Kiki Morente is nine years old and she is woken up by noises at the door. It is his father, Enrique Morente, who is recording from the San Nicolás viewpoint, in front of the Alhambra, the bells of a parish in the Albaicín to mix them with a choir of Bulgarian voices. “A dog barks and the singer says: 'well, it's not that bad either, maybe they'll confuse him with me.'” The anecdote is beautiful and reveals the adventurous and uninhibited spirit of the immense singer. Her mother, Aurora Carbonell, and her sisters, Estrella and Soleá, laugh heartily when they hear an unknown story but that they recognize as if they had lived it.
The Morentes have met at the family home in Granada for the Morente documentary
Morente's history with Barcelona begins in 1973 in the Verdum neighborhood, where a 16-year-old teenager named Lluís Cabrera, who would later found the Taller de Músics, created the first flamenco peña with his name, and concludes in November 2010 in the stage of El Molino, stage where he offered what would be his last concert a month before he died. Mayte Martín wanted him to be the one to pour “the holy water” on the new flamenco cycle that had been entrusted to him. From the audience, Pasqual Maragall asks the maestro: “A few years ago, you had a club in Verdum, right?” “Of course,” Morente replied, “that's where we met.” And he sang some tientos for “Mr. President, Mr. Mayor, Mr. Friend.” “He sang as if he knew it would be the last time he would do it,” Martín recalls in the documentary, which reveals that the singer refused to collect that now historic gig.
Morente had heard her sing in the Nou Barris club, when she was only eight years old, but although he had returned many times (for the Festa del Treball, the Catalan Culture Congress of '77...) they did not meet until the Seminar. Carmen Amaya Flamenco International held in 1989 at Mas Pinc, the dancer's home in Begur. “There was a big deal there,” recalls Cabrera, who came up with the idea for the documentary and a central character in this story, who together with Lola Huete, also from the Taller de Músics, and Mingus B. Formentor, led to an unusual meeting of musicians. flamencos (Morente, Sabicas, Manolo Sanlúcar, Matilde, Coral, Rafael el Negro...) with Pakistani musicians (Sabri Brothers), Chinese (Guo Brothers) or the American jazzmen Cecil Taylor. “The emotional, experiential, and vital relationship was enormous,” recalls Mingus B. Formentor. From there would come New York-Granada, the posthumous album of the great guitarist.
Blessed follies that Morente, open to experimentation, always moving forward, never stopped embracing. Here his collaboration with Max Roach was forged and where he lit the fuse of the revolutionary Omega, with songs by Leonard Cohen (when the Canadian received the demo he ran to a station in Los Angeles to be played non-stop, says Alberto Manzano) . Here he sang with Pat Metheny or with the Bulgarian Angelite Voices; and he dreamed of the electrifying one-on-one with Sonic Youth after seeing them at Primavera Sound. “Can she be more proud of your father?” Soleá asks herself, putting her hands to her head.
At another moment, Poveda summarizes his vision of someone who learned so much: “He was a free being. He knew every corner of flamenco. But he was also a rocker, a poet, a man awake to the world. That's why he was drawn to Barcelona, a place where you could breathe freedom and curiosity about whoever had something new and different to tell."
