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| Walk all over me Susana Baca, the Peruvian barefoot diva, works her soothing magic on Robin Denselow by Robin Denselow Guardian - Saturday November 18, 2000 The Latin music boom rolls on and becomes ever more varied. In South and Central America, as in Africa, there is a vast array of different styles, and audiences that may have started off listening to the dance music of Cuba or Brazil are moving on check out the slinky rhythmic ballads of the west coast. Susana Baca, now firmly established as the best-selling exponent of Afro-Peruvian styles, is the Latin answer to Cesaria Evora. Both can now pack Western concert halls while popularising apparently obscure local styles that mix African and Portuguese or Spanish influences, and both have been hailed as "barefoot divas". Apart from that, they are a world apart - Evora is from the Cape Verde Islands, off the West African coast, while Baca was brought up in a coastal barrio outside Lima. She may have started out as something of a musical scholar, travelling across Peru and learning the songs and music of those descended from the old slave communities, but there is nothing academic about her performance. She comes on in cropped hair, long velvet dress, shawl and (of course) no shoes, looking and sounding as if her natural home is a concert hall. She starts off with exquisite, slinky ballads that soothe or seduce, and eases gradually towards laid-back dance songs in which she glides across the stage almost in slow motion. The songs are a mixture of old and new from Peru, ranging from ballads with European- sounding melodies to upbeat songs with Irish jig-like bass riffs. But the African influences are there too, both in those pieces where her four-piece band echo the song lines back to her, and in their intriguing, subtle use of rhythm. In a gentle band like this, it at first seems odd that two of the four musicians are percussionists, with one drumming away throughout on the wooden box on which he is perched, and the other hitting anything from congas to a clay pot, a twanging gourd-like instrument, or a hinged wooden device, worn round the neck and repeatedly thumped and banged shut. On her new album Eco De Sombras, recorded for David Byrne's Luaka Bop label, Susana Baca is joined by such adventurous Western musicians as Mark Ribot and Greg Cohen (both known for their work with Tom Waits) but they were not needed here. She has worked with the same backing musicians for six years now, and they understand her perfectly. Sensitive, inventive accompaniment from acoustic guitar and double bass matched the colourful percussion and provided an intricate setting for her cool ballads or the more up-beat songs like Valentin. She may have started off with a series of minor key laments, but when goaded by her highly enthusiastic band she eased into her own stately form of party music, sounding even more impressive live than on her albums. Peru can claim a world-class world music diva. |
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