto Rico has drawn on the style’s rhythms rather successfully for deeper music. Calle 13 (2005) is well worth a listen. If you enjoyed it, the band’s front man, Residente, has two excellent alternative hip hop solo albums: Residente (2017) and Las letras ya no importan (2024). His lyrics are amazing if you speak Spanish or want to learn. Also, Orquídeas (2024) by Colombian-American pop star Kali Uchis brings reggaetón-based syncopation into modern R&B in a satisfying way. See you next week!

*El Cigala was found guilty of domestic violence in 2021. Enjoying his music is not an endorsement of any other aspect of his life.

Previously on Sharpen Your Axe

Immigration to Spain (part one, part two and part three)

The move from the countryside to the cities

Further Reading

Duende: A Journey in Search of Flamenco by Jason Webster

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