In a New Voice from Granada, the Colors of Spain’s Islamic Past

“Lara is a gifted singer with a beautiful and unusual instrument” - LILA DOWNS

For all the tendrils of other world music revealing themselves on Spanish singer/composer Lara Bello’s engaging new album Primero Amarillo Después Malva (“First Yellow Then Purple”) -- Peruvian percussion, Colombian harp, Syrian and French duets, Armenian melody -- the gifted artist’s sound remains rooted in her native Granada, Spain. It helps explain why the young singer was voted Spain’s “Best World Music Artist 2010” by Europe’s most influential world music radio programmers.

That means something of flamenco’s fundamental passion and earthy poetics can be found at the core of Primero Amarillo Después Malva, released May 22 on Jazz Granada (the record title alludes to springtime flower colors in southern Spain). Tellingly enough, before Bello ever mastered various international folk, pop and jazz vocal techniques through performance and extensive study (at home and abroad), she was formally learning the Andalusian music’s intrinsic dance in the fabled gypsy caves of Granada’s Sacromonte district.

In fact, this poised, mature follow-up to her widely acclaimed 2009 debut, Niña Pez, is dedicated to “La Presy,” Bello’s late flamenco dance instructor in Granada -- an important mentor. “She taught me much more than just flamenco,” recounts Bello. “She taught about life itself, overcoming, finding your place and what you really want to do -- things I want to keep in mind forever.” Bello’s teacher was actually a Native American from Texas named Priscilla, who -- after being barred from pursuing classical ballet in the U.S. because of her “Indian face” and brusquely told to try something else -- eventually migrated to Spain and, long before her death, had been completely accepted into the deepest wells of Andalusia’s famously wary flamenco Gypsy culture.

The album’s title track references successively blooming spring flowers that replace dying, differently colored older ones -- imagery that Bello was struck by during her last visits to La Presy’s Sacromonte dance studio. Recorded around the New York metro area and back in Granada, Primero Amarillo Después Malva is full of such nature-based allusions. “Yes, the entire disc has this sense of nature’s cycles in life and death -- every track speaks of that,” notes the songwriter.

Intriguingly, the first and last of …Malva’s ten tracks deal with historical cycles of life and death – and of rise and fall -- that involve Bello’s hometown. Casting the opener “Zahra” and closer “La Luna Cubre Montañas” (“The Moon Covers the Mountains“) in Granada’s glorious Moorish past, Bello employs finely wrought music and some naturalistic lyrical metaphor that can recall the great Granadan poet himself, Federico García Lorca. Everything serves to evoke the garden-laden city’s waning days as the last outpost of “Al-Andalus,” that presence of sophisticated Islamic civilization that had illuminated Spain for over seven centuries -- right through Europe’s Dark Ages -- before its forced collapse in 1492.

“Those songs were inspired by [British Pakistani intellectual/activist/author] Tariq Ali and his [1993] book Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, set in the Granada of that era,” reveals Bello. (Along with flowers, tree imagery abounds throughout the CD. In Spanish, “pomegranate tree” is “granado”; its fruit is the town’s namesake.) Beyond the wondrous Alhambra (Granada’s famous surviving Moorish palace), Bello insists that an essence of the beautiful city continues to be its persistent Muslim past. “You can find Arab ruins wherever you dig in Granada. Yes, the Moorish presence is still there -- it’s in the stones of our streets, even in our regional Spanish accent, where the sounds are very close to Arabic.”

Bello’s degrees of stylistic vocal command allow her to evoke a Middle Eastern feel, putting melismatic inflections into her voice as needed. And she brings in Syrian vocalist Lena Chamamyan for some bilingual dueting on the CD’s “Horizonte - Yumma Lala.” They met when they both headlined at the “Jazz Lives in Syria” festival in Damascus in 2010 (political turmoil in Syria made that 2010 festival the last of its kind).

Bello’s musical growth especially resounds on the new album via all the subtle blending of global themes and audio elements, with corresponding instrumentation from a mostly New York-based crew of primarily Latin American musicians. The highly regarded Venezuela-born pianist Luis Perdomo -- a long-time bandmate of Ravi Coltrane, etc. -- is just one of the impresssive players. The CD’s Colombian producer Samuel Torres also contributes some key percussion on the cajón. “In New York, I’ve found this very strong Latin American presence, a great community of Latin musicians -- there’re so many colors to work with here,” elaborates Bello on the influences of the city where she now resides. “To all my lyrics and music, there are things I bring from my travels or from meeting musicians and others, without even being conscious of it. But always,” she adds, “there is something of Granada.”

There is much of her southern Spanish homeland in “Ausencia” (“Absence”) -- a melancholy song that reflects on the cherished time Bello used to spend with her grandmother up in the Alpujarras Mountains near Granada.

Among the reasons Bello cites “Nana de Chocolate y Leche” (“Lullabye of Chocolate and Milk”) as a favorite track is its concern with the cycle of life and death -- and one of a very close, personal nature. “My father [a talented Granadan photographer] passed away in 2009 -- but then, the very next day, my friend gave birth to beautiful fraternal twins, one with much darker skin than the other. So, without it being done consciously, the song was a celebration of both a life remembered, and new life: the twins, one ‘chocolate’-colored and the other ‘milk’-colored.” (Bogotá-born harp virtuoso Edmar Castañeda accompanies here, in one of the album’s instrumental highlights).

Bello counts Mexican-American songstress Lila Downs as one of her influences, as well as Argentina’s late Mercedes Sosa, flamenco divas Carmen Linares and Mayte Martín, and Arab vocal legends Fairuz and Umm Kulthum. “What they have all done -- in totally different ways, is use the voice to communicate … I love many types of music played by many kinds of people, but there is something special in the voice.”

And with her new CD, Lara Bello shows she is a special voice, indeed.

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