Natalia Lafourcade's alter ego takes center stage in ‘Cancionera'
She had always worn her heart on her sleeve through her lauded career, but with 'Cancionera,' Lafourcade finally felt she was able to stop holding back, lean into the 'spirit of play' and showcase all her multitudes on her 12th studio album, out Thursday.
'Cancionera (the character) challenged me and asked, 'Who are you, really?' 'Who do you think you are?' and 'Are you much more than what you tell yourself? I mean, if you are who you think you are, because, in reality, you are many different things. So it opened up huge possibilities,' said Lafourcade, whose answers have been translated from Spanish. 'Cancionera' translates to 'singer' in English.
Lafourcade, who has four Grammys and 18 Latin Grammys to her name, felt it was time to step into Cancionera's duality and the varied energies: 'earthly energy, volatile energy, romantic energy … they all became a part of her world, and I didn't want to interrupt as they began to manifest,' she said.
The 14-track album transports listeners within the trifold theatrical walls of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema — an era spanning the 1930s to the 1950s when the Mexican film industry cemented its role as a dominant force across Latin America and received international acclaim, creating stars like Pedro Infante and Maria Félix and introducing surrealist styles of filmmaking.
'This album is full of symbolism, inspired by the surrealism of Mexico and the values of our tradition and iconography. I wanted to honor the songs and the path of the cancioneras and cancioneros of life,' said Lafourcade via email.
From the very beginning, with the inviting complex string arrangement of 'Apertura Cancionera' ('Opening'), the album sends listeners on their own cinematic journeys as the jewel-toned red curtain ascends to reveal the black-and-white screen.
'It led me to think of characters, like the ones we saw in the movies, like (Mexican actor) Tin Tan, and these surreal worlds of lots of tropicality, music crafted by Agustín Lara,' said Lafourcade. But she says this is her own interpretation of those characters, inspired by the language and stories of everyday life in Mexico.
Lafourcade has paid homage to Lara in the past: She recorded her own interpretation of the Mexican composer's most notable works on her 2012 album 'Mujer Divina: Homenaje a Agustín Lara' ('Divine Woman: An Homage to Agustín Lara'). 'Cancionera' revisits some of Lafourcade's past stripped-down work as a singer-songwriter with acoustic tracks like 'Como Quisiera Quererte' ('How I Would Like to Love You'), featuring El David Aguilar.
The album was coproduced by Adan Jodorowsky, who also produced Lafourcade's Grammy-winning 'De Todas Las Flores' ('Of All the Flowers'). Lafourcade recorded the album in one take on analog tape alongside collaborators like Aguilar, Hermanos Gutiérrez, Israel Fernández, Diego Del Morao, Gordon Hamilton and Soundwalk Collective.
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This was Lafourcade's chance to explore the duality of her artistic self and her alter ego. She created the visual assets for the album in tandem with her unique recording process, which pushed her to express herself through other creative media, like painting and movement.
'This opened my view and my heart to be more sensitive to the things around me. I began to understand the story behind 'Cancionera,'' said Lafourcade. 'Things started to happen, like I started to paint. It unblocked a lot at a creative and imaginative level'.
A constant throughout Lafourcade's music is her roots in Veracruz, the same Mexican state Lara was from. Veracruz, known for its thriving arts and culture scene, infuses the entire album and naturally evokes itself through songs like 'Cocos en la Playa' and 'La Bruja' ('The Witch'), a reimagined version of a folk song made popular in the region.
'I love everyday life in Mexico. I love the markets and the streets; I love its nights. I love its clandestine spaces and its characters … Mexico is full of beautiful things. Strong things, dark things and luminous things. There's so much duality,' said Lafourcade. 'It's all reflected in the lyrics, in the music.'
Fans of Lafourcade will be able to experience the recording artist's alter ego on the 'Cancionera' tour, which kicks off Thursday in Xalapa, Mexico, and runs through October. The recording artist will tour throughout the United States, Canada and Latin America, along with stops in Spain.
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Access articles from across Canada with one account Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments Enjoy additional articles per month Get email updates from your favourite authors Don't have an account? Create Account Cleo Laine, an English singer who moved easily among musical genres with a dazzling vocal range of almost five octaves and who nurtured a dual career as an actress, performing in musicals and dramatic roles during a career of more than six decades, died July 24. She was 97. Her death was announced in a statement from Monica Ferguson, the chief executive and artistic director of the Stables, a British arts centre founded by Laine and her husband, John Dankworth. Laine began performing in London jazz clubs in the early 1950s, working alongside Dankworth, a saxophonist. After they married, they formed Britain's royal couple of jazz, winning acclaim for performances that combined bebop with baroque music and the blues. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Nothing if not eclectic, Laine remains the only female singer to be nominated for Grammy Awards in the pop, classical and jazz categories, which she accomplished in successive years in the 1970s. She was the first – and still the only – British singer to receive a Grammy for best jazz vocal performance, when she won for her 1983 album 'Cleo at Carnegie: The 10th Anniversary Concert.' Her repertoire encompassed the saucy lyrics of British playwright and composer Noël Coward, the poetry of John Donne and T.S. Eliot, standards by Duke Ellington and George Gershwin, and even Shakespeare's sonnets, which were worked into jazz compositions by Dankworth. A concert by Laine was likely to have a 19th-century German art song by Robert Schumann followed by a tune by Stephen Sondheim or Fats Waller. Laine, who rarely appeared without Dankworth at her side as her musical director, made dozens of recordings, including albums with classical guitarist John Williams and flutist James Galway. She recorded songs from 'Porgy and Bess' with Ray Charles. Her parallel career as a theatre actress informed the dramatic flair she brought to her singing. Your noon-hour look at what's happening in Toronto and beyond. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. Please try again This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. 'I'm a cabaret singer wherever I am,' she once told The Washington Post . 'I think it's a part of me that the words are very important, much more so than improvisation. I think that the drama of a song is a lot more important than oobly-shoobling all over the place.' In 1961, she had a song in the Top 5 on the British pop chart ('You'll Answer to Me'), appeared as a nightclub singer in the film 'The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone' and received glowing reviews for her performance at an Edinburgh arts festival when she filled in at the last minute for Lotte Lenya in 'The Seven Deadly Sins,' a theatrical piece with music and dance by Lenya's husband, Kurt Weill. The following year, Laine – who identified herself as Black and biracial – appeared in two plays on the London stage, including in Caryl Brahms and Ned Sherrin's 'Cindy-Ella, or I Gotta Shoe,' an all-Black musical based on the Cinderella story. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. She had dramatic roles in other British productions, including a modern adaptation of Euripides's 'The Trojan Women,' Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' and the title role in a 1970 staging of Henrik Ibsen's 'Hedda Gabler.' Laine had a showstopping role in a long-running 1971-1972 London revival of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's 'Show Boat,' playing Julie, a mixed-race singer whose story ends in tragedy. Her songs, including 'Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man' and 'Bill,' invariably brought the audience to its feet. In 1972, after Laine made her New York debut at Alice Tully Hall, New York Times jazz critic John S. Wilson called her one of Britain's 'national treasures … with a remarkable voice that ranges from an exotically dark, breathy quality to high-note-topping exclamation.' This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Despite her undeniable vocal dexterity, other reviewers were unmoved by the commanding theatricality she brought to the concert stage. 'She has a frighteningly accurate ear and a teasingly infallible sense of rhythm,' Times music critic John Rockwell wrote in 1974 of Laine's performance at New York's Carnegie Hall. 'But for this listener, admiration stops a good deal short of real affection. Miss Laine strikes me as a calculating singer, one whose highly perfected artifice continually blocks communicative feeling. To me, she has all the personality of a carp. But then, obviously, I'm just a cold fish.' Nonetheless, Laine maintained a large and loyal following for both her singing and her theatrical work. Dankworth wrote a musical play for her, based on the life of the French writer Colette, that premiered in 1979 and later moved to London's West End. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. In 1985, Laine developed the role of Princess Puffer in the original Broadway production of 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood' (later called 'Drood'), based on an unfinished novel by Charles Dickens, and earned a Tony Award nomination for best actress in a musical. In 2000, she played a singer in 'The Last of the Blonde Bombshells,' a joint U.S.-British TV movie about a latter-day reunion of an all-female band from the Second World War, also starring Judi Dench, Olympia Dukakis and Ian Holm. 'Whatever I'm doing at the time is my favourite thing,' Laine told The Post . 'A lot of people would say I'm too eclectic, diversifying far too much, but I think that because of that I've worked longer and had a much more interesting life.' This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Clementina Dinah Campbell was born Oct. 28, 1927, in the Southall district of London. She had a Black Jamaican father and a White English mother who were not married to each other when their daughter was born. In a 1994 autobiography, Laine called her mother 'a bigamist' who had not obtained a divorce before marrying Laine's father. The family moved frequently, and her parents held a variety of jobs, including running a cafe and boardinghouse. Her father also worked in construction and 'would sing at the drop of a hat,' Laine told The Post . 'He was a busker, singing on street corners in the Depression,' she said. 'It was a matter of need, dire need, in those days. Being Black, it was difficult for him to get work, so he busked. I wasn't really aware of this until much later, when I realized that he used to bring a lot of pennies home and count them.' This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Young Clementina was strongly influenced by her father's interest in jazz and was encouraged by her mother to study music and acting. She left school at 14 and became an apprentice hairdresser, always hoping to break into show business. 'I would sit in the cinema,' she later told Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper, 'watching Lena Horne and Judy Garland and think: 'I want that for me.'' At 19, she married George Langridge, a roofer, and had a son. Five years later, in 1951, Laine had a tryout with Dankworth, then emerging as one of England's leading jazz musicians. 'I think she's got something, don't you?' he told his bandmates after the audition. 'Something?,' a trumpeter answered. 'I think she's got everything.' This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Her name at the time was Clementina – or Clem – Campbell Langridge. After some brainstorming, the band members decided to call her Cleo Laine. 'They decided my real name was too long and sounded like a cowboy,' she told the Chicago Sun-Times. Her sister raised her son while Laine devoted herself to her career. She impressed Dankworth and his band not just with her voice but with her ability to match them, glass for glass, in drinking ale during their tours of British nightclubs. By the mid-1950s, Laine was anointed Britain's top jazz singer by critics and music magazines. She divorced her first husband, from whom she had grown apart, and she married Dankworth in 1958. They had two children, who were raised by nannies and attended boarding schools while their parents were on tour. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. They lived about 50 miles from London in the village of Wavendon, where they established a theatre and an educational foundation. In the 'show must go on' tradition, Laine gave a performance at Wavendon on Feb. 6, 2010. Only at the end did she announce that Dankworth had died earlier that day. Dankworth was presented with a fellowship of the Royal Academy in 1973 and the following year appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. He was knighted in 2006, the first British jazz musician to receive this honour. Survivors include a son from her first marriage, Stuart Langridge; two children from her second marriage, singer Jacqui Dankworth and jazz bassist and composer Alec Dankworth; and several grandchildren. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Laine wrote two volumes of memoirs and received the title of Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1997. Her voice remained supple and precise well into her 80s. In 1983, she told The Post how she sought to connect with her listeners: 'I like to imagine when I'm singing that it's not thousands of people but one person, and a love affair can be created that way. I ignore my husband in the background: This is a love affair going on.' Love concerts, but can't make it to the venue? Stream live shows and events from your couch with VEEPS, a music-first streaming service now operating in Canada. Click here for an introductory offer of 30% off. 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