He’s still playing with fire

BERKELEY — Backstage at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, Paco de Lucia’s 3-year-old daughter, Antonia, offers a peeled banana to the world’s greatest living flamenco guitarist. The precocious little girl puts the fruit to her father’s lips, insisting on a bite. But he tenderly turns her down.

De Lucia, 56, is careful not to hurt the feelings of the apple of his eye, who danced in the wings during his prodigious, two-hour performance Thursday. He seems particularly gentle for a man who underwent an emergency dental procedure that same morning, to repair a tooth he cracked during dinner the night before.

As the renowned guitarist leaves the hall for a ride back to his San Francisco hotel, he turns to thank the dentist who had done the work, tapping his bearded jaw in appreciation. Normally, dentists aren’t part of the backstage entourage. But this one had helped avert the cancellation of a show that had already been postponed once before.

People started wondering, half jokingly, if there was a curse on this tour, which (knock on wood) finally brings the flamenco innovator to UCLA’s Royce Hall tonight and Tuesday, dates originally scheduled in January. But De Lucia found no humor in the fact that the U.S. government, out of heightened security concerns, had caused the delays by holding up a visa for his Cuban-born bassist, Alain Perez.

“This seems barbaric to me,” says De Lucia, sitting in a chauffeured Mercedes with his daughter and his Mexican wife, Gabriela. “They know me, and they know we’re not going to hurt anyone or plant a bomb anywhere.... I was on the verge of canceling the whole thing, but then I thought, the promoters, the concert organizers, well, they’re not to blame. Neither are the guitar aficionados nor the kids who bought tickets three months ago to see us play. They really don’t deserve this.”

The wait is well worth the opportunity to witness a rare genius at work. Considering his weariness with touring at this stage of his long, illustrious career, it’s hard to say when the chance will come again.

De Lucia says he knew how to play the guitar since he knew he was a human being. On stage, his relationship to the instrument seems supernatural, as if the guitar is suspended in midair and his body has grown to fit it. Although his playing is often vigorous and very physical, the guitar appears to stay still.

If once the flamenco guitar was considered a humble backup for the cantaores, or vocalists, De Lucia demonstrates its astounding range as a showcase instrument, filling the hall with warm, resonant tones and bright arpeggios plucked with vertiginous speed.

Although the show is classically flamenco, De Lucia improvises with an ease and inventiveness he learned from former jazz collaborators including pianist Chick Corea and guitarists John McLaughlin, Larry Coryell and Al DiMeola. The second half features his six-piece ensemble of virtuoso instrumentalists, singers and dancers. He leaves room for impressive improvisations from Perez on electric bass and Bobby Martinez on sax and flute. Percussionist Israel Suarez Escobar provides polyrhythms on the cajon, or box, now a standard flamenco instrument that De Lucia borrowed from Afro-Peruvian music.

Even when De Lucia is simply accompanying his powerful singers, his mastery is at the heart of the show, adding dramatic punctuations and crescendos with economical flicks of the wrist.

It’s hard to believe that this flamenco luminary could question his own talent. But De Lucia says he is haunted by a voice in his head that tells him he’s never good enough. It’s a critical and demanding voice, forcing him to doubt the worth of his own songs as he writes them. It’s a stern and unforgiving voice, making him flinch after an impossibly complicated run he wishes he had executed faster, sharper, cleaner.

“By misfortune, I’m always thinking how poorly I’m playing,” says De Lucia, a perfectionist who practiced 10 and 12 hours a day as a boy. “I had a father who didn’t believe in rejoicing when things were done well. That was normal. That was the way it had to be. The horrible thing was when things were done wrong. I was raised that way and you can’t escape your upbringing. At least, I haven’t escaped my father.”

De Lucia glances out the window as the car glides across San Francisco Bay, shadowy headlamps reflecting the weariness in his drooping eyes. He’s been touring since he was the teenage accompanist for dancer Jose Greco. Today, he’s tired to the bone of being on the road.

At first he was driven by the struggle to rise out of the grinding poverty of his family in Spain, the cradle of flamenco, this exotic, emotional fusion of Moorish, Jewish and Gypsy music. Then it was the struggle to maintain his status as the reigning genius of the genre.

You get the impression that De Lucia would rather have a root canal than endure the agony of writing something new. He took years to produce his latest studio album, the masterfully understated “Cositas Buenas,” always wondering if it would live up to his legacy.

“I’m at a level where so much is expected of me,” he says. “I dread being locked up in a room with a blank page, wondering where I could go next that I haven’t been before, somewhere that won’t be just commonplace, where there are no more surprises.”

After arriving at his hotel near midnight, De Lucia says he needs some sleep and disappears with his family into the lobby. But moments later, he cheerfully reemerges with a photographer who was waiting to shoot his portrait. As they head up the street, Antonia suddenly darts out after him, her mother chasing after her.

“They are inseparable,” says Gabriela as her husband and daughter walk ahead holding hands.

De Lucia, who has three grown children, says he’s enjoying fatherhood more this time around. Those mournful flamenco eyes light up with mischief as he shoots playful glances at his coddled girl.

De Lucia has been living with his family in Xpu-Ha, a remote Mexican town on a peaceful bay south of Cancun. That’s where he’d happily live out his days.

If only he weren’t the great Paco de Lucia.

“I’ve been playing for more than 40 years, with a lot of tension, with the adrenaline always pumping at its peak,” he says. “So there comes a time when you say, ‘When can I devote myself to a contemplative life, to enjoying what I have around me, without the pressure of always having to be brilliant?’ ”

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Paco de Lucia

Where: Royce Hall, UCLA

When: Today and Tuesday, 8 p.m.

Price: $50, $40, $28 ($20 students)

Contact: (310) 825-2101