Stirred, but shaken away

Lila Downs is an artiste who always seemed to have her act together.

The Mexican-American singer has a stunning voice, a confident multicultural vision grounded in her Indian roots and a successful 15-year career in global music circles.
What she doesn't have is a child.

Downs faced her inability to conceive children as she approached her 40th birthday in September. Depressed and drinking, she fell apart.

“What ... am I doing in this life if I can't have children?'' she asked herself. “That's the whole point of living as a woman.''

Back home in her beloved Oaxaca, the deteriorating political situation racked by a violent teachers' strike two years ago made matters worse.

As a champion of her culture, she felt powerless and angry and started taking it out on her band.

Once, in the middle of a concert in the Canary Islands, she walked off the stage, thinking: “You guys work it out yourselves. See how far you get without me.''

“The devil came out in me,'' Downs recalled. “I was engendering the anger in my band and suddenly everybody started fighting.

Oooh, yeah, it's very interesting, because the seed of evil, I can see how it infects things,'' she said.

Today Downs has won her fight with the devil. She laughs frequently, even while discussing personal problems.

She dresses in a more appealing way and has started plucking eyebrows that she used to keep thick. “Its liberating to suddenly pluck your eyebrows and be more feminine,'' she said.

But Downs's biggest transformation is in her music. Her new album, Shake Away, marks a pinnacle in her attempts to find a natural fusion of disparate strains of music and different sides of herself.

The title tells you where she is at. She took that evil and shook it off.

Allure in swan songs

Her previous album makes more sense now too. La Cantina (2006) was a collection of Mexican rancheras, songs for broken-hearted people.

It was her release for all that pain, though she didn't talk about it much at the time.

Even now, when she sings a snippet from the Cuco Sanchez classic La Cama de Piedra (Bed of Stone) in her trademark deep voice, she can summon profound sadness.

“From the cantina to the cure'' — that is a line she is using to describe what has happened to her between albums.

The “cure'' refers, in part, to the healing she underwent with a curandera from Oaxaca, Dona Queta. The famed folk healer and midwife prescribed a regimen of herbal teas and massage to awaken her femininity.

“I did feel better physically after Queta gave me those teas,'' said Downs during a recent interview in West Hollywood.

With long braids, colourful woven clothing and strong sense of mysticism, Downs's artistic persona is immersed in the indigenous culture of Oaxaca. Her early albums in the mid-to-late 1990s were essentially showcases for the folkloric music of the region southeast of Mexico City.

Downs's importance, however, lies with her ability to transform folk tradition into a modern, living genre — what she calls “re-conceiving'' the music.

She now uses it as part of a Pan-American palette of sounds that includes blues, jazz and rock, reflecting the half of her lineage inherited from her Scottish-American father.

Multicultural fusions are not a matter of taking something from column A and something from column B, which can sound self-consciously eclectic. With the new album, Downs and Paul Cohen, her husband and long-time collaborator, finally have hit on a natural formula.

But like the instinctive recipes of great cooks, they can't quite tell you how it is done.

“Musically, it's kind of hard to explain things anymore because it flows so much,'' Downs said.

The evolution was helped by the couples' move a few years ago from Mexico City to New York. The city's multinational mélange has energised her band, La Milagrosa, which includes a drummer from Chile, a guitarist from Venezuela, a bassist from St Louis and percussionists from Colombia and Cuba.

City open to risks

“New York is the place where musicians are willing to risk more,'' said Downs, who co-writes all the music with her husband-arranger. “You can find a musician from Morocco or Paris or Colombia willing to put in their bid for 200 bucks a session and see what happens when coming together with artistes from different cultures.''

The album's open, expansive feel is enhanced by Downs's duets with guest singers, including Mari from Spain's flamenco-chill band Chambao, Ruben Albarran of Mexico's Café Tacuba and New Mexico-born Raul Midon on a tribal reworking of Santana's Black Magic Woman.

After 15 years, Downs remains one of the most interesting and compelling artistes from Mexico.

She tours constantly throughout the world and even performed at the Oscars in 2003, singing a duet with Brazil's Caetano Veloso on Burn It Blue, a nominated song from the film Frida, to which she contributed other music.

Through it all, Cohen has been by her side, sharing dreams for a better world.

“I've become a more peaceful person thanks to him,'' Downs said, laughing again.

Keeping the cultural torch ablaze hasn't been easy. Even Mexicans don't think it is hip to do Mexican music these days.

“Swimming against the current can be hard work because you have to deal with this notion that what were doing is somehow backward,'' Downs said.

“I come from a culture that is very negative and very ashamed in many ways.

The Mixtec people I meet in New York, they're afraid to say they're Mexican. And I try to tell them, ‘no, keep your heads high. We have to show that we, too, are worth something here'.''