LILA DOWNS  Album Title: Border  Producer(s): Paul Cohen and Lila Downs  Genre: WORLD MUSIC  Label/Catalog Number: Narada World 70876-15333  Source: PRINT  Originally Reviewed: July 14, 2001  Lila Downs' dramatic debut album, Tree of Life, released last year by Narada, drew heavily on her exotic Mixtec Indian background, delivering a profoundly moving performance that immediately thrust her into the world music spotlight. With Border, she has wasted no time taking her repertoire to another level. She does two songs in English—"Pastures of Plenty"/"This Land Is Your Land" and "Smoke." The latter is very much in the populist folk tradition, as is "Pastures." "This Land," though, comes from a jazzy rock idea and actually flashes hip-hop at a couple points. Downs pulls off a very torchy bit of Latin pop with "Perhaps Perhaps" that would make for a nice rhumba on the dancefloor, and she shows an adroit comman...

BY JOSH KUN WORDS THAT HURT: Downs's new album documents the war on the Mexican-American border. Susan Sontag began her recent acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Prize, which is awarded annually to a writer who examines the relationship between freedom and individuality, by talking about words. She spoke of how words are never just words, especially words that are big and over-arching and general. These words, she said, can come to “resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand or cave in.” Because they mean so much, they can end up meaning so little. She gave as an example “peace,” a word that can mean either victory or defeat depending on who employs it and who it is employed against. It is of course no coincidence that she offered her comments in the Middle East, at yet another moment of crisis in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Such moments force us to re-evaluate how the world becomes narrative, how society is transformed by the language that pretends to represent it;...

Pedro Luis Munguia, The News Staff - 7/12/2001 The truly exceptional composers intricately subsume the beauty and complexity of their cultures in their musical interpretations. For singer-songwriter Lila Downs, of Mixtec-America background, the beauty of the two cultures that shaped her life cannot be any better demonstrated, nor can the presentation of such cultures be more beautifully interpreted. In Lila's music, we are privy to her many cultural secrets. The pulsing rhythms of Sandunga transport the listener to a remote Mixtec village, to a Mexican City and to the heartland of the U.S. When she first arrived from the United States and settled in Tlaxiaco, on the Mixtec Oaxaca mountain chain, people in the vicinity would come to ask her to translate letters written in English. Once she was caught off guard when a woman wanted to know what was on a letter she had received from U.S. authorities. It stated her young son had been killed while attempting to swim across th...

WORDS THAT HURT: Downs's new album documents the war on the Mexican-American border. BY JOSH KUN Susan Sontag began her recent acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Prize, which is awarded annually to a writer who examines the relationship between freedom and individuality, by talking about words. She spoke of how words are never just words, especially words that are big and over-arching and general. These words, she said, can come to “resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand or cave in.” Because they mean so much, they can end up meaning so little. She gave as an example “peace,” a word that can mean either victory or defeat depending on who employs it and who it is employed against. It is of course no coincidence that she offered her comments in the Middle East, at yet another moment of crisis in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Such moments force us to re-evaluate how the world becomes narrative, how society is transformed by the language that pretends to represent it...

Mi manera de interpretar es frenética y mi música un híbrido, señala. Border es su tercer material y marca el comienzo de su relación con la disquera Narada. Incluye canciones inspiradas en su niñez mixteca y la lucha de los migrantes. ANGEL VARGAS En su más reciente producción discográfica, Border, Lila Downs crea un puente entre las culturas y el tiempo, ya que se trata de una colección de canciones inspiradas en su niñez mixteca, la vida en la frontera, la lucha de los trabajadores migrantes y, finalmente, los sufrimientos y el racismo que padecen las comunidades indígenas. Downs también consolida su propuesta artística, a la cual define como ''híbrida", pues sin ambages alterna entre el jazz, el gospel, el hip-hop, la cumbia, los ritmos norteños y el latin jazz, además de dar un papel protagónico a instrumentos tradicionales y hasta de origen prehispánico. Musicalización de un poema de Sabines downs_lila3Tercero en su discografía -antes grabó La Sandunga y...

By SUSAN FERRISS / Cox Washington Bureau 07-04-01 MEXICO CITY -- Blending borders is hip now, with America's latest Census figures confirming the explosion of Latin influence north of the border. But Mexico City-based singer Lila Downs has been living cultural fusion all her life. The daughter of a Mixtec Indian woman from the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca and an American art professor raised in Kansas, the sultry-throated Downs has become one of the Mexican cabaret scene's most celebrated divas. "I grew up in our Oaxacan home listening to that classic album, Miles Davis' 'Kind of Blue,' " said Downs, 33, summing up her bicultural rearing, borne from parents who didn't even speak each others' languages when they first met. Downs is getting noticed on both sides of the border and in Europe, whether she is singing Gershwin show tunes in English or Mexican folk songs in Spanish or in one of this country's more than 60 indigenous ...

01. Mi Corazon Me Recuerda 4:33 02. El Feo (feat. Ken Basman) 3:27 03. Sale Sobrando (feat. Ken Basman & Gabriel Hernandez) 3:43 04. Corazoncito Tirano (feat. Ken Basman, Aneiro Taño, Agustin Bernal & Omar Aran) 3:59 05. La Niña (feat. Rodrigo Duarte) 3:07 06. Hanal Weech (Cumbia Maya) 3:00 07. Medley: Pastures Of Plenty/This Land Is Your Land/Land (feat. Ken Basman) 5:56 08. La Línea 5:00 09. El Bracero Fracasado 2:33 10. Tránsito (feat. Ken Basman) 3:49 11. Smoke (Acteal) [feat. Ken Basman, Gabriel Hernandez & Alfredo Pino] 4:52 12. La Martiniana (feat. Martirio, Agustin Bernal & Gabriel Hernandez) 5:48 13. Soy Pescador (feat. Memo Diaz) 3:58 14. La Llorona (feat. Gabriel Hernandez & Agustin Bernal) 5:29 15. Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps 4:45 Released: 3 Jul 2001 A Blue Note Records Release; ℗ 2001 Capitol Records, LLC