Flamenco: the moor's last sigh

Spain's folk music has gone medieval - and it works, says Philip Sweeney

Over the past year, the hybrids variously known as new flamenco, flamenco-rock and flamenco-pop have scaled the heights of Spanish music. The most noticeable evidence has been the chart success of the last album by Ketama, the flamenco-Latin fusion band named after Morocco's main Appellation Controlee hashish town, followed by several dozen other young gypsy artists such as La Barberia del Sur, and Ketama's contemporary Raimundo Amador, who performs the unlikely feat of welding acoustic flamenco guitar to electric blues.

Up there in the pantheon of Spanish music, worshipped by colleagues and decorated by the government, is Paco de Lucia, who started it all 25 years ago with his jazz and light Latin nuances, and his incorporation of bass guitar and percussion for the first time into concert-hall art flamenco.

Could it be, though, that Paco de Lucia is not 100 per cent hero, but responsible for igniting a spark that sent a good part of young flamenco creation sizzling off up a blind alley? There are those who find the addition of jazz harmony weakens flamenco, and the imposition of blues cadences on cante jondo melody a jarring anomaly. There is, after all, another way to experiment.

Less noticeably, but far more interestingly, a parallel school has existed, coupling flamenco with Arab and medieval European musics, genres far more appropriate to its stern ancient sound because of genuine shared antecedence. The civilian duo Lole Y Manuel first performed classic Egyptian songs in the late Seventies, and subsequently a series of flamenco singers have recorded with North African orchestras.

Three years ago, a new and distinguished practitioner appeared on the scene with the release of the album Rumba Argelina (Algerian rumba) by Radio Tarifa. Both names are significant - the album title suggesting a rendering by North Africa of one of the light styles of flamenco, while the group name refers to the southernmost point of Spain, near Gibraltar, where the North African coastline is hazily visible from Europe.

Rumba Argelina is a terrific record, an unusual combination of scholarship and artistry, taste and intelligence, under-statement and power. The title track itself blends a soft warbling Arabic flute with banjo, bass and the characterful Granada-accented but not flamenco voice of the singer Benjamin Escoriza. Things just get better. "Oye China" could serve as a textbook model for the mixing of Spanish and Latin American music, a lilting soulful flamenco milonga tweaked gently in the direction of a Cuban country guajira by a banjo, hissing maracas and, unusually, a plaintive accordion. Then there's "Nu Alrest", a 13th-century German troubadour song translated and set for sinister electric guitar, crumhorn and crashing percussion.

The remarkable thing is that the record was almost entirely put together in a small home studio by two semi-amateur musician researchers - Raphael "Fain" Sanchez Duenas and Vincent Molino. A year later, I chanced to see a performance by a live version of Radio Tarifa, recruited after the album's success. It was a colourful nine-piece including a Sikh tabla player from Chicago, a Somali accordionist, and, also deployed with unerringly accurate taste, a single male flamenco dancer.

Duenas and Molino are as erudite and reflective as their music would lead you to expect. Both have only recently been able to give up their day jobs - Duenas is an architect, and Molino, from Montpellier in France, is a hydrologist. (Escoriza, the third original member, works in a TV production company.)

They met in the early Eighties and concentrated initially on medieval and Arabic music, forming a group called Ars Antiqua Musicalis. Radio Tarifa's work is based largely on the projection into the musical present of the ancient modal melodic system which lasted in Spain into the 16th century, and which persists in Arabic and Turkish music. Partly, this is ideological: a desire to create something Mediterranean before American culture sweeps all before it.

Duenas and Molino continue to scour libraries and collections for medieval music manuscripts and Arabic melodies. The rough tapes from the new album they play me include combinations such as a 16th-century Sephardic song set for crumhorn, bouzouki and Hammond organ.

The Anglo-Saxon heritage isn't entirely excluded. New Radio Tarifa repertory includes one song attributed to our very own Henry VIII, a prolific writer it seems, which should be a refreshing, if minor, morale boost for the British monarchy.

Radio Tarifa appear at QEH, London SE1 on Tuesday (0171-960 4242), Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham, 25 May (0121-440 3838) and Womad, Bristol (0117-922 1996). 'Rumba Argelina' is released on Monday by World Circuit