Two Hearts Beat as One Act of Flamenco

Sometimes, fate has a role in bringing flamenco collaborators together. Perhaps in a smoky Spanish club, they hear the right rhythms across a crowded room and hook up when the spirit moves them. But in the case of Laila and Adam del Monte--the dancer and guitarist currently generating heat on the L.A. flamenco scene--a rabbi had something to do with it. Maybe that’s another kind of fate. Or maybe the rabbi was just lucky--not all part-time matchmakers have so much to work with.

Laila and Adam are both Sephardic Jews with mosaic ethnicities and colorful performing childhoods. When they met in 1988, they were living and learning in the flamenco world of Madrid.

Today, in the living room of the couple’s rented Temple City bungalow, they are telling the story of how they met, as they rest after an afternoon rehearsal for their upcoming Hollywood Bowl appearance. “Back then, meeting men was the last thing I was looking to do--I just wanted to dance,” says Laila, who was in her mid-20s at the time. But her rabbi, having made no love connection by introducing the unsuspecting Laila to single doctors and lawyers at his dinner parties, suddenly had a brainstorm.

“The rabbi calls me,” she remembers, “and he says, ‘You know, I know this family of musicians; they’re [part] Romanian like you. Maybe you can work with them. Why don’t you give them a call?’ ” Five months later, she finally phoned the number he gave her.

“We didn’t know it was a setup,” says Adam, who was playing in a “progressive Romanian, jazz, flamenco group” at the time with his artist-musician father. “I just heard, ‘The rabbi’s sending some Jewish girl to see if you can work together. She’s a dancer.’ Oh, a Jewish flamenco dancer, great! We started to laugh--we were also Jewish flamenco artists, so we just had to laugh.”

The couple found themselves married and collaborating on twin sons before they started working together onstage. Then Adam began to compose and play for Laila, while he built a strong reputation as an innovative, classically trained guitarist who also had flamenco chops.

In 1993, when raising children in crowded Madrid seemed increasingly difficult, the couple decided to move to Southern California, where they have relatives and where they had heard the flamenco scene was strong. Their eagerness to explore new creative avenues also played a part. “There wasn’t much fusion going on in Spain seven years ago,” Adam says. “The flamenco, the classical and jazz all kept to themselves with almost no interaction. We wanted to be exposed to other cultures and have them available to us in a musical form.”

Since settling here, the Del Montes have experimented with various cultural crossovers. They have incorporated into their concerts several instruments not traditionally used in flamenco, such as the flute, violin and cello. Critics have detected jazz, Western classical and Middle Eastern influences.

In April, they took part in an ambitious collaborative program at the Cerritos Center for the Arts, alongside the Jazz Tap Ensemble and Anjani’s Kathak Dance of India. At the Hollywood Bowl tonight, they again appear with Anjani’s company, sharing one section of an evening, called “Fiery Flamenco.” Revered flamenco singer Curro Fernandez will have traveled from Spain to join the Del Montes at the Bowl. They will also be joined by flutist Damian Draghici, guitarist Jose Tanaka, percussionist Patrick Oliver.

The Cerritos flamenco-tap-kathak experiment was a less-than-stellar experience for performers and audience alike. “It was a conflict of cultures on a very fundamental level--everybody had a different sense of time and purpose,” Adam says politely. But the Del Montes’ own flamenco fusion concerts have received glowing reviews. Times dance critic Lewis Segal has noted Laila’s “spectacular creative experiments grounded in brilliant technique” and described Adam’s playing as “ravishing in its heartfelt simplicity and rich tone.”

The couple’s respective skills were forged not only from contact with master flamencos in the Spanish context, but also from their own diverse lives, a description of which reads like a textbook on how personal fusions create individual artists.

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The Del Montes’ 11-year-old sons, Enosh and Shaul, are studying violin and cello, respectively, and sometimes hang out backstage at flamenco concerts. But it’s unlikely they will have the peripatetic lifestyles and performing experiences their parents had growing up. Laila (of Romanian, Spanish Jewish and Egyptian stock) was born in California, but from the age of 4 grew up in Spain and in France, where she took ballet. At 10, she was performing character dances (Russian, Romanian, Ukrainian) in Paris with a French-based Russian ballet troupe. As a teenager, she danced tzigane (balleticized Eastern European Gypsy folk dance) while touring around Europe with a flutist, sometimes performing in circuses, sometimes literally dancing for her supper.

When she danced tzigane for Gypsies in Spain, they told her how similar it was to flamenco and eventually persuaded her to switch. Formal training in the smoke-choked studios of Madrid came next, but Laila says she got more from “living around Gypsies”--especially being coached by top flamenco dancers Juan Ramirez and La Chana. “I lived with La Chana for a while in Barcelona,” she says, with a French accent that wraps around each word. “When we cooked, I would learn more about flamenco in her kitchen than I could anywhere else.”

Adam, 33, was born in Israel and also grew up moving around a lot--to Holland, Germany, Spain and England--whatever spot inspired his father, a painter and amateur musician who played flamenco on a Romanian instrument called the zimbal, or cymbalum. From an early age, Adam had lengthy stays in Malaga and Granada, where flamenco was in the air. His father gave him guitar lessons at age 8, and, within a few years, Adam was sufficiently confident to earn a few dollars playing for tourists in the caves around Granada. Eventually studying classical guitar in Israel and England, he continued to soak up all he could from the Gypsies he hung out with in Spain.

Both he and Laila have been told by their families that they have Romanian Gypsy blood, but in their view, ethnicity has nothing to do with the ability to understand flamenco. “There are many Spaniards who don’t have a talent for flamenco or even like it,” Adam says. “What is relevant is that I was fortunate enough as a child to absorb flamenco. I could have been Chinese and still have absorbed it as a child. It’s a lifestyle--breeding almost--that you get from an early age.”

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“I think having Adam here in town really elevates the scene,” says Tom Schnabel, program director of world music at the Hollywood Bowl and host of KCRW-FM’s “Cafe L.A.,” where Del Monte has often been a guest. “Just watching his fingers and the way he creates chords--it’s hard to find a classical musician who can improvise in flamenco. He’s one of those rare birds who’s equally amazing in both areas.”

The Fountain Theatre’s Deborah Lawlor, a longtime flamenco scene observer who has often presented the Del Montes, sees in Adam a great potential for expansion of the form. “Adam is probably the best guitarist that we have,” she says. “He not only offers excellent renditions of traditional flamenco pieces, but also some original compositions that widen the scope of flamenco. It will still be flamenco, but it will be more experimental and very beautiful.”

While both Del Montes are committed to the core spirit of flamenco, they’re not afraid to test the boundaries of the form. “Many flamencos could be great lawyers,” Adam says. “Because they know there are rules, and they try to make nice music against the rules without breaking them. Our intention in both dance and music is to respect the tradition and play within the rules, breaking them sometimes, but not destroying them.”

In this vein, they have experimented with rhythms other than flamenco’s traditional 12-beat phrase--a true departure for traditionalists. Adam has also composed a flamenco concerto for orchestra that was performed with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project last year; and Laila has started working on “theatrical flamenco” projects that tell stories using flamenco and other dance forms as a language.

At the same time, both work against current trends they perceive in flamenco--Adam deplores the “showing off” syndrome seen in some younger performers; Laila thinks that many female dancers are leaning toward “imitating men” and losing flamenco’s feminine sensuality. The conversation gets very lively at this point, with ideas and possibilities tumbling out as easily as falsetas (melodic guitar variations) and zapateados (footwork) had in rehearsal an hour earlier.

At that run-through, in their backyard garage-turned-studio, Adam’s guitar chords floated on the warm air as Laila slowly unfolded in riveting postures with her partner Ricardo Chavez. When the guitar picked up speed, the vibrations of furious footwork shook the small room. Then, boom, it was over.

Though this section seemed to last just a moment, the stopwatch said 2 minutes, 55 seconds, Adam reported. A stopwatch is not usually flamenco equipment, he explained, but they are condensing all their numbers to fit into a shared program.

It will be just a taste of their longer concerts, he says later. But when the Del Montes get together, there are always flavorful, high-energy meals of flamenco to be had.

It seems the rabbi knew what he was doing.

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“FIERY FLAMENCO,” featuring Del Monte Flamenco and Anjani’s Kathak, Noche Flamenca and Thierry “Titi” Robin-Gitans at the Hollywood Bowl.

Dates: Tonight at 7. Prices: $52 to $210. Phone: (323) 850-2199.