Lila Downs on the Way Up

LILA DOWNS At La Peña Cultural Center, Berkeley, Thursday, June 29.
By Jesse "Chuy" Varela

Lila Downs
Photo: Ron Delany

The crowd was buzzing this past Thursday at La Peña in anticipation of Mexican singer-songwriter Lila Downs. The talk was about music rather than the upcoming presidential elections south of the border. After experiencing her performance you realize that in a nation where elections are still for sale, Lila (Lee-la) does more to advance the cause of the marginalized than any politician ever will.
An electrifying figure who bears an uncanny resemblance to painter Frida Kahlo, Downs wore a hand-embroidered cotton blouse with bare midriff and a long green skirt, with a silk-like black shawl draped over her shoulder and her braided charcoal hair glistening against the spotlights. Her quiet confidence and rare artistic ability add up to a transfixing diva’s aura.

A talented quartet from Mexico City made up of Paul Cohen (sax-piano), Celso Duarte (harp-fiddle-guitar), Armando Montiel (congas-cajon), and Chuco Mendoza (bass) provided superb backup in the intimate setting. Cohen, who is married to Downs, serves as the group’s musical director and is an able multi-instrumentalist with diverse improvisational ability. String master Duarte handled his chores with a dynamic presence. Montiel played textural congas and took a smoking solo on the cajon wood-box drum on the Verzcruz classic "El Chuchumbe." The band’s anchor, though, was Mendoza, who provided great groove and harmonic coloration on bass.

The strums of a folk harp served as the opening prelude for a rendition of "Sandunga," a traditional Zapotec song from Oaxaca that is the painful cry of an Indian woman embracing her dead mother’s body. Her first few notes said it all: a huge and potent range with exquisite vocal technique and articulation laced with operatic and jazz influences. Embracing the melancholy lament, she turned out an emotional rendering that conjured images of the soulful 1950s singer Chavela Vargas.

Downs quietly greeted the audience and scanned the room with those intense Frida-like eyes. Grabbing a cone-shaped guiro (gourd scraper) they swung into "Noche De Luna," a midtempo Cuban guajira done à la Mexicana. Forging a bridge between the past and the present, Downs is a passionate revivalist transcending musical eras. With a Sonora Santanera swing and a torchy 1940s cabaret delivery, the neo-traditionalist sounded like the reincarnation of a guarachera from a bygone era.

"Se me paro el corazon con las trajedias del amor," she sang (my heart stopped with the tragedy of love) with seasoned nuance, greeted with a roar of applause. "Nueve Viento" came next and added a festive spin with a delightful 6/8 huapango beat and a bit of comic relief as she stopped midtune to recite stanzas of dichos (folk sayings). With a quivering vibrato her performance bore the touch of pioneer ranchera singer Lucha Reyes with its chorus ("coco de la nube, coco de la lluvia…") and its climatic crescendo.

Catching her wind, Downs took a minute to expound on her next piece, an original called "Maquiladora," a song dedicated to women who work in Free Trade border factories. The delicate cumbia featured a melancholy fiddle that contrasted nicely with the clarity and radiance of her voice as she spoke to the women abused, killed, and exploited in these industrial zones.

The daughter of a Mixtec Indian mother and an Anglo-American father from Minnesota, she grew up between both countries. Attending the University of Minnesota, where her father taught art, and University of the Arts in Oaxaca, she has honed an image and style that is bringing her critical acclaim. Her 1997 debut La Sandunga is now licensed to BMG Latin for international distribution.

Downs also drew selections from her latest CD, Yutu Tata (Tree of Life), a mythological account of the first Mixtec people being born from trees, drawn from the codex Vindobonesis, one of the pre-Columbian pictographs that survived the Inquisition. Singing songs in Zapotec, Mixtec, Mayan, Spanish, and English, her profound affection for her indigenous roots was coupled with a strong working-class American ethic that she shared with a very hip medley of Woody Guthrie songs that included "Pastures of Plenty." As she strapped on a barrel drum for "Arenita Azul," an Afro-Mex offering, she was rescuing the folk music of cultures in Mexico fighting against obliteration.

At times Downs resembled chic pop icon Yma Sumac, the Incan princess with ladder-leaping range. Singing soulfully in indigenous tongues, she entranced the listener with an intimate and open air, so that by the end of the show you felt befriended. A fabulous jazz waltz version of the mournful "La Llorona" served as her encore. Truly a descendant of the cloud people of Oaxaca, as she caressed the melody we realized we’d been hovering around a mountainous musical talent. The heavens don’t get any closer than this.

FUENTE