Cádiz and Peru, two places linked by the flamenco cajón

The idyll was immediate.

The guitarist Paco de Lucía heard a cajón for the first time at a party for the Spanish ambassador in Peru, in 1977. He immediately understood that this percussion instrument played by the famous cajoneador, Carlos

While accompanying the singer-songwriter Chabuca Granda, Soto solved a flamenco problem.

“We had always used clapping and no one can stand clapping for two hours.

And the cajón was like the feet of a bailaor because there is the sound of the sole and that of the heel”, the guitarist recounted in EL PAÍS.

46 years have passed since then, although it seems that this Peruvian instrument has been linked to flamenco for a lifetime.

"What would be different now would be to see a flamenco group without a cajón," ironically Juan José Téllez, a writer and expert on the figure of the musician, who died nine years ago.

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Three worlds in a drawer

The celebration in Cádiz next week, from March 27 to 30, of the IX International Congress of the Spanish Language (CILE), after the political situation prevented it from doing so in Arequipa (Peru), has become a perfect reason to honor one of the best examples of those back and forth stories that mark Andalusian culture.

An hour before the inaugural flamenco concert, titled

—starring the artists Carmen Linares, Marina Heredia and Arcángel—, at the Falla Theater in Cádiz at 7:30 p.m., 64 participants will gather in a mixed-race cajonada.

The activity, open to citizen participation, will be led by percussionists Guillermo García,

(Spain) and Mario Cubillas (Peru) and is guaranteed a symbolic charge.

“From Cádiz many boxes of merchandise left for America, they arrived there and were surely beaten like everyday objects that served as the first drawers.

Then they came back transformed into an instrument designed and built by a luthier”, sums up Pepe Zapata, organizer of the meeting and head of Cajón Expo, an initiative to investigate and disseminate the figure of this percussion instrument with residence in the Granada Science Park. .

If the flamenco history of the cajón is recent, its baggage as a fully standardized percussion element in Peruvian music is much older.

Its origin is linked to Chincha, an area south of Lima with a prominent population of African origin.

There, at the beginning of the 17th century, the Church prohibited the use of drums by slaves, considering them pagan and dangerous.

Without them, any element became capable of being a percussion instrument.

“It was played on a table, in a fruit box.

It also happens with other folklore that use everyday elements”, details Zapata.

The first iconographic representations of the cajón were not found until the beginning of the 20th century and we must go back to 1969 to find the moment in which it acquired its current proportions and shape:

Rubem Dantas, Tino Di Geraldo and Jorge Pardo, in a concert in homage to Chick Corea at JazzMadrid.

“The poet and historian Nicomedes Santa Cruz (Lima, 1925-Madrid, 1992) traveled to many places investigating its origin.

It was he who proposed some measurements in a newspaper article as a construction standard”, explains Zapata, who belongs to the Cajonán Association, dedicated to the figure of the artisan builder of the cajón.

With the chair already established, Paco de Lucía found it a few years later and brought it to Spain at the hands of Rubem Dantas, the Brazilian musician who on that day in 1977 shared this discovery with the guitarist from Algeciras, who came to buy Caitro the drawer with which he had played at the ambassador's party.

Solo quiero caminar

and

(1981), by Paco de Lucía and Camarón de la Isla, respectively, are the first albums in which Dantas introduces the cajón as part of his percussion.

“It was something withering.

His sonority replaces fingers on a table, ”says Téllez, who still remembers the impression he had when listening to Paco de Lucía and his group for the first time in the eighties of the last century.

“It was a new world, it wasn't just the cajón, it was the use of other instruments in flamenco, like the bass.

It's all very unusual."

Zapata prefers to use the word “transculturation” to define the symbiosis that occurred between Spanish flamenco and the Peruvian cajón: “One culture adapts or supplants the other, like the layers.

Everything is born from a mixture”.

In Peru, the instrument was officially declared as cultural patrimony of the nation in 2001, in a clear step forward in reaffirming its origins.

Meanwhile, in Spain it has followed its own course and has marked the lives of percussionists, such as Carlos Merino from Jerez, capable of identifying winks from here and there in the way of using the instrument: "There are many flamenco rhythms that, although they are not the same, , they can live with the Peruvian patterns.

What we call here in one way, there is another, but it can be the same”.

The cajón finally came into Merino's hands at a party in the nineties, when he was barely “seven or eight years old”.

He immediately felt the connection that Dantas and De Lucía must have experienced at that event in Lima.

Now he is one of the experts in Jerez, the cradle of flamenco and one of the schools —along with Madrid, Seville and Barcelona— that the percussionist lists as the essential nodes for learning and styles of this instrument.

He is in such good health that Merino already glimpses new trips to the box, now towards other music: “He is already on tours with Alejandro Sanz.

There are acoustic formats where cajón is used instead of drums.

It's in all music."

Who was going to tell those merchants from Cádiz that centuries later their boxes of merchandise were going to have such a rhythmic destiny.

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