The Culture Vulture

The zambomba is two things. It’s a musical instrument, but also a traditional  Christmas “fiesta” of carols where said instrument is played. The Culture Vulture, who has just been to one of these zambombas flamencas for the second time, having made his debut in 2020, explains.

The zambomba is a friction musical instrument. In Spain, the zambomba is an instrument that frequently accompanies the singing of Christmas carols and popular songs. It is also used in many other Latin American countries in their traditional music.

It consists of a more or less large hollow cylinder that can be made of different materials (ceramic, wood, etc.) with one of its ends closed with a piece of leather. This is crossed through the centre with a rod, which can be made of wood or other materials. This rod is sometimes replaced by a rope. By rubbing the rod or rope with both hands, the vibration produced by the rod or rope is transmitted to the leather, producing a low and peculiar sound.

Zambomba is also the name of a typical Christmas fiesta in some parts of Spain, especially in Andalucía, at which Christmas carols are sung accompanied by said instrument.

In 2020 in Ronda, the local group La Marmorena presented two different zambombas at the Teatro Vicente Espinel. One was a group of twelve actors, musicians and singers, entitled Ven a mi casa por Navidad; the other a collection of flamenco singers and players called Ronda suena a Navidad.  

Because of the Covid-19-limited capacity of the theatre, the tickets, which were free-of-charge, went quickly. My wife and I had the good fortune to get two seats for a performance of Ven a mi casa por Navidad.

The stage was set as the Last Supper, with the 12 participants sitting at a long table decked with food and wine. The quintet of women were the singers, five of the men formed the band and the two remaining men and one of the women were the actors that linked the songs, with their optimistic observations on the difficult times we were experiencing and how Christmas could be a way of lighting up our lives.

Over the course of an hour and a bit, the audience was treated to a fiesta of singing and dancing of the greatest variety and highest quality. Songs ranged from traditional flamenco to jazz to Irving Berlin, most with a Christmassy theme. There was no programme, so we did not know who was who, although I did find out subsequently that the redheaded lady with the magnificent singing voice was a rondeña called Martha Pérez. She was outstanding, but the other four were extremely good too! They each had about three solos, as well as contributing backing vocals.

The band, comprising two Spanish classical guitarists, one of whom sometimes played what looked like a ukulele; an electric guitarist-cum-bassist; a keyboard player; and a percussionist, who played the zambomba on some numbers, were really tight and played the various musical genres on offer with great skill.

This was our first ever experience of a zambomba and we thoroughly enjoyed it. Worth every penny!

This year the zambomba was performed by a group from Jerez de la Frontera, believed to be the home of flamenco. A less imaginative set – just a line of chairs, each with a mike.

There were seven women singers, several of whom performed solos, three male singers, two guitarists and two males on percussion, one of whom, a young lad of about 14, was the star of the show for the subtlety and verve of his performance. He also did a dance in the encore at the end which brought the house down..

This was out-and-out flamenco: hoarse, agonised voices, accompanied by vibrant guitar-playing and  lots of toque (clapping). The theatre was full to bursting and the locals really got stuck in with their calls of Olé, Anda, Vamos etc. 90 minutes of pure fun.

If you get the chance to see a zambomba, I recommend you take it.

¡Feliz Navidad!

Jason Webster is second on The Culture Vulture’s list of top 5 writers about Spain. Here he tells us more about the man and his books.

Biographical details

JASON WEBSTER was born in California to British parents in 1970 and spent his childhood in the US, Britain and Germany. He first moved to Spain in the early 1990s having graduated in Arabic and Islamic History from St John’s College, Oxford.

He has written five non-fiction books on Spanish themes, which we shall consider later in this article.

He has also written a biography of the Spanish WWII double agent Garbo (entitled “The Spy with 29 Names”); and the Max Cámara series of crime novels.

He has appeared in TV documentaries for the BBC, Channel Five and the Discovery Channel as an expert on Moorish Spain.

Webster has also written extensively for British and Spanish newspapers, including The Financial Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Observer, and El Asombrario.

He is married to the flamenco dancer Salud Botella and has two children. 

Books on Spain

I first came across Webster’s work when a friend gave me a copy of the recently published “Duende” back in 2003. I was stunned. This “outsider” had managed to penetrate the closed world of flamenco and had been able to unearth some of  its secrets.

The following year he published “Andalus”, a book about the impact of the Moorish occupation from 711 to 1492 on the Iberian Peninsula.

Then, in 2006, came “¡Guerra!” which studied the wounds left by the Civil War on contemporary Spain.

In 2009 “Sacred Sierra” described the first year of his time spent living on a mountain.

After a wait of a decade, during which Webster devoted his time to writing fiction and to other activities, in 2020 we finally got his latest non-fiction work “Violencia”, in which he demonstrates that the country’s history has been dominated by violence and brutality.

“Duende”

“Duende: A journey in search of Flamenco” (2003), which recounts Webster's move to Spain after university and his quest to learn flamenco guitar and the path to the elusive yet passionate feeling of duende, an untranslatable term referring to the feeling that is the essence of flamenco.

Having pursued a conventional enough path through school and university, Webster was all set to enter the world of academe. But when his girlfriend of some years dumped him unceremoniously, he found himself at a crossroads.

Abandoning the world of libraries and the future he had always imagined for himself, he headed off instead for Spain in search of duende, the intense emotional state - part ecstasy, part desperation - so intrinsic to flamenco.

“Duende” is an account of his years spent in Spain feeding his obsessive interest in flamenco: the tyranny of his guitar teacher; his passionate affair with Lola, a flamenco dancer; in Madrid, living with gypsies in their dislocated, cocaine-fuelled world, stealing cars by night and sleeping away the days in tawdry rooms.

Finding himself spiralling self-destructively downwards he goes to Granada bruised and battered, after two years of total immersion in the flamenco lifestyle.

In the tradition of Laurie Lee's classic “As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning”, “Duende” charts a young man's emotional coming of age and offers real insight into the passionate essence of flamenco.

Miranda France, writing in the Guardian, admitted that her first thought on picking up “Duende” was that Jason Webster's stated passion for flamenco sounded a bit dubious.

“My second thought … was that it looked a bit boring. I was wrong on both counts. “Duende” is a fascinating book, the most gripping I have read for years. I can't remember ever before having stuck my fingers in my ears to block out the wails of my children in order to finish a chapter!”

“I don't believe that everything in “Duende” is true. It doesn't matter - Jason Webster is an exceptional writer, and this is a great book.”

“Andalus”

“Andalus: Unlocking the secrets of Moorish Spain” (2004) examines the deep impact left on Spain, and by extension the rest of Europe, by the Moorish presence during nearly 800 years.

As Islam and the West were preparing to clash once again, Jason Webster embarked on a quest to discover Spain's hidden Moorish legacy and lift the lid on a country once forged by both Muslims and Christians. He meets Zine, a young illegal immigrant from Morocco, a twenty-first century Moor, lured over with the promise of a job but exploited as a slave labourer on a fruit farm. Jason's life is threatened as he investigates the agricultural gulag, Zine rescues him, and the unlikely pair of writer and desperado take off on a rollercoaster ride through Andalucía.

While Webster unveils the neglected Arab ancestry of modern Spain - apparent in its food, language, people and culture - Zine sets out on his own parallel quest, a one-man peace mission to resolve Muslim-Christian tensions by proving irresistible to Spanish señoritas.

“¡Guerra!”

“¡Guerra!: Living in the shadows of the Spanish Civil War” (2006) studied the wounds left by the Civil War on contemporary Spain through a combination of history and travel.

After twelve years in Spain, Jason Webster had developed a deep love for his adopted homeland; his life there seemed complete. But when he and his Spanish wife moved into an idyllic old farmhouse in the mountains north of Valencia, by chance he found an unmarked mass grave from the Spanish Civil War on his doorstep. Spurred to investigate the history of this conflict, a topic many of his Spanish friends still seemed to treat as taboo, he began to uncover a darker side to the country.

Witness to a brutal fist-fight sponsored by remnants of Franco's Falangists, arrested and threatened by the police in the former HQ of the Spanish Foreign Legion, sheltered by a beautiful transvestite, shunned by locals, haunted by ghosts and finally robbed of his identity, Webster encountered a legacy of cruelty and violence that seems to linger on seventy years after the bloody events of that war.

As in his previous books, “Duende” and “Andalus”, “¡Guerra!” reveals the essence of modern Spain, which few outsiders ever manage to see. Fascinating true stories from the Civil War, vividly retold as he travels around the country.

Yet the more Webster unveils of the passions that set one countryman against another, the more he is led to wonder: could the dark, primitive currents that ripped the country apart in the 1930s still be stirring under the sophisticated, worldly surface of today's Spain?

“Sacred Sierra”

“Sacred Sierra: A year on a Spanish mountain” (2009) describes a year that Webster and his Spanish wife Salud spent living on their mountain farm in eastern Spain, on the slopes of the sacred peak of Penyagolosa, working on the land and planting trees with the help of a 12th-century Moorish gardening manual.

Jason Webster had lived in Spain for 15 years when he and his wife Salud Botella, a flamenco dancer, tired of their city life and decided to buy a crumbling farmhouse clinging to the side of a steep valley in the eastern province of Castellón. He knew nothing about farming - he didn't even know what an almond tree looked like, or that he owned over 100 of them - but with help from local farmers and a twelfth-century book on gardening he set about recreating his dream.

“Sacred Sierra” tells the story of their first year on the mountain, and how they cleared the land, planted and harvested olives, nurtured precious, expensive truffles, all while surviving gale force winds and scorching summer fires.

While toying with the timeless, he also retells ancient legends and as the year passed, finds himself increasingly in tune with the ancient, mystical life of the sierra, a place that will haunt your imagination and raise your spirits.

“Violencia”

Spain has never worked as a democracy. Throughout the country's history only one system of government has ever enjoyed any real success: dictatorship and the use of violence.

Violence, in fact, is what Spain is made of, lying at the heart of its culture and identity, far more so than any other western European nation. For well over a thousand years, the country has only ever been forged and then been held together through the use of aggression - brutal, merciless terror and warfare directed against its own people. Without it the country breaks apart and Spain ceases to exist - a fact that recent events in Barcelona confirm. Authoritarianism is the Spanish default setting.

Yet Spain has produced many of the most important artists and thinkers in the Western world, from Cervantes, author of the first modern novel, to Goya, the first modern painter.  

Much of Western artistic expression, in fact, from the Picaresque to Cubism, would be unthinkable without the Spanish contribution. This unique national genius, however, does not exist despite Spain's violent backdrop; it is, in fact, born out of it. Indeed Spain's genius and violent nature go hand in hand, locked together in a macabre, elaborate dance. This is the country's tragedy.

“Violencia” unveils this truth for the first time, exposing the bloody heart of Spain - from its origins in the ancient past to the Civil War and the current crisis in Catalonia. “Violencia” will be in the tradition of those books which come to define our understanding of a country.

***

Whilst these descriptions may sound a bit dry and dusty, the opposite is the case. Jason Webster’s style makes his books easy and enjoyable to read. That’s why he’s number two on my list of the Top 5 Writers on Spain.

See also:

My Top 5 Writers About Spain

Laurie Lee: poet, womanizer and hispanophile

Acknowledgements

Amazon

The Guardian

Wikipedia

Jason Webster’s own website