Instead of angling for a record deal, Canyon Cody sent his demo to the U.S. government and applied for a Fulbright scholarship. After he was awarded the prestigious grant, Cody headed to Spain with rapper/producer Gnotes and built a recording studio above a flamenco guitar shop in Granada. Over the next year, the Gnawledge Records duo collaborated with 16 local musicians, recording their open-invite jam sessions during the daily afternoon siesta.

The result is Granada Doaba, an immigrant-powered mash-up of traditional music and progressive hip-hop. While most musicians make records to sell, Gnawledge recorded the album as an educational experiment in multicultural collaboration.  With the entire CD offered online as open-source material free to be remixed by global MCs and DJs, Granada Doaba demonstrates how even “world music” still usually has its roots in a local scene.

“There’s a lot of communal loitering in Granada, people just hanging out in the streets together playing music for free” Cody explains. “And that’s what I tried to capture with the album: I wanted to make local music, not world music.”

Each track on Granada Doaba flows from centuries of confluent immigration that have produced both convivencia—the peaceful coexistence between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval Spain—and violent conflict. When the Spanish Inquisition forced non-Catholics to flee Granada in 1492, persecuted Muslim families fled to the mountains above the city, where they intermixed with the newly arrived Gypsy community.  The resulting hybrid is a unique style of flamenco indigenous to Granada with strong Arab roots (“La Senda del Abuelo”).  The album traces the evolution of the Spanish guitar through five generations of the Habichuela family, Granada’s epic flamenco dynasty, whose youngest star Juan embodies the vibrant future of the tradition (“Flamencología”).

Gnotes and Cody conducted their ethnomusicology research with the guidance of two older musicians—flamenco guitarist Juan Miguel Carmona and Arabic oud (fretless lute) player Uzman Almerabet. But in the end, it was through their collaboration with the young community of immigrant artists that Gnawledge was able to experience first-hand the difficulties and triumphs of border-crossing, genre-bending musical fusion.

As Cody and Gnotes explored the scene, they realized that it would be nigh impossible to capture Granada’s diversity in a traditional recording. In the end, it was Gnotes’ talent and experience as a sample-based hip-hop producer that allowed the group to actively listen and engage the soundscape around them, “Hip-hop is omnivorous. There are no rules that govern hip-hop like they have in flamenco or Arabic music,” Cody explains. “Older genres have reified into these fairly rigid structures. Hip-hop has fewer rules, or we are still discovering them. You can incorporate so many different elements and still be live inside the walls of hip-hop.”

These elements came from chance meetings, magic moments, and off-the-cuff jam sessions with local celebrities like Richard Dudanski, an English drummer who was in punk bands with both Joe Strummer before The Clash and Johnny Rotten after The Sex Pistols.  Dudanksi who now lives in Granada and owns one of the city’s best-loved bars, contributes polyrhythmic percussion to “El Manisero de Potemkin,” a spirited take on Spanish colonialism and a piece of Cody’s personal history, his Cuban heritage.

Japanese flamenco guitarist and long-time Granada resident Hidetomo Nambu painstakingly recorded his accompaniment to the heart-wrenching vocal sample on “No Te Rebeles,” a controversial re-interpretation of an orthodox flamenco song. After hundreds of hours of recording with the Al-Tarab Ensemble, Granada’s premier performers of traditional Arabic music, Cody and Gnotes finally captured a moment of pure old-school funk as the group accompanied a beautiful dancer, Griselda Qamar, while the clacking beads of her dress shimmy audibly in the song’s final mix along with the oud and qanun (zither).

Though the album may be deeply local, the next step for Gnawledge is to take the sound global, which is why an open-source, digital download approach is the perfect fit. “The internet is the only place where global music exists,” Cody believes. This is more than just a distribution method. It’s a metaphor for what lies at the heart of the project, the ideas that took Cody and Gnotes to Granada in the first place: the power of music to build communities from disparate and far-flung cultures.

As the whole project is based on collaboration and collective discovery—right down to the relatives enlisted to craft handmade CD booklets from remixed thrift store atlases—“we want to encourage this to be an ongoing collaborative process,” Cody reflects. “Someone in Helsinki can download it and then upload their contribution. This is an unfinished project. I hope it continues to sprout new life.”