Once upon a time it was a bustling port city, which still lived with its back to the sea when a couple arrived at its doors with their little flamenco show: Louis Adame, from Madrid, tocaor, and the bailaora of Malaga origin Irene Alba. They landed on the number 35 of the Rambla, an artery without tourists in 1970 but crowded with hustlers and ‘marines’, in a place then run by Joan Gaspart, from the HUSA group, and Matias Colsada, theatrical impresario from Paral•lel (“we are the happy girls that Colsada brought to take away their bad humor”). The Adame couple had traveled halfway around the world on ‘tournées’ with posh companies, and lo and behold, they ended up becoming the owners of the Tablao Cordobes and in his soul, let’s go. Well, the establishment celebrates its fiftieth anniversary.
Really, the anniversary was fulfilled in January 2020, the year of the fateful covid, confinement and restrictions, so that the cava bottles have had to be uncorked now, three years later. The party of 50 + 3, the same age that the first deputy mayor has just turned Jaume Collboni, who came to the sarao, held on Tuesday at noon. Many people attended: the bailaoras Milagros and ‘La Chana’; Mime Aguero, from The Tablao de Carmen (Amaya); Lluís Cabrera, the founder of the Taller de Músics; Sílvia Ferrando and Eva Navas, from Theater Institute; the flamenco historian Montse Madridejos; Xavi Massip (Friends of the Rambla); and Rafa Perona, guitarist and president of the Gypsy Cultural Center of La Mina. And María Rosa Pérez Casares, daughter of the couple, who now runs the business.
Fert Graffiti
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A good group of people gathered in the middle of the street, in what ended up being a very rambler spectacle, like that soccer gathering around the source of Canaletes. The Empordà Jordi Comasknown by the stage name of FERT, He has painted a mural at the door of the parking lot next to the tablao, a colorful and pop portrait of Luis and Irene, the founders, in their good times. There were toasts and speeches and a desire to celebrate the effort that has gone into maintaining the essences: surrounded by waffles and sangria, it would have been easy to succumb to plastic, to the pig in a poke, but the best of the best has passed through Cordobés, of the old and new sap. To singing and dancing.
I went up the Rambla remembering Enrique de Heriz, a friend who left without leaving at all, and how much he liked the tititrán. Once he sent me an email that I still have: «Why write if everything is in flamenco?». And the lyrics of a soleá: «I was a stone, I lost my center/ and they threw me into the sea;/ but with the force of time, / I searched for my center again».