Rhythm, Afro-Peruvian singer Susana Baca tells Paddy Woodworth, may be the string which leads her once enslaved people back to their lost origins
If they took my words or my tongue I would speak from the heart
If they took a leg, I would dance on one foot
If they took an eye, I would cry with the other If they took an arm I would still have another to embrace my brothers to sow the furrows of the earth
To write your name on every shore my love
- From Si me quitaran totalmente todo (If they took absolutely everything away from me) by Alejandro Romualdo
Susana Baca found herself singing this poem on September 11th last year, in the heart of New York City, just after the Twin Towers had imploded to Ground Zero. She and her producer, Craig Street, had booked into a Manhattan studio, which had the advantage of providing space for a small audience, to record her third album. Baca likes to play to human beings, not to the reflecting glass window of a sound booth. But she could never have imagined the challenge of reaching out to people whose whole, familiar universe had just been ripped apart.
"We all wondered what we were doing there with the world shattering all around us," she says. "For the Peruvians, it was a flashback to the past, to the years of bombings by the Sendero Luminoso guerrillas. Perhaps, in that sense, we were better prepared than the Americans. But such conflicting feelings went through all our heads, from terror to fury. Yet somehow, one by one, I don't know how we found the strength, but we simply began to play music, and playing, playing, playing," - she repeats the Spanish word, tocar, as though it were a powerful mantra - "something cathartic happened. We decided to continue, to put our music before death."
The invited audience began to drift in, "absolutely cast down with despair, but there was nowhere else to go. There was a sensation that we were not in reality. The sessions took us through very tough moments. But somehow, we found that music, happiness, could be contagious even then, even there."
Is she serious? Her voice comes down a crackling, out-of-sync phone-line from her home in a Lima fisherman's barrio, but it carries extraordinary conviction and vitality - and the result of the New York sessions can be heard on her new album: Espíritu Vivo.
However, there is nothing unusual in the idea that the alchemy of art can somehow transform suffering and horror into something else. And this forms the basis of much of the music which Baca has dedicated her life's work to recovering - the rhythms and songs from the dislocated and abused culture of Afro-Peruvians.
El Mayoral, for example, from her previous album, Eco de Sombras, looks on paper like a bitter lament against a slave driver "who never lets us rest". In Baca's hands, though, it becomes a blood-tingling celebration of survival, a transformation of the misery of cane-cutting and ditch-digging into some sort of redemptory joy. Si me quitaran totalmente todo, on the new album, is a steady, dignified defiance of the worst the violent human world can do to us. "It is not a sad song," says Baca. "It is always a source of strength, a dedication to those who have suffered."
Growing up in a fisherman's barrio in Lima, she found the culture of her own people was becoming almost invisible. Peru was the heartland of the Inca empire and its indigenous people have never forgotten who they were before the illiterate conquistador, Francisco Pizarro, ambushed their emperor, Atahuallpa, with the help of a Catholic priest and some heavy artillery.
In school, Baca was taught about both Spanish and Inca history and art, but nothing about the African slaves who formed the nation's third great population group. "The first wave of blacks came with the conquistadores," she says. "They were both slaves and mercenary warriors, who often carried out the worst atrocities against the Incas for their masters, which did not make them very popular with the locals.
"The second wave came as slaves, pure and simple, and were so disorientated when they arrived that they accepted the instant baptisms of the priests who were waiting at the docks. The priests were the only people to help them, to heal their wounds, and so they changed their names and lost their identities."
The Africans remained closer culturally to the Spanish than to the descendants of the Incas, despite sharing a similar experience social dispossession. In any case, unlike many slave groups in Cuba and Brazil, Peru's black population was deliberately drawn from diverse ethnic groups, to undermine the links which might have led to co-ordinated resistance. When Baca and her Bolivian husband, Ricardo Pereira, set up their Instituto NegroContinuo, to research and develop Afro-Peruvian culture in 1992, she was already aware that only a scattering of stray words from African languages like Yoruba was still in use. Apart from some memories of pre-Christian rituals, only the music remained, and it was vanishing fast. "We had been so eager to assimilate to Spanish culture that there was a sense of shame among the old people about their own songs, which were, of course, associated with the pain of slavery. I used to have to go to them with my heart in my hand and say: 'Look, I'm the same as you. I want to appreciate what you know'."
She has written extensively about her research, but she baulks at the term "academic". "I'm just a very curious woman," she says, laughing. Her curiosity led her to explore the complex heritage of the (to our ears) unusual rhythms which underlie Afro-Peruvian music which makes her own work such a richly satisfying tapestry of sound.
"Rhythm is at the heart of things," she says, "and while it is a very difficult field of study, I think evidence is emerging which shows that specific rhythms can tell us where we came from, can lead us back to our origins in Africa."
She sees parallels between her work and Irish efforts to document and preserve musical traditions. And she is very familiar with one of its central controversies: is the tradition something sacrosanct, which must be reproduced in pristine and unchanging form, or can it gain from interaction with other and more contemporary traditions, such as rock and jazz? "This discussion is so useless," she says. "Music changes its nuances with the generations. It is beautiful to go to the source, but it is also beautiful to enjoy new forms."
Baca's full exposure to new forms came about because the former Talking Heads frontman, David Byrne, took Spanish lessons. His teacher, an Argentinian, showed him a video featuring Baca, and he quickly signed her to his eclectic, but heavily Latin-biased, Luaka Bop label. "He is my 'discoverer'," she says, "and opened many doors for me. Now I have to learn to walk alone, he is a friend. He shows in his life that an artist is an artist, not a diva, that you still have to pick up your child from school." In case she has made the rather unconventional Byrne sound like a suburban clerk, she adds hastily: "There is still a lot of craziness about him. I consult him now," she adds with self-irony, "about fame".
With international fame came US musicians, incorporated electronically after Eco de Sombras was recorded by Craig Street in Baca's Lima home. But her own band, with whom she has sung for more than 20 years, is still central. Her only request, after a 90-minute interview, is that I name them. They are Sergio Valdeos (guitars), David Pinto (bass), Hugo Bravo (percussion) and Juan Medrano (cajón - a simple box which somehow produces more varied tones and rhythms than most drum kits ).
It was not until a session in Joe's Pub in New York , a year after that album was recorded, that she and her band actually met two of the American contributors,John Medeski (keyboards) and Mark Ribot (guitars), both jazz/rock musicians closely associated with Tom Waits.
"They found our polyrhythms very difficult," says Baca. "It was not until they could feel, rather than read, what we were doing that we could really play together. But thanks to their great training as jazz musicians, we found a way to meet, and it worked really well."
So well that they agreed to come back together for that extraordinary recording session on September 11th, 2001.
The result is a broad, deep and resonant canvas of sound, over which Baca's chameleon voice lilts like a teenage girl on songs like Caracunde, chants jubilantly on the emancipation anthem 13 de Mayo, and brings all of the pain and maturity of an Edith Piaf to Si me quitaran totalmente todo and Les Feuilles Mortes.
In conversation, she returns again and again to the theme of music as a healer. She was one of the leading lights in a Peruvian peace movement opposed to both terrorism and the dirty-war tactics of the Fujimori government. And while she criticises the current president, Alejandro Toledo, for adopting a monocultural approach which tends to exclude black artists, she praises him for not interfering with a truth commission which is investigating that dark period in Peru's recent history.
But she comes back again to the immediate past and present. "I feel the same when I see the New York firemen crying after pulling their comrades out of the trade centre as I do when I see an Afghan family fleeing American bombing. The smell of death was so close to us on September 11th, but I can smell it now in the Middle East, it wakes me in the middle of the night. I feel despair, but there must be a reason to make music in these circumstances. It must help us be militants for peace."
Susana Baca is at the Savoy Theatre, Cork, next Thursday and at Vicar Street, Dublin, on Friday. Details: www.note.ie