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Lila Downs steams up Carnegie Hall
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Lila Downs
Whether she’s dressed in slitted miniskirts or garlands of flowers, Lila Downs—who’s performing at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel auditorium tonight—is drop-dead gorgeous. With her commanding, sensual presence, she stole the show, singing a simple Portuguese folk song in Carlos Saura’s recently released movie "Fados.”
But you don’t need eyes to be bewitched when this powerful Mexican-American—who performed at the Oscars in 2003 and in Julie Taymore’s movie “Frida” (2002)—belts out “Black Magic Woman,” in a voice so earthy and soulful you’d swear she’d taken hoodoo lessons from Louis Armstrong.
“They call me a black magic woman,” intones the deep-voiced Downs, interpreting the Fleetwood Mac/Santana classic from the feminine perspective. “Don’t turn your back on me baby…I just might pick up my magic stick!”
And you don’t doubt for a minute that she would.
As it happens, Downs—who grew up shuttling between a little village in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico, where her mother lives, and a college town in Minnesota, where her dad is from—does know something about magic. And it’s not the Hollywood kind. It’s curandismo, the Latin American healing tradition that springs from an indigenous belief system rooted in the natural world.
The maternal side of Downs’ family is Mixtec, a native group that’s lived in the mountains of central Mexico for thousands of years. So in 2006, when Lila was suffering from depression, it was natural that she turned to a Oaxacan curandera or healer named Doña Queta, who talked to her about cleansing her spirit and prescribed massage and herbal drinks.
Many of the songs on Lila’s recent album “Shake Away” are about healing and they take an animistic perspective. “Shake away all the many sorrows,” she sings in the title number, “slide away like a rattle snake.”
The songs, many of which she wrote with her husband and longtime musical collaborator Paul Cohen, overflow with images of the natural world and shift between English and Spanish as smoothly as Nuyorican kids on the playground. “Black Magic Woman” crosses borders both linguistically and musically, moving from blues to shamanistic drumming and back again.
“Perro Negro” (Black Dog) uses a Spanish vocabulary and a Mixtec world view to express some of the anguish Oaxacans experienced in 2006, when Ulises Ruiz, the much despised governor of the state, called in the military to brutally put down a teachers’ strike.
“In Mexico there is a notion of transformation,” Lila explains. “A belief that people can transform themselves magically into other creatures. I was sitting with my aunts and uncles in Oaxaca and they told me that the political leaders had changed into animals. People really do believe this. The black dog in my song is a symbol of crossing over into the underworld.”
Other cuts, like “Little Man” and “Tierra de Luz” and “Minimum Wage” are about the lives of migrant workers. “We’re all children of immigrants,” says Downs, who’s currently living in New York’s Chinatown with her husband. “But sometimes we forget where we came from. Comfort is the mother of ingratitude.”
Whoa! That has a powerful ring to it. I sense another song coming on. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it had a fiery gospel flavor. Who knows. Maybe she’ll perform something Biblical tonight. With Lila Downs, you never know what’s coming next.
Whatever Downs does at Zankel hall or anywhere else on her national tour, there’s one thing I predict. Her performance will be magnetic.
Lila Downs websites and links:
Lila Downs sings in the movie "Fados" on YouTube
Lila Downs sings "Ojo de Culebra" on YouTube
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