Eva Yerbabuena

Eva Yerbabuena and her Ballet Flamenco company opened the London Flamenco Festival at Sadler's Wells with three performances of her latest production, El Huso de la Memoria (The Spindle of Memory). A native of Granada, despite having been born in Frankfurt, La Yerbabuena is one of the leading flamenco dancers of her generation. Her new production blends traditional flamenco with modern dance styles to create a rather abstract, but captivating performance. It consists of a number of precisely choreographed numbers with different combinations of male and female dancers, with a focus on time, symmetry and rhythmic repetition subtly inspired by West Side Story. These numbers are interspersed with more free-flowing interludes from dancer Aida Badía, performing to saetas, unaccompanied prayers originating in the Easter processions. Eva Yerbabuena dances four numbers, the third of which is by far the highlight of the show, and danced to a soleá (an improvised combination of three- or four-verse stanzas over a 12-beat metre). The musical accompaniment is provided by four male singers, two guitars, flute/soprano saxophone, and percussion.

This type of more artsy, large-production performance will probably not appeal so much to those preferring the more intimate, low-key setting of traditional flamenco haunts, but it's a fair compromise to see the more established dancers who have graduated from the tablao. Of course, I wanted to see Isabel Bayón on Wednesday, but it's sold out already. The clip below is from one of Yerbabuena's performances at the 2006 Bienal de Flamenco in Seville, with singer Miguel Poveda, courtesy of traza

Flamenco v The World

Tomatito and Michel Camilo, live at the Barbican, Nov 15th

This was one of the most anticipated concerts at this year's London Jazz Festival. Discovered by Paco de Lucía, Tomatito hails from Almería, in the east of Andalucía, and at 48, is one of the leading flamenco guitarists of his generation. Michel Camilo, a native of the Dominican Republic, is regarded as the pre-eminent Latin American jazz pianist. Putting the two together is seemingly a recipe for a sublime evening of highly controlled chaos. Both are strongly influenced by the music of Astor Piazzolla, and started their set with Libertango. The programme combined another two Piazzolla compositions, an amazing performance of Fuga y Misterio and Adiós Nonino, with compositions by both artists from their second collaborative album, Spain Again (the first one, if you're wondering, was called Spain). Both players traverse the various realms of Latin American, Spanish and jazz music with ease, but their playing is always strongly rooted in their respective Spanish and Caribbean roots, which makes for a fascinating contrast of playing styles and rhythms. Tomatito's guitar playing speaks for itself, but Camilo's piano playing at times leaves you completely speechless, switching effortlessly from tango, to rumba, to salsa, to blues, and sometimes even playing more than one of these at a time. You feel you could ask him to play The Sound of Music over a bossa nova beat and he'd probably throw in some bluegrass for good measure.

Definitely worth the three standing ovations.