Susana Baca

Espanol

£10.95

'Lamento Negro' - TUMI104

Track Listing:

³The delicacy and beauty of Susana Baca¹s voice makes her one of today¹s most popular Latin American singers. She is renowned as an interpreter of contemporary Afro-Peruvian music: the intimate lando and samba rhythms of her country. Here she sings the love lyrics of Latin America¹s greatest 20th century poets: including Peruvian Cesar Vallejo, Chilean Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda and Uruguayan Mario Benedetti. An irresistible disc.³ Jan Fairley (Music critic, UK)

Susana Baca was born in the black coastal barrio of Chorrillos, outside Lima, where the descendants of slaves have lived since the days of the Spanish empire. While many people are aware of the huge and powerful African based traditions of Cuba and Brazil which emerged from the cultures of West-Africans brought to the New World, few realise that black customs continue to thrive in other parts of the Americas. In Peru, groups of slaves were brought to work in the mines along the Pacific coast and in the homes of wealthy colonists as domestic servants. They gradually adapted the traditions they brought with them to the new lives they forged, be it mining or fishing, slowly interlacing them with Spanish practices. Carmen, Chincha and Chorillos where Susana was born, are just three places with remnants of Afro-Peruvian culture. Thus, in Chorillos, Susana grew up surrounded by music : "My father played guitar and my mother, who was a dancer, showed me my first steps. At the same time I listened to the radio and watched Mexican movies, and saw all those great Cuban musicians like Perez Prado and Beny Moré."

Despite childhood asthma, Susana avidly pursued folk singing and dancing. "Every June 29, there was the Chorrillos festival, with a religious procession for the patron saint. It was very beautiful: the townspeople carried the image of Saint Peter onto a boat out to sea to bless the water and the season's fishing. The next day everyone in town went down to the beach. The old folks played guitar and cajón, everyone sang." The Afro-Peruvian instruments found today are percussive: Susana¹s musicians use the round, hollow clay botija jar (probably originally used to hold oil), and the cajón. Her percussionist sits astride what was once merely an upturned fish crate, but is today an elongated box crafted from wood capable of producing rich, crisp timbres, the hole in its back creating better Œreverb¹. A myriad of shifting rhythms are created by rapping and slapping fingers and palms of the hand against different parts of the box, producing a subtly shifting percussive soundscape.

Early on Susana took a keen interest in the poets of Peru and Latin America and formed an experimental music group combining poetry and song. It was the beginning of a passion which comes to fruition on this disc, where the lyrics are provided by some of the greatest poets of 20th century Latin America, notably Vallejo, Neruda, Benedetti and Romualdo. Later, through grants from Peru's Institute of Modern Art and the National Institute of Peruvian Culture, she began performing both poetic work and folklore. Susana began to attract attention, the most flattering of which was the admiration of the late Chabuca Granda.

Afro-Peruvian music was little known in urban areas and not at all commercially until the 1950s, when it was popularised by the seminal figure of Nicomedes Santa Cruz. Poet, musician and journalist, he researched Afro-Peruvian music and dances, producing key recordings and publications. Santa Cruz himself followed in the footsteps of Porfirio Vasquez, an early pioneer in the re-discovery of Afro- Peruvian traditions in the Lima of the 1920s. However, it was not until the mid-1960s, through the incredible impact of the group Peru Negro and singer Chabuca Granda, that people in different parts of the continent really became aware of this potent music. One of the great figures of Latin American song, composer and singer Granda was known throughout the Americas, but it was only late in her life that she turned her attention to the sounds of Afro-Peru. In Susana she must have seen a worthy successor, inviting the young singer into her home, hiring her as her personal assistant. "She was my inspiration, the mother of my singing," Susana recalls.

At Chabuca's insistence, Susana was given her first opportunity to record professionally in Peru. But the composer's sudden death in 1983 meant all deals were abandoned. Undeterred, Susana continued, but it was years later before she was able to record and bring her music to a wider audience. Meanwhile, she continued what she has come to see as her life's work: recuperating the music of her people by researching, documenting, learning and performing it. "I had to get right back to the essential foundations of our past - to learn all I could about Black people and their ancestors, who were my grandparents, and their parents as well. I wanted to know that, as well as being good football players and cooks, we were a culture that had contributed to the formation of the Peruvian nation," she says.

To that end, Susana and her husband Ricardo Pereira founded the Instituto Negrocontinuo ["Black Continuum"] in Lima, dedicated to the exploration, creation and expression of black Peruvian culture. "It began as a need for a place where young people could actively participate in cultural research and music making. Now we have a library and an archive as well as a dynamic performance and dance space." "I express myself with the songs and poetry of my people," Susana explains. "I choose songs that speak to me: they're tender, melancholic, rhythmic and poetic. My repertoire is simultaneously old and new. There are traditional songs evoking the experiences of our grandparents, while others mostly poetic are linked to modern life as experienced in both town and country."

The resilience of Susana Baca's talents lies in these tensions. "I never wanted to become the voice of a museum for the dead. Interpreting old, traditional songs in a new way that makes them relevant today and singing contemporary poetic lyrics with traditionally influenced accompaniment has always been my greatest goal," she avers. "This is what unites and renews the old and the new, all that is ours, in what for me is a continual and unending story."

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