Concha Buika is a Spanish singer from Mallorca whose time has clearly arrived. Her latest CD Mi Nina Lola exhibits her diverse talents and powerful, emotional singing. It amazes me how an artist of this stature could still be so well hidden that it took me until mid-2007 to discover her. I am not sure what it says about the way music is distributed in today's world or better yet what goes on mainstream media as music. Concha was recently in the U.S. and Jon Pareles reviewed her concert-here's what he had to say:
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.