Sinuous in her movements, zen-like in her onstage presence, the Afro-Peruvian singer Susana Baca immersed herself in her Dublin debut as if her life depended on it - note-ie's remarkable lateral thinking lured Baca into their jazz series, welcoming her re markable silken vocals, buoyed by a quartet who performed a spellbinding musical calculus on stage.
Having come to mainstream attention courtesy of David Byrne's Luaka Bop label, but with a formidable reputation already forged at home, Baca's "coming out" has been a boon for music fans who like their rhythms syncopated, their basslines utterly redrawn and their acoustic guitar distinctly Spanish in tone and mood.
Negra Presuntuosa was the perfect scaffold for the entire quartet to lend backing vocals which simultaneously challenged our hips and ears with its complexity. As a people who can barely walk and chew gum at the same time, we struggled to catch up, trying desperately to infiltrate the rhythms.
This was remarkably joyous music. Juan Medrano Cotito played the cajon, a wooden box, with the subtlety of a master who has nothing to prove; David Pinto's baby bass ducked and dived between Baca's fluid phrasing like an errant child; and Raphael Munz's acoustic guitar was both rhythm and rhyme. Donkey's mandibles and sundry other percussion were merely the scaffolding for Baca's own barefooted serpentine movements. Dyskinesia never felt so good.
One quibble, though: why were we subjected to the sponsor's logo as backdrop for the entire performance? Does patronage really have to be this attention-seeking?