Gipsy kings - bamboleo
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Gipsy Kings
French flamenco, salsa, and pop group
This article is about the musical group. For persons with the title Gipsy King, see King of the Gypsies.
Gipsy Kings (originally Los Reyes) are a musical group founded in 1979 in Arles, France. The band, whose members have Catalan heritage,[1] play a blend of Catalan rumba,[1]flamenco, salsa, and pop. They perform mostly in Spanish but also mix in Catalan, French, and languages of southern France, such as Occitan.[2]
Although the group members were born in France, their parents were mostly gitanos (Spanish Romani) who fled Spain during the 1930s Spanish Civil War. They are known for bringing rumba flamenca, a pop-oriented music distantly derived from traditional flamenco and rumba, to a worldwide audience, and for their interpretations of English-language pop hits.
History
Beginnings: 1970s–1980s
In the 1970s, José Reyes and Manitas de Plata were a duo who played rumba flamenca in the southern French town of Arles. When they split up, Reyes began performing with his sons
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- Nicolas Reyes |
The Gipsy Kings are members of a minority that has been persecuted for centuries, so it is ironic that they should now find themselves under fire for a perceived lack of authenticity. The loudest skeptics are generally those who know very little about them, but are irritated by the group's high profile and appalled by the unintellectual hordes who lionize them. However, it becomes apparent with only a little digging that the combo's music is a logical result of their cultural heritage as Gypsies and their family background and training. The only genuine selling out is going on at the box office. Beyond this, whether or not their style charms or repels the listener is a matter of subjective taste.
The history of the Gypsy people is a crucial matter for Nicolas Reyes, the lead singer of the band, both as a person and as an artist. The prevalent theory is that the Gypsies originated in India. Aside from a physical resemblance between the peoples, there are also similarit
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Gipsy Kings is a music group from Arles and Montpellier, France. They explained the evolution of their sound in the 1996 PBS documentary of their lives and music "Tierra Gitana (Gipsy Land)". Young brothers Nicolas, Canut and Paul Reyes accompanied their father, famed flamenco singer Jose Reyes, who started out singing "cante jondo" (deep chant), traditional flamenco with long-running themes of passion, love, death, etc. But they began playing rumba flamenca because "we liked to watch pretty girls dance," said Nicolas.
Latin American beats had been joined with flamenco by gitanos since at least the 1950s, mixing complex strumming with rhythmic, percussive tapping on their guitars' tops. The new Reyes generation — soon to meet and join up with three guitar-playing brothers from the Baliardo family — began creating more pop-oriented songs. They played at roma parties and at street corners until they got their chance to record under the group's new name, Gipsy Kings.
Sharp-eyed individuals might have noted that all the left-handed members of
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