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Some songs are better in black and white
Marty Lipp talks with Argentine artist Juana Luna Photo: Sol Schiller
Before there was an internet and synthesizers and artificial intelligence there was, well, everything. That’s the simpler world that Juana Luna explores on Canciones en Blanco y Negro. Born in Buenos Aires amid a family that loved Argentinian folk music, Luna moved to the U.S. at the age of 21 to attend the Berklee School of Music. Among her dreams was to follow the example of Juan Luis Guerra, who went to Berklee to study jazz but made a career of reinventing traditional music from the Dominican Republic. Luna entered Berklee playing the diatonic Paraguayan harp, but switched to the classical harp so she could explore a wider repertoire. Over time, she began collaborating with other musicians as a singer and began to lay the groundwork for a very different career from playing the harp.
Now 36 years old, Luna has released a spare, mostly-acoustic album where her love of folk music and the family stories of her youth began to rise to the surface. Because both a friend and her grandmother told her she had a “voice from another time,” Luna said she thought: “Well, I have all the all these old songs, and some people tell me I have this old voice, so okay, maybe I’ll just embrace that and and do something kind of looking backwards and holding those sound textures of the past, and also the songs. I thought a little bit about this, and I thought, it’s true, I like boleros, I like folk music. Everything I do at the end of the day is kind of inspired by the past.” She began to visualize the songs as the musical versions of old black-and-white photos and that made the album coalesce in her mind. Indeed, the album has a beautiful stillness that is in stark contrast to the frenetic energy and electronic rococo complexity of so much contemporary music. Her album seems an antidote not a contributor to the short attention span of today. “I didn't think I was going to end up doing simple, simple, simple songs, like the ones I do,” she said. “And now I love simplicity, and I’m being very honest with my songs. I don’t want to add anything extra just to make it bigger. I really want to learn how to embrace the simplicity and to be able to share that. It took a lot of evolution to be able to be like simple and to love that, and to say, ‘Yes, this is very simple, and this is what I want to share.’”
One song, “Emilia,” tells the story of her great-great-grandmother, who became pregnant out of wedlock in her hometown of Venice and was essentially exiled by her family to Argentina. She still doesn't quite understand what happened/tears falling sideways
“Olmedo” is based on the true story of a successful magician from Ecuador who moved to the United States with big dreams, but who had lost his eyesight. He eventually was only able to perform on subways in New York City. Luna based the song on a story she heard about him on National Public Radio but had never met him. Olmedo, what your eyes say every time I try to guess my balcony fills with birds and flowers because they know that I am naming you Recently, she said, she was able to track Olmedo down, sent him the track, spoke to him on the phone and they are planning to perform a show together in New York. Luna’s journey to singing simple songs that are rooted in Argentine folk but are not strictly folk, began in her childhood home amid cosmopolitan Buenos Aires.
 Luna's late grandfather, Roberto Aquerreta (the guitarist) “What was heard in my house was folk,” she said. “My relationship was very strong, but I have to say it took me a while to be very proud of it, because it was not the most fashionable thing growing up. People there wanted to hear things that were coming from the States or from the UK. I always remember loving it completely, and that's why I was listening. But I couldn't share it completely necessarily with my friends. And then when I moved to the US, for some reason it was easier for me to do—to keep on doing this kind of music. It was absolutely inside of me, because everything I did had an element of it. What my music has is elements of folk music from Argentina. It has both rhythms and like cells, like molecules of the sound, of the rhythms. But it's not necessarily the whole thing. And I love to do that, because that’s very honest for me, because that's who I am.” The songs on Canciones en Blanco y Negro have a few common themes: several are stories about women, several are about travellers. Luna herself left Argentina for Berklee in Boston, then relocated to New York City and is the daughter and grand-daughter of immigrants. While the lovely, calming album is not dark or maudlin, there is an undercurrent of something like the bittersweet yearning called saudade explored by Brazilian and Portuguese songwriters. “Maybe it’s a way I have to deal with sadness, to just put it in songs,” Luna said, citing her relocations and the deaths of her mother and grandmother. “But yes, there’s a lot of traveling and there's a lot of reflection. I have to say, there's been a lot of good byes—and welcomes too—in my life. I think it’s somehow, the way I deal with life, which is looking backwards and yes, and taking a little sip of melancholy. I don't know if it's an Argentinian thing, but it's having a little sitting down with the sadness. And I wouldn't say enjoying it, but yeah sitting with it.”
Further reading and listening:
Juana Luna and ensemble on the Millennium Stage at The Kennedy Center (September 27, 2024)
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