Genre
Flamenco nuevo and rumba flamenca. Talco y Bronce deepens Manzanita's fusion of Romani rumba, flamenco, and Mediterranean tonalities, while introducing a slightly more accessible pop sensibility in the album's hit singles without sacrificing the intimacy and purity of his guitar style.
Release
Released in 1981 by CBS Records Spain.
Production
Produced by José Luis de Carlos, Manzanita's producer on all three of his albums to that point. The majority of the compositions were written by Manzanita himself (José Ortega Heredia). Recorded at Estudios Eurosonic, Madrid, and CBS Studios, New York City.
Reception
Talco y Bronce was Manzanita's commercial breakthrough, surpassing 500,000 copies sold in Spain — an exceptional figure for a flamenco-rooted artist. The album produced two major hit singles: "Un Ramito de Violetas" — originally composed by Cecilia (Eva María Llanos Manzanedo) — and "Por tu Ausencia," both of which became defining songs of Spanish popular music of the early 1980s. "Un Ramito de Violetas" in particular has achieved the status of a Spanish classic, subsequently covered by dozens of artists. The album was also released internationally and contributed to growing awareness of the nueva rumba outside Spain.
Manzanita
José Manuel Ortega Heredia (February 7, 1956, Madrid – December 5, 2004, Alhaurín de la Torre, Málaga) was a Spanish Romani singer and guitarist of exceptional lyrical sensitivity. Raised in a family with deep flamenco roots — his father a trovador, his mother a dancer — he began his career in the early 1970s with the rumba group Los Chorbos. His three-album run from 1978 to 1981, culminating in Talco y Bronce, established him as one of the defining voices of the flamenco nuevo movement. He subsequently explored Arab and Indian instruments on Echando Sentencias (1986) and set the poetry of Góngora and Lorca to music on En Voz Baja a las Rosas (1988). A religious conversion led him to record exclusively for the Evangelical Church throughout the 1990s; he returned to secular music in 1998. He died at the age of 48, leaving a body of work considered foundational to the development of flamenco nuevo.
This text was generated with the assistance of Artificial Intelligence.