May 2000
GQ Magazine
Her music was born of slavery and lost instruments, but a new sound comes through when Susana Baca is in the house
The Soul of
BY JAMES O'BRIEN
Black Peru
MOST OF THE time, when an artist says, "I recorded it at home," it means in a studio in the barn or on a twelve-track in the basement. In Peruvian singer Susana Baca's case, it means in the kitchen, the hallway, the bedroom, the stairwell. When I arrive in Lima, it is early winter south of the equator. I find Baca's house an obstacle course of electrical cords and recording equipment, with padding on the doors and walls and windows that tells me I've entered either an insane asylum or an improvised studio. The padding, of course, is to keep out the sounds of the busy streets of Chorrillos, the ocean-side barrio where Baca grew up, where she first learned to love the songs and dances of her Afro-Peruvian ancestors, and to where she has returned.
There is in this house a sense of anticipation, of great possibilities, sparked in part by the presence of a celebrated American producer whose work has led to Grammys and changed careers. There is here a clear feeling that the recording being made within these padded walls has the potential to take Susana Baca from World Beat phenom to international star.
Even in the face of great expectations, Baca seems cool, seems focused, seems... at home. The first thing she mentions when asked about the joys of home recording is food. "It's been pleasant," she says, "to have my kitchen nearby." In fact, in the next few days, it will become crystal clear that Baca is much more comfortable making my bed and meals, more comfortable talking with me about how I've slept, about the sea air in Chorrillos or the constellations in the subequatorial sky, than she is sitting with me for an interview as the great Peruvian singer, or as the conservator of a culture so recently in jeopardy of disappearing.
ESSENTIAL LISTENING: When North American audiences first heard Baca, they heard something that was both recognizable and novel, a sound rooted in a history they knew and didn't know.
Whether or not Eco de Sombras, the album she was recording (which has just been released), signals a commercial breakthrough for Baca, to many she has already become the voice of Peru. This is especially true for listeners first drawn to her music in anything like the way I was: by the description of a disc jockey on an obscure radio station in the Adirondacks one somber and bracing December day four or five years ago.
​
He said, "Here's some warm music for a cold day," and then played "Maria Lando," the song that first brought Baca and her voice to the attention of the vast and chilly North.
​
That disc jockey (bless him) had found the song on 1995's Afro-Peruvian Classics: The Soul of Black Peru, a compilation released by David Byrne's Luaka Bop label that was thick with the heat and passion of songs such as Roberto Rivas's rousing "Enciendente Candela" and Lucila Campos's blood-spattered bullfighting an- them "Toro Mata." Here was a music in which North American audiences heard something immediately recognizable as essential, as rooted in the enduring tradition of blacks in the New World, a music that, in the way of blues and jazz, had emerged as a kind of undeserved blessing out of the unimaginable evil of slavery.
Byrne had been inspired to produce that compilation because of a similar reaction to Baca's "Maria Lando." In a Spanish class, he'd seen a South American video of Baca performing the song. "Immediately, I said, 'What kind of music is that?" he remembers. "It had familiar elements, but the way it was put together was like nothing I'd heard before."
Susana Baca's music comes out of a human history largely un- known, out of the dusty, unpaved streets of shantytowns along the Peruvian coast, from musical gatherings called peñas damp with spilled beer in low-slung sheds off quiet village squares, out of the crowded alleyways of barrios where criollo children insist on shining your dirty old boots that never had a shine in the first place and where vendors sell skewers of fried guinea pig and warm orange juice so thick it oozes.
​
Out of these perfectly likely places (think of turn-of-the-century New Orleans or Port of Spain in the '30s) comes a sound capable of being at once jubilant and anguished, a music made by turns for the sadness of a Spanish guitar, the sparseness of a rhythm beat out on a simple wooden box and the force of a salsa beat.
​
Baca knew that sound like no one else, knew the lives and the histories that invented it. For years she had written books and made recordings based on the stories and songs she'd found in small towns like Trujillo in the north and El Carmen in the south. In 1992, with her husband, a handsome Bolivian named Ricardo Pereira, Baca founded the Instituto Negrocontinuo as a place of artistic nurturing and preservation, where young Peruvians could embrace the traditional songs and dances of black Peru while creating their own, contemporary forms.
As he is showing me the institure's collection of instruments it has saved from extinction and brought to life in Baca's songs, Pereira pulls out a highly polished gourd the size of a basketball. He tells me that Afro-Peruvian slave musicians, denied instruments by their owners, found that if they hit certain parts of the gourd with certain fingers and at the proper angle, they could get specific sounds, every time. In the early '90s, Baca and Pereira. tracked down a 95-year-old man on the northern coast of Peru who knew how to play the checo, how to get those special sounds out of his gourd. So they took Baca's two percussionists, Hugo Bravo and Juan Medrano Cotito, up to Trujillo, found the guy and had him teach them how to play. The old man died a year later, but you can hear the sound of the checo on new songs, such as the stirring "El Mayoral" and the Afro-poppish "Xanaharí." You can also hear Baca's voice infused with an innocence, a child-like fearlessness fostered by the comfort of her surroundings.
HOUSE MUSIC: There are plenty of New York musicians and ex-Tom Waits mates on Eco de Sombras, but mostly there is Baca, alone and unafraid in a house in Lima, Peru.
Inside the airy house, with its grand staircases and towering ceilings, the sound is rich and echoing. For all the hardships that come with making a record without a studio, the trade-offs seem clear: Your bed is nearby, your dog, the fragrances of your own good cooking. Producer Craig Street, whose work with Cassandra Wilson helped reveal the depth and sensuousness of her contralto to the world and to the Grammy committee, loved Baca's house, and anyway, he says, "Making a recording has more to do with who's in the room, what is the room and how people feel about it. And this is totally a case of somebody being really comfortable in an environment and feeling good about an environment."
​
When, late at night, the playing begins, when the tape is rolling, Pereira sits very still at the kitchen table, smoking one Cuban cigarette for each take.
​
Everyone must be quiet, but once, during what will become the master take for the love song "De Los Amores," Pereira can't resist whispering to me, "I like this one very much."Every time somebody messes up, even if it is Baca, even if it is two in the morning and they're on the sixth take, she giggles. Sitting quietly in the kitchen with Pereira, I can hear her over the monitors, sounding a little giddy, a little nervous. The giddiness comes, I think, from the joy of these new songs. The nervousness from what Baca calls her fear before the microphone. "There's a moment, that instant when you are right about to begin, where there's a terrible fear," she says. "A terror," she laughs. "Recording at home has allowed me not to have that so much."
With the new album, Baca, Street and the folks at Luaka Bop had all agreed they wanted to push, emotionally, musically. On Eco de Sombras, if you listen really, really closely, you'll hear not only the homey sounds of pots rattling (Pereira making dinner for the musicians) and dogs snoring (Baca's taciturn bulldog, Bembon) but also the sounds of Tom Waits's old guitarist Marc Ribot and Waits's bassist Greg Cohen. Ribot and Byrne liven up "Valentin" with a kind of New York electric funk. Rob Bur- ger's melancholy accordion gives "La Macorina" a smoky, torch-song feel. On "Reina Mortal," the new people step back and let Baca and her Peruvian guitarist, Raphael Muñoz, and bassist, David Pinto, weave a quiet, passionate ballad
Mostly, though, the thing people listening to Eco will respond to is what happens when, early on a winter morning, in a dark, narrow hallway just outside her bedroom, Susana Baca stands. alone except for a lyric sheet, a music stand, a microphone. Her band mates are scattered throughout the house; her husband is in a room nearby; her dog is asleep in her bed. From the kitchen, no musicians are visible; there is only the silhouette of the singer. Someone counts to four, and suddenly the house is full of music. Baca begins a subtle dance, shifting from one bare foot to the other until her time has come and she addresses the microphone, begins to sing, faces down her fears.