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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.