As is often the case when we sign an artist, Susana Baca had never made an album in her home country of Peru. Susana told me a story about meeting one of Peru's most respected singers, Chabuca Granda, who became her mentor. Chabuca went to her record company in Peru and told them they must make an album with Susana.

So Susana and her husband, Ricardo, set up a meeting with the heads of Chabuca's record company to discuss Susana's upcoming album. They told Susana that she must wear a short skirt and a wig on the cover and as Susana told me, she thought to herself, "Well, ok. If this is what I have to do to get an album out, I'll do that." Shortly thereafter, Chabuca Granda died. When Susana called the record company a few months later and said, "I am ready to do that record now," they said, "Well, sorry. Since Chabuca is no longer with us we are no longer planning on doing your album."

Years later we started recording with Susana. As many of you might know, David Byrne was introduced to her music by his Spanish language teacher (who was from Argentina and had done a video of Susana). The one -fantastic- song on the video, Maria Lando, prompted us to do a compilation of Afro Peruvian music, a music that up until that time had very little attention paid to it, even in Peru.

The album was a revelation for people, as was Susana. At one point she even won a Grammy, the first Peruvian to ever do so. At the time I remember walking down the streets of the West Village with her when the president of Peru called her on her cell phone to congratulate her!

We have just released a new small collection of songs from Susana dedicated to her mentor Chabuca Granda. It's called Seis Poemas. It is something of a small gem.

As a side story, I was in Peru in the 1970's. If I heard something good coming out of a record store when walking down the street, I would duck in and buy it, which was usually a 45 single. The record store owner would have a stack of singles on the turntable and take the top one off that he was playing - sell that to me and put the needle down on the next one. One store I went into was playing an Afro Peruvian song (of course, at the time I didn't know it was Afro Peruvian I just knew it was different and that I loved it) and when I said "I'll take that," the guy in the store handed me a four album box set of Fania material. "What the hell?" I thought. I just wanted that one song which didn't sound like typical salsa to me. Nonetheless, thinking that perhaps it was a special Peruvian-style Latin music box set on Fania in Peru, I paid the relatively big bucks it cost and took it home. It was a good set, of course, of Fania material in that label's prime, but not Peruvian - except for the one Celia Cruz cover of Tora Mata. A song that, as it turns out, Susana also sings, though not on this new release.