The flamenco inspired roots of Feel Alive
Did you notice that there is an unusual rhythm in Feel Alive from Mariana's Café? If you did, then nice work! It is inspired by some of the 12 beat rhythms common to the most traditional forms of flamenco.
Flamenco music always fits to a chosen style or 'palo' and the most traditional of these are palos such as Seguiriyas, Soleares, Alegrias and Bulerias (to name a few).
The Bulerias rhythm is the one that we based Feel Alive on and is typically pretty fast...
So how do you count it?
Typical flamenco 12-beat pattern
First we're going to talk about the general 12-beat Flamenco rhythm. You guessed it, there are 12 beats to a bar (or however you want to think about it) but some beats need an accent placed on them. So if you wanted to clap along, you would clap on each beat and accent the ones highlighted in the table below.
Typical flamenco 12 beat pattern
Flamenco bulerias rhythm pattern
Feel Alive reflects the Bulerias type rhythm. In this form, the bar needs to start with an accent, but rather than shifting all our accents along one beat (i.e. to beats 1, 4, 7, 9 and 11), we're going to start counting our bars on beat 12.
This way, if you ever get into other forms of flamenco and want to count along, your accents should still all fall in the right place!
Typical flamenco bulerias 12 beat pattern
One final variation
So if you've got your head around the counting above, there is one final variation that we used from time to time in Feel Alive and that is to shift the accent from Beat 6 to Beat 7 as shown below.
Variation on bulerias 12 beat pattern
Fancy a mental challenge?
Try clapping the two bulerias rhythms described above alternately! It may take a while to get your head around them, but you will if you want to. And you may even find that understanding these rhythms brings added depth to flamenco shows you go to in the future!
Just one thing left to clarify!
We are not playing flamenco! We've just worked with one of their very cool rhythms. If you want to hear proper, authentic flamenco, then go to Andalucía! Or failing that, a quick internet search will bring up all sorts of great examples and videos.
Saludos,
Dave (from The Bustling Tram Society)
