Triana

There, where in the Betic Cordillera Iberians, Celts and Vandals mingled over the millennia with the caliphates in a religious convergence between the banners of the crescent moon and the barbarian standards, lie lands already tread by Italians since the dawn of the first Roman colony, present-day Santiponce, near Seville; lands later evangelized under Aragonese alliances, following the dusty Moorish incursions. And beyond this regional history, anyone who has in some way traveled and explored the more or less remote corners beyond the Pyrenees will sooner or later have come across the sounds of música andaluza.

Only in the simmering pot of Sevillian cuisine, amid the azulejos of ceramic-tiled kitchens, could a sound as vivid as that of Spain's Triana have been born. Yet their music has crossed the peaks of the Sierra Nevada to become part of a nation's rock history. From the Atlantic islands to the Basque Country, they are now regarded as legendary standard-bearers of flamenco culture, having forged an unusual and unique union between Spanish guitar and rock music, with symphonic and progressive shades, that has left a considerable legacy even beyond the borders of their homeland. It may well have happened to some night-owl like myself to have stumbled, beneath the Aguere in Tenerife or perhaps in Seville's Alameda, upon some callejero with an acoustic guitar strumming chords steeped in gypsy feeling.

From there, curiosity to learn more would naturally follow. The urge to drink from this musical spring, so rare and hidden that it stands as a unicum rarely replicated even within the history of Iberian popular music itself. Flamenco is, in fact, a meditation set to music, born as a popular prayer, a natural synthesis of Islamic mysticism and Christian devotion, a free outpouring of one's own feelings, whether poetic or erotic in nature.

It originates as song accompanied by a casual, primitive rhythm, deeply rooted in the traditions of the Andalusian outskirts, first and foremost the Sacromonte quarter of Granada, right beneath the crimson walls of the Alhambra, and the gypsy neighborhood of Triana, from which the band takes its name — the flip side of gothic, regal Seville, the other bank of the Guadalquivir, and its true face: that of the ghettos, the ceramicists and carpenters, the seamstresses and the squires.

In this context, the band distills into its alembic an outmoded yet visionary progressive mood, one that was taking its first steps in Spanish popular music of the time. Poor Seville, then, which across the dark riverbanks gazed upon the gleaming splendor of the Torre del Oro and once heard the distant echoes of suras, then the psalms and bell-tolls of the Giralda in the Mudéjar era, all while hammering iron on anvil with the very same frequency with which we now tap away at computer keys.

And in 1975, right out of the ferment of the drunken boat that was the Feria de Santa Ana, at the tail end of the Franco dictatorship, Jesús de la Rosa Luque (vocals and keyboards), Eduardo Rodríguez Rodway (backing vocals and guitar) and Juan José Palacios "Tele" (drums) came together after previous stints in lesser-known outfits (De la Rosa had also mixed with musicians from the London scene, having been part of Tabaca, in a CSN&Y-style vein) and released their debut album at Estudios Kirios in Madrid, "El patio", conceived as a militant response to the Francoist paradigm, though it would be the follow-up, "Hijos del Agobio", that would raise the political stakes considerably.

"El patio" is a record of sheer craft and artistry, pure sonic ecstasy that imports British psychedelic instincts and grafts them onto Andalusian guitar technique. Yet the album initially found little following, only to be gradually rediscovered towards the end of the Seventies, alongside the band's growing fame and the gold record earned by the album "Sombra y luz" (1980). This was because the Madrid scene in which the debut was recorded remained hostile to the southern influences of Gypsy culture, especially under the Franco regime. It could even be argued that this cultural legacy has, to some extent, persisted to this day.

Triana came into being with "Abre la puerta", the album's opening track, an almost ten-minute suite, a sort of "Innuendo" ante litteram, with a winding, narrative flamenco backing the inspired singing of Jesús de la Rosa.

What comes to mind here are the hallucinated landscapes born of hashish haze, among the

caves of Sacromonte and the spring of the Ermita de San Miguel, where a lookout point

up on the heights of Granada opens onto a view of a round, red, twilight sun.

The nostalgic march of the following "Luminosa mañana" leads into "Recuerdos de una noche", which doubles down on the opening track with a Gypsy delight that charges the atmosphere with real electricity, evident in the shift from Jesús's wandering voice to Eduardo Rodríguez's Hendrix-like guitar, delivering his own gypsy-flavoured take on "Voodoo Child".

But the heart of the record is "Sé de un lugar": the sheer simplicity of its lyrical poetry expresses and concentrates all the tension of a love lyric, distilling the very essence of flamenco. It's a meditative, almost symbolist song, delivered aloud like the pangs of lovesickness, at once a madrigal to nature and a call to the beloved. The guitar work makes clear we're in the presence of serious musicians: here Rodríguez reaches an unrepeatable peak, with a solo that phrases like something out of a textbook, making the strings of the soul vibrate, while De la Rosa closes things out with high-pitched wails recalling the stage presence of a Robert Plant or an Ian Gillan.

The following "Dialogo" is a love song beneath the full moon, returning to a slower, more reflective form, with a cadence of real stylistic distinction.

"En el lago" carries the mind into the dreamlike sphere of the Id, a dream on the shore of a lake:

We watched the dawn together and the lake reflected our dreams, in silence we fell, beside the great mountain, the one that gave us love. I cannot deny that it hurt me, that my heart flees from you. You must be like the morning of the day I met you

It closes with a psychedelic coda that builds into a crescendo spilling over into raga rock. The closing "Todo es de color" opens with a rooster's crow, waking us from the dream, as a barely-hinted Mellotron accompanies Rodway's Spanish key.

How beautiful spring is when it arrives, the carnation at your window reminds me of the Triana neighbourhood

The feeling left at the end of the listen is that a record with this kind of impact, on Iberian soil, was at the time as rare as it was necessary. It was a two-way exchange, an osmosis: from Seville to Madrid, they discovered progressive rock as a response to the regime, while on a global level the band reasserted the centrality of flamenco culture to the guitar's place in modern music.

"Hijos del Agobio" and the even proggier "Sombra y Luz" carried forward, almost sublimely, the path begun with "El patio"; the band's story would span the entire decade of the Seventies before ending in tragedy: on 13 October 1983, at 6pm, the Citroën Jesús de la Rosa Luque was driving collided head-on with a van coming from Santander. It happened near Villariezo, in Burgos, as he was returning from San Sebastián, from a benefit concert for flood victims. His companion and friend, Javier Osmas, was injured. Rodríguez attempted a reunion in '94, with modest results, appreciated by longtime fans.

On November 2, 2018, on the 35th anniversary of his death, De la Rosa was honoured with a commemorative plaque in his home town, drawing a crowd of people from many parts of the country, lovers of his music and poetry, and champions of his legacy. It was a day held in his honour, which saw the participation of Rodway, the only surviving member of the legendary band, as well as Jesús's son, Ramiro de la Rosa, and much of his family, and which closed with a spectacular concert by Zaguán at Alameda de Hércules, a remarkable enclave of the city of Seville.

It's hard not to trace the influence of their music rippling through time: Medina Azahara within their own specific sphere, from Jarabe de Palo to El Niño de Elche, via Manu Chao and El Bicho (Miguel Campello), right up to the modern trap of the late Gata Cattana, another face of contemporary Andalusian music who died tragically young.

Those three lads who, from the crumbling patio of their cuarto, beautifully depicted on the cover, set out on the path and, having lost their way, passed through the narrow doors of their casas de campo in search of their own personal grail. Young corsairs who, in April '77, brought down Francoist rule by flooding the streets of the country.

(Revised by Federico Romagnoli)

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05/10/2025