WOMAD

Lila Downs

From Mexico

“It took a long time to decide that I wanted to sing,” Lila Downs recalls. “Something needed to motivate me.” And what did motivate this anthropology graduate were the songs and stories of the people of Oaxaca, the southern Mexican state where her mother came from and where Lila spent much of her childhood (splitting her time between there and the distinctly chillier Minnesota). It was her mother, a singer herself, who persuaded Lila to sing with sentimiento, the deeply emotional feeling that’s made certain musical traditions, like the Portuguese fado, utterly beguiling. Since that epiphanic moment, Lial and her partner Paul Cohen have created a series of remarkable albums, inspiration for which has come from all over the Spanish-speaking diaspora – it might be mythological tales of trees giving birth to people or the very real plight of Mexicans trying to cross heavily guarded borderlines. With her songs of emotion and humanity, this is Latin American soul music.