A CD of flamenco cante by Antonio de la Malena

I have been trying for at least two years to persuade Antonio de la Malena to record a CD of flamenco cante.  At last, I´ve succeeded.

Bear in mind that he has two CDs of his own already, and is one of several people on countless other CDs, but his own two CDs are of flamenco fusion and the others, well, they are group efforts.  But Antonio is first and foremost a singer of flamenco cante--flamenco puro.  The old stuff.  The original stuff.  The stuff that led me, personally, to flamenco.

El Bo, Antonio de la Malena, Manuel Parilla, and others.

I was very, very pleased, then, that he finally agreed to doing the CD.  It´s a joint venture, meaning that Palomino Productions gets to finance it (oh, joy) and another organization (which shall remain nameless for the moment) will do the marketing.  Antonio, of course, does the singing and all the organizing of the recording sessions and I go along for the fun of it.

We´ve now gotten 8 of the minimum 10 tracks recorded.  We have two more recording sessions in which he´ll record either 3 or 4 more tracks (so it will be a more-than-complete CD), then a final session where the technician works the sound (with Antonio supervising).

The bulerias fin de fiesta crowd, with a couple of friends and me, on the far right.

 For all but two tracks, Antonio is the only singer;  on the other two, he´s joined in one case by his brother Manuel de Malena, and in another (the fin de fiesta), he´s joined by 8 other people!   In all but two tracks, there is also a guitarist (Manuel Parilla for two, Malena Hijo for four and Santiago Moreno for two).   In the other two, Antonio sings alone.

Two things that make everything a bit of a cliff-hanger are that a) I go back to California in two weeks (and we REALLY want to get all the recording and sound work done before I leave) plus b) the sound studio owner-operator´s wife is very pregnant and about to deliver.  When she does, the sound studio will close down for a week.  And of course, we have no way of knowing exactly when that will happen.

El Bo is the principal palmero-jaleo person.

More on this later, but I will say that this is going to be a very good CD.

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