Susana Baca echoes in the shadows
Afro-Peruvian songstress has spent her life researching the music of her people
PREVIEW
SUSANA BACA
Wednesday, October 9
Jack Singer Concert Hall (CPA)
Peruvian singer Susana Baca has spent her adult life researching and cataloguing the folkloric music of her native country – hers is not a politically correct ethnomusicology, though. Instead she's fascinated with the music of Peruvians of African descent.
Baca came to world attention in 1995, when her own rendition of "Maria Lando," a heartbreaking ballad about oppression of Third World labourers, was included on The Soul of Black Peru, a compilation on David Byrne's Luaka Bop label. Her eponymously titled debut solo CD was released two years later, followed by Eco de Sombras (Echo of Shadows) in 2000, a record cited as one of 100 essential CDs in Sue Steward's Rough Guide to Latin Music.
Through an interpreter, Baca tells me that she had to wait until she was in her 40s before she released any albums because she was not taken seriously in her home territory. Rather, she was looked at as being a little bit crazy for singing Afro-Peruvian songs and poetry when different types of music were more important to the Peruvian musical establishment.
Baca was born and raised in Chorrillos, a seaside barrio outside of Lima that was established by the Spanish to house African slave miners, the ancestors of Baca and other constituents of the present-day Afro-Peruvian community. It was there that she was steeped in the cultural legacy of Africans brought to Peru by the Spanish slave trade. Her father was a fisherman who sang and played guitar, and the sea is a central character in her songs.
"I come from a culture and a place where music is natural," she says. "And since I was young, I was always curious about the origins of songs we sang."
After years of writing books and making recordings based on her field work in towns like Chorrillos, Trujillo and El Carmen, she founded the Instituto Negro Continuo with her husband, Ricardo Pereira, in 1992. Their goal? To preserve the music and culture of black Peru for future generations. Today the Instituto is helping several young artists record and publish new material.
"The amount of music lost in Peru is incredible," says Baca. "An old musician dies and his tradition dies with him. The worst part is that the youth don't know about it. Young people go to the Andean, but they can't locate the Afro."
The music of black Peru is still in many ways "the music of the ghetto," says Baca. Blacks are still treated like second- or third-class citizens, but the music has in recent years found relevance as a source of black pride for Peruvians of African descent.
The songs of Lucila Campos and Chabuca Granda might be sung in Spanish, but their beats and blues – played out on traditional instruments like the quijada de burro (jawbone of a donkey) and the cajita or cajon (wooden box used to keep rhythm) – are those of Africans in the Americas.
"I came face to face with the past and I had to be strong," says Baca about her research. "It's something that everyone of African origin has to do because our past is immersed in the history of slavery – and that has to be confronted and acknowledged. I read a lot – it wasn't very pleasant. There were moments I didn't want to continue – I didn't want to know anymore about the atrocities of history."
Baca and her longtime bandmates were in New York City on September 11, 2001, and during the days that followed the tragedy. She says the impact of 9/11 awakened mixed feelings about her music, and an awareness about the need to get on with life, that you can survive the bad things that happen to you.
"At first I felt as if I was drowning, and I was afraid I wouldn't have the voice to sing, but after I started singing, I realized again the power of song to heal. We felt as if we were sharing this with the people of New York. And in the end, love is the thing that succeeds."
As the city cycled through fear, disbelief and shock, then community, sharing and kindness, Baca gathered herself to create Espiritu Vivo, an album recorded before a small audience in an intimate Manhattan sound studio.
It is a diverse repertoire of songs, including Afro-Peruvian classics, a work by her mentor Chabuca Granda, the Latin-jazz standard "Afro Blue" by Mongo Santamaria, Caetano Veloso's "13 de Maio" (a song she chose because the history it recounts closely parallels that of the people in Peru) and reworkings of "Autumn Leaves" and Bjork's "Anchor Song."
Baca brings to Calgary her Peruvian quartet, which she says is like an extended family of players: Juan Medrano (cajon, backing vocals), Hugo Bravo (percussion, backing vocals), David Pinto (bass, backing vocals) and Sergio Valdeos (acoustic guitar, backing vocals). |
