Last Wednesday, at (Le) Poisson Rouge (which occupies the hallowed Bleecker Street premises of the old Village Gate), Pedro Soler, a master of flamenco guitar, who is seventy-four, and his son, Gaspar Claus, an experimental cellist, who is twenty-eight, conversed onstage intently for about two hours. They weren’t talking—they were playing (for the first time in New York), and their fiercely different approaches to plucking strings made for an intriguing duet.
The duet became a trio towards the end of the program, with the appearance of Bryce Dessner, the classically trained, indie-rock guitarist of the National and Clogs, who used a bow on his electric guitar. Dessner produced “Barlande,” Soler and Claus’s first joint album, which was released in August. “I’m part of the family,” he explained, after the show. (He is the partner of Soler’s daughter, and Claus’s sister, Clara; he also happens to be the bandmate, in the National, of his own twin brother, Aaron. A family that plays together, apparently, stays together.)
“This music is a beautiful melting pot of sonic worlds,” Dessner continued. “Pedro’s goal is to purify flamenco of its showy, sort of heartless virtuosity, and to take the genre back to its authentic roots.” (Flamenco “puro,” or “gitano,” was the vibrant, melancholy music of a dispossessed people, the Roma, and it resonates with the sounds of India and North Africa—Gypsy way stations on the path to Spain.)
“Flamenco has become too harmonious and agreeable,” Soler added, in French. “It wasn’t written, it was improvised, like jazz; it was a cry from the heart—not a performance. I want to recapture that sense of rawness and danger.” (He, like flamenco, was born in Andalusia, but he moved to southern France as a young man, to escape the Franco dictatorship; it was in Toulouse, the capital-in-exile of the Spanish Republic, that he learned his art from other émigré musicians.)
Claus’s mother, Madeleine, is German, and he took her last name, she explained to me, because Spanish nomenclature (matronyms tacked onto patronyms) was too confusing for Gaspar’s French elementary-school teachers. He studied cello at a conservatory in Perpignan, from seven until seventeen, at which point—“fed up,” he said, with rules and formality (not unlike his father)—he abandoned his instrument, studied philosophy, and worked as an actor. After five years without playing a note, he picked up the cello again, but to explore avant-garde and electronic composition, and to experiment with sounds that his father describes as “éraillés,” (which can mean “frayed,” or “raucous,” but also “off the rails.”) “They come from very separate places, mindsets, and generations,” Dessner said, “but their styles are united by physicality.”
You would never actually guess that Soler and Claus are père et fils from mingling with them in a green room. The father has long white hair, handsome Roman features, and the compact build of Picasso. The son is pale, dark and thin, with a poetic aura of fragility. But you might guess their kinship by seeing them on a stage. Claus improvised his fraying, off-the-rails music with his eyes closed, while Soler watched him with a rapt paternal gaze.
Photograph by Guy Le Querrec/Magnum.
