To feel its gusty winds, you would think Tarifa, on the farthest tip of Andalucía, is Spain's very own version of Land's End. Indeed, for over five hundred years, that's what Spaniards have been led to believe — that the Moors had only been a bad dream, that eight centuries of cultural cross-fertilization could and should be swiftly swept under the rug so that Spain could turn its admiring gaze north, to the rest of Europe, where real civilization lay. But what Radio Tarifa really likes about its namesake is less the fact that it is the southernmost point on the European landmass than its vantage location as a gateway to the Mediterranean world stretching to the south and the east, a world whose unique sounds and history have a lot more to do with what we call Spanish music than many would care to admit.
For many years, Faín Dueñas, Radio Tarifa's "man with a mission," thought that changing that perception was a lost cause. Then in 1993 he got together with some of his friends and longtime collaborators and decided to throw a wild roots party. "It was all homemade and totally reckless," he explained. "We felt we could do anything we wanted, so we would mix a shawm with the voice of a man screaming in the bathroom or somebody playing the trumpet at dawn. It was very liberating." The result — slightly less random than that — was Radio Tarifa's debut CD, Rumba Argelina, one of the most unusual and intriguing recordings to come out of southern Europe this decade, and an instant roots classic (released in 1997 in the U.S. by Nonesuch/World Circuit).
Wary of the flamenco and folk-rock fads that seemed to be springing up all around them, Radio Tarifa's three founding members — guitarist, percussionist and arranger Faín Dueñas, flautist Vincent Molino and singer Benjamín Escoriza – chose instead to follow their instinctive affinity for the modal sounds of Spain's neglected past. And their instincts couldn't have been better, judging from the ease with which those different sounds resonate with each other and pull us into the fascinating crossroads where Spain meets Africa, medieval Europe, the Celtic regions, and the Caribbean.
Rarely had ancient scales sounded so modern; rhythms born hundreds of years ago so in tune with ever more demanding taste in matters of percussion. What had begun as Radio Tarifa's "bedroom tapes" (for the lack of an attic — or a garage) soon struck a chord with world music fans, whose fascination with the sounds of Arabic flutes, medieval strings, African daraboukas and timeworn vocals is behind Rumba Argelina's unusually long-lived success.
Playful as the recording sessions may have been, the music in Rumba Argelina is remarkably mature in its balance between an extreme open-mindedness and its tasteful weaving of all the different musical threads assembled over a lifetime of sponge-like music collecting. The medieval sonorities are the legacy of Dueñas' and Molino's 12 years of research with their early music ensemble; the unequivocal flamenco sensibility comes from Escoriza's Andalusian roots and Dueñas' experience as a flamenco guitarist and percussionist, and the Arab influence is the result of the group's enthusiastic interaction with African and Middle Eastern musicians living in Madrid, or just passing through.
In its own unassuming way, Radio Tarifa is living proof of the power of world music to stir us into digging up the exotic sounds buried in our own backyards and show us what we've been missing. Dueñas speaks from experience: "In the early 1970s I was a rock fan, like everybody else. I spent my days playing electric guitar and listening to Hendrix. After he died I tried to follow the new trends — Pink Floyd, Genesis, King Crimson — but when pop broke through, I hated it. I decided to trade my Gibson for a flamenco guitar and that was the beginning of the rest of my life."
