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Lila Downs
Tree of Life
Narada World (www.narada.com)
Born in Oaxaca, Mexico, her mother's home, Downs finds artistic inspiration in the indigenous traditions of greater Latin America, making her music a compelling cosmopolitan hybrid of indeterminate cultural identity, an organic expression of her own mixed background. Downs studied music and anthropology at the University of Minnesota, where her father taught, and at Oaxaca's University of the Arts. Tree of Life draws its revelatory character in great degree from the Mixtec codices, a hieroglyphic rendering of the history of her mother's people. Downs thus offers an extraordinary series of visions animated by the capricious and enduring figures of Mexican indigenous folklore.
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Lila Downs performs at the Makor Center in New York City on Monday, January 8, 2000, and at the Encino (CA) Community Center on March 24, 2001.
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Tree of Life is more subtly jazz-tinged than her first and likewise compelling release, La Sandunga (BMG U.S. Latin). It reveals her superb ensemble as finely adept in the folkloric realm she explores here. The band includes Downs' husband Paul Cohen (sax, keyboards, musical direction), Angel Chac�n (guitar), Armando Montiel (ocarina, gourd, bongos, conga, djembe, clay drums, Tarahumara drum), Aneiro Tano (ocarina, percussion, vocals), Carlos Tovar (clay drums, Tarahumara drum), with unidentified but equally skilled players on Veracruz (Jarocho) harp, harmonica and marimba.
Downs and Cohen cultivate a magisterial sense of sound in each of the album's finely chiseled offerings. "Arenita Azul," a traditional Veracruz tune, pairs Jarocho harp with a Cuban rumba-like percussive figure, producing a marvelous pan-Latin blend that won't let go. She follows with an upbeat rendition of another Veracruz classic, "La Iguana," in which the harp again achieves takeoff velocity against the weaving call-and-response vocals. With Chac�n's impressionistic solo classical guitar accompaniment, Downs' interpretation of "Xquenda," a Zapotec song by Manuel Reyes Cabrera, is oddly redolent of the jazz classic, "You Don't Know What Love Is," invoking the tragic vocal spirit of the young Chet Baker.
The deeply expressive "Nueve Hierba," a Downs-Cohen composition, highlights the singer's extraordinary vocal palette with a spare but insistent percussive and keyboard underpinning. "Semilla de Piedra" combines indigenous and Spanish lyrics with a subtle guitar-harmonica interplay and the muted drum kit, allowing Downs to modulate between a husky whisper and the soaring heights of her vocal range, crafting a vocal waltz in figurative and literal terms. "Icnocuicatl" opens with a subdued ocarina solo into which Downs' voice flows almost indistinguishably, an airy blending of tonalities. The album closes with "Uno Muerte," another of the singer's ethereal Mixtec compositions, sung to the celestial deity: "No person can touch you, sun/ you decompose the dead/ and transform death into life/ my world dies without you..."
There are other treasures as well, but verbal description cannot capture the earthy strength of Downs' dramatic vocal presence. Her arresting dynamics and depth of feeling are evident in spades in this recording. For full appreciation, this is an album for headphone listening, and Downs is an artist whose other-worldly inspiration is probably best apprehended in live performance. She has already won passionate audiences in France, Portugal and Mexico. Next on her itinerary is North America, whose own sequestered indigenous spirits emerge incarnate in an astonishing voice that shall by all accounts be heard. - Michael Stone
Lila Downs' Web Site
Song:
"Arenita Azul (Blue Sand)" Arranged by Lila Downs, Paul Cohen
Published by Nara Music, Inc. (BMI)/Cloud People Music (BMI)
©1999 Narada Productions Inc
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