Jose Mercy Manuel Alejandro met their eyes for the first time in a very long time, when the singer was still a baby running along La Merced Avenue in Jerez, which would give him his stage name. Who would have imagined that decades later, … Both are now legends in their own right, and their lives will also intersect in a tribute album in which one sings the other’s compositions.
in “Jose Mercy sings Manuel Alejandro” There are indisputable songs (“We broke our love”, “I’m a rebel”, “I’m trying to forget you”…) and songs that perhaps not everyone has in their memory (“Wishing for you”, “The girl is dying for me”…), which will join the brightest of their group on a tour that stops this Saturday in Almeria (where he will be called “Adopted Son”) and after the Christmas break, he will restart his engines on January 23 in Zaragoza and then travel to Alicante and Estepona. Madrid and Mérida.
– Have you wanted to make this album for a long time?
– A very long time. But at the time I wanted to do it, I did not dare. In the 1980s, flamenco was very closed. And if I had decided to do things for Manuel Alejandro at that time, they would have taken away my flamenco food. Bad review in the ABC of Seville or in El País at the time, they left you without food for six or seven months.
-And Manuel Alejandro is a composer who can harmonize well with flamenco.
– Yes, but at that time it was Jack, the Horse, and the King, and you had to be very careful.
-With the way the world and life in general have become, do you think this line of composers will become extinct?
My way of thinking and feeling tells me that there will be no more composers of this category. No, because the world moves too fast, too light. Now with artificial intelligence, it will be very difficult for talent of this kind to go out and write.
Mercy remembers her beginnings with Manuel Alejandro and advocates the development of flamenco without relationships
– With AI, beautiful pop and rock songs come out, but for flamenco… impossible, right?
-No flamenco or anything. What hurts me the most is that there are those who say that… I don’t want to speak ill of anyone, but there are those who say that there are artificial intelligence songs that when they listen to them, their hair stands up. I just can’t understand it. Does artificial intelligence have feelings, heart? When I hear that from young people…but how does your hair stand up if that’s a lie?
-And not too young. Alejandro Sanz admitted in this newspaper that he heard a message that sounded so good that he “felt very envious.”
– But wait, too much envy? I don’t understand how people can say this comes to them. Do you think the doll can convey something to you? It’s too strong.
-You and Manuel Alejandro have known each other all your lives, as you were both residents of the Santiago neighborhood in Jerez de la Frontera. But when was the first time you had a conversation with him?
– We lived on the same street, I’m 16 and he’s 1, and since I came to live in Madrid, we’ve had a lot of contacts. At the end of the 90s, I made several more open flamenco albums, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw that things were starting to change. Now, at my age, criticism no longer matters to me. The first time Manuel and I spoke must have been when I was a child singer at Escolania de la Merced, the patron saint of Jerez. He saw me on the street dressed as an altar boy (laughs), and I was at his house a few times.
-At Seville 92, you actually paid tribute to him by singing some of his songs, didn’t you?– Yes, I sang “The Girl Dies for Me” and “I’ll Lose My Head for Your Love”, which were included in a record by Gaitanetos de Jerez singing Manuel Por Boleria.
Epic opening flamenco to other sounds
– He performed songs by Aute, Víctor Jara, Louis Armstrong, Pablo Milanés, Serrat and even Manu Chao. Is singing great composers the best way to open flamenco?
The best way to convince fundamentalists is to be open-minded and knowledgeable about music and instruments. Before, as soon as there was no guitar and singer, it was as if the Fu Manchu drums came, but fortunately that has become history. The best-selling flamenco album in history is “Aire.” All the critics criticized it, and even my colleagues criticized it.
– Did these colleagues ask for forgiveness after years?
– Not after years, after months they started playing the same thing I played on stage (laughs).
– They copied it, come on.
-(gestures)
He was honored with the Gold Medal of Merit in Fine Arts from the Ministry of Culture. What do you think of the work done by the current minister?
– I don’t know, I see very strange things. They told me about the medal on December 23 last year, and it’s December 4 and I still don’t have it. They will deliver it to me in January! (Laughs) So I think he’s not in good shape. A bit slow.
– He lived in Madrid for many years. Has the tabla scene in the capital lost its essence after the closure of Casa Patas and many other places? Or are there exceptions?
-The only remaining exception is El Corral de la Morería. The rest was completely lost. The flamenco artists of the 1970s were all in Madrid. Casa Patas was modern. Before that there were Torres Bermejas, Los Canasteros, Café de Chinitas, Las Brujas, Zambra… In those tablaos there were all the greats of singing and guitar.
-Next week, she will be named Almeria’s adopted son. What does that mean to you?
– When I arrived at Peña el Taranto in Almería, in the early 1980s, that was when I started to be recognized. There they gave me a lot of love, and they called me their adopted son, because I am happy with life. Whatever they have to do with me, let them do it in life.