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Spain, Andalusia, Gipsies families. Tens of voyages, hundreds of nights to travel since 1986 within the Universe of Flamenco. Flamenco is the name which the Castilians gave to the Andalusian outlaws way of life in 17th and 18th centuries. Later this word became the term to describe the music and the dances that these marginals interpreted or listened in the taverns. For five centuries, and until nowadays, the excluded populations from every edges gathered to create this musical art : Jews, Moors converted by force, and especially gipsies, made as the end of XVe century - even, according to some exegetes, since XIIIe, via the Maghreb. Musically, the principal influence is obviously gipsy, with the very important contribution for melodies as for rhythmic from the music of the North-West of India. Sepharade singing influences may also be found. What one calls today the Arabo-Andalusian music in Occident was initially the music born into Andalusia and at the same time as flamenco. Since more than one century, more than two third of those who are the best interpreters and artists flamenco are gipsies. Flamenco would not exist without the gipsies. It is related to an area, Western Andalusia, and speaks the trial of life, the hardness of love, in the same time that it has a social eye (songs of the mines) or a polical one (songs of the prisons) ... In the fifties, more than 84 different styles were indexed, under the definition of combined rhythmics and a set of themes. Because flamenco is initially song, then dance, then finally interpretation with the guitar and with the palmas, the slapping of hands. The gipsies were initially established in low-Andalusia, Seville, Jerez, Cadiz, Granada. Then in the XXe century those families of artists settled in Barcelona and Madrid. Nowadays flamenco is an art recognized not only like an ethnic or regional folklore but barely likely the full-fledged Spanish cultural expression
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