Download Gypsy Spirit Infuses the Fusion (New York Times)

Gypsy Spirit Infuses the Fusion (New York Times)
By JON PARELES
Published: October 29, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/29/arts/music/29buik.html?_r=0
Sad love, crazy love, bad love, joyful love, life-or-death love: those were what Concha
Buika sang about in her magnificent New York City debut on Friday night at
the Brooklyn Academy of Music. While the lyrics were in Spanish, the emotion was
luminous and unmistakable.
Buika, as she bills herself, is a Spanish singer and songwriter who has conceived her
own diaspora: one in which the Gypsies, who catalyzed flamenco, crossed the
Atlantic to meet Cuban music and jazz. Her music is the rare fusion that honors all
its sources. The sorrowful volatility of the old Spanish songs called coplas and of
flamenco — its pain and tragedy, endured and defied — suffused her music’s
multilayered rhythms and harmonies.
Buika (pronounced BWEE-kah) was born on the island Palma de Mallorca to parents
from Equatorial Guinea. She soaked up flamenco, jazz, African music and soul as she
grew up, and she carries them all within her husky voice. She can make sweeping
dynamic changes, turning from tearful to desperate to furious in a phrase. She can
sing the taut arabesques and unfurling improvisations of flamenco, or glide through
a pop melody, or scat-sing with an exultant sense of swing.
On her superb album “Mi Niña Lola” (Dro Atlantic), Buika shapes the songs into
concise pop structures. Onstage she expanded them for more drama and exploration.
She led a quintet of Spanish and Cuban musicians. The Spaniards, who started the
set with her, played the acoustic guitar and cajón (box drum) of flamenco; the
Cubans, who soon joined them, were a jazz trio of piano, bass and drums.
No one was confined by idiom. Buika uses the traditional flamenco rasp, but at times
she traded flamenco’s throat-tearing climaxes for a breathy, hazy jazz singer’s tone,
as if she were ducking into enigmatic shadows. The approach was thoroughly
untraditional, but no less moving. Daniel López, on guitar, played the suspenseful
chordal flurries and interjections of flamenco, but also delved into pop and jazz
chords. Iván González, on piano, juggled Chopin-esque delicacy, modern-jazz
harmonies and Afro-Cuban vamps. And the rhythm section juxtaposed flamenco
rhythms like the triple-time, hand-clapping bulería with rumba, bolero and jazz,
making transitions so natural they sounded like different strata of the same
landscape.
Buika arrived onstage in a black dress and the kind of red shawl a traditional
flamenco singer might wear. She began with her slower, more pensive songs: “All
women are angels, fighting for lost causes/We women are angels without wings,” she
sang. Later, for “Bulería Alegre” (“Cheerful Bulería”), she tossed away the shawl and
began to dance, mixing flamenco gestures — elegantly hitching up her long skirt —
with Afro-Cuban crouches and hip swivels. She also scat-sang with the dexterity of
one of her American favorites, Betty Carter, and plucked an imaginary bass fiddle
along with the band’s modal Latin jazz.
For her finale Buika was unaccompanied as she sang “Ojos Verdes” (“Green Eyes”), a
celebrated old Spanish song about a prostitute’s unforgettable night with a man who
rides away forever at dawn. She made the song impulsive, languid, tender and then
bitterly bereft; the audience was hushed, enthralled. All Buika needed was her voice
to summon the music’s complex past, its possibilities and, above all, its passionate
immediacy.