|
The crowd was hushed as Concha Buika took the stage at the Brooklyn Academy Of Music for the second of three exclusive appearances in the U.S. Barefoot and clad in a black velvet floor-dusting skirt, black mesh top and a brilliant mandarin orange shawl, she immediately captivated the audience with her husky, emery cloth voice, abrading and caressing at the same time. Her music clearly came from a safe and inviting place, moving many in the small concert hall to tears.
Diminutive, lithe and radiant, Concha Buika is like a small skyrocket, exploding into a shower of music, color and light, as she did on this recent tour, seemingly coming out of nowhere. Her first widely distributed CD, Mi Niña Lola, has dazzled music lovers and critics alike, with the Spanish newspaper El Pais calling it “a revolution” in music.
Based in Madrid and now known simply as Buika, the seasoned chanteuse has taken a roundabout path to where she is today. She schooled herself in rock and soul with a two-year stint in Las Vegas, knocking off a convincing Tina Turner impersonation with wig hat, shimmering thighs, platform shoes and all. She’s refined it by bringing in influences both from her formative years in Spain, and from her African blood. Her repertoire is mature, compelling and complex, and perfectly complements the multilayered dimensions of her extraordinary three packs a day-sounding voice. “I’m feeling really comfortable in myself,” Buika says, linking her personal growth to her artistic arrival.
But it hasn’t always been easy. Maria Concepción (“Concha”) Balboa Buika grew up amongst “putas and yonquis” (prostitutes and junkies) in the barrio chino—the seamy side of the tracks—in Palma De Mallorca, off the coast of Spain. Her parents had been political activists in Equatorial Guinea, Spain’s only colony in Africa, and were exiled to the island. Buika was born there in 1972. Her father eventually fled the family too, closing the door behind him one day and leaving her mother and seven children abandoned. “No problem,” Buika maintains. According to her, he’d been a rat to her mother and the kids.
African and an exile, Buika grew up as an outsider. She recalls that the only other black person in town was a man she’d often see fixed outside a gift shop to entice passersby like a cigar store Indian. The neighborhood kids would run up behind her to steal a feel of her bushy afro, which she wore in tribute to Michael Jackson (who at the time still looked like he once did in the Jackson 5). For comfort and sustenance, Buika turned inward. She built a nest of belonging inside herself—a refuge where, as she explains, bringing both hands to her chest, “I’m always going to have a place to stay.”
Music was her other sanctuary. She went back to the Africa she’d never seen, but “that’s in my heart and in my blood.” She taught herself guitar, piano, and bass and began to sing, inspired by her grandmother, who vented her anger not with shouts but with song. “I compose not to hate,” Buika says matter-of-factly, “and I sing not to turn crazy.”
After high school, she began to frequent the gypsy quarters of her city, penetrating the most fabled outsider culture of all by soaking up the deep emotion of their music. Buika discovered the copla, a long-lost Andalusian song form that was revived in the early 20th century, and brought its sorrowful, bittersweet and fleeting pleasures into her own safe house. The three coplas on Mi Niña Lola—the title song, “Ojos Verdes,” and “Te Camelo”—are smoldering and exquisitely personal examples of Buika’s gut-wrenching
interpretation of the form.
Buika’s initial attempts at conveying this emotion come through on her self-titled first album (released in 2006). A breezy, tasteful study in soul-flavored jazz, it has drawn comparisons to Sade. Moreover, it’s self-produced, with Buika tackling nearly all the arrangements and instrumentation on her own. “I don’t like to work with producers,” she observes irreverently. “I don’t like the way they come to you and say, ‘I’m gonna save your life, and I’m gonna make you feel like a star.’ I don’t want to be a star. The stars are over there!” She laughs as she unfolds her arms and points to the high ceiling of the hotel lobby where we met.
What she does like is “working with crazy people—people crazy for music.” One of those self-confessed lunatics, producer Javier Limón, appeared at just the right juncture in her career. “And he is crazy!” she exclaims. “I love how he arranges and the way he does so many things.” Crazy like a fox, one might say about Limón he has worked with such legends of Latin music as Paco de Lucia, Bebo Valdés and Duquende, and owns one of the most sought-after studios and record labels (Casa Limón) in Madrid. He has assembled a stable of some of the Latin world’s most innovative and accomplished musicians— a sampling of whom helped make Mi Niña Lola such an artistic accomplishment. The album is so “mature and elegant,” as Buika rightly describes it, that the effort won Limón this year’s prestigious Premio De La Musica—Spain’s answer to the Grammys.
In addition to the coplas, Mi Niña Lola features a flamenco-jazz arrangement of a classic tango (“Nostalgias”), as well as songs that Limón wrote for her, five of her compositions and several collaborations they did together. She vaunts her “Jodida Pero Contenta” (“Screwed But Happy”) as her rallying cry for everyone—women especially—to free themselves from “love dictators.” While lyrics are about moving out from under the yoke of machismo and male dominance (“Come on, the world is like it is because they built it / We didn’t build it / They built this world”), at the same time she’s careful to warn that “even women practice machismo.”
Buika doesn’t waste her lyrics on banalities or debase her performance by plying sex above her talent on the contrary, she chides the growing number of women artists who do. “I’ve met a lot of artists,” she says. “They like to be famous and sexy, but they don’t love music. Music will be here even if we’re not. It’s so big that really we’re here for music— music isn’t here for us.” She likes to note the irony that ultimately these seeming sexpots don’t even understand sex. “Sexy is when I see, for example, a book of a writer, and I read that book and say, ‘Oh, my god, how you touch my heart.’ Sexy is what you are: it’s your smile, your eyes, your everything.”
|
RSS Feeds
