Lila Downs: Pecados y Milagros (Sins and Miracles, 2011) and Balas y Chocolate (Bullets and Chocolate, 2015)
Together with her husband, saxophonist Paul Cohen, plus sundry others including trumpet players, Mexican/Minnesotan vocalist Lila Downs has been performing and recording innovative reinvigorations of Mexican folk music for several years. About her two most recent studio efforts, Pecados y Milagros is a vintage outing for Downs, but the more recent Balas y Chocolate steps her music up to a whole new level.
Pecados opens with “Mezcalito,” an original composition by Downs and her husband. Downs/Cohen compositions are often highlights of her recordings, and this one is no exception. Klezmer folk music from Paul Cohen’s background gets interwoven with the more Mexican sounding melodies. This lends a level of complexity to the energetic arrangement in the same league as progressive rock. And as always, Lila Downs’ incredibly versatile voice adds lots of drama, in this case including an opening that is just her singing, unaccompanied. Again, this is all vintage for her, but it’s vintage that never gets old.
Other must-haves of the “typical” Downs recording include a hauntingly beautiful rearrangement of a Mexican folk standard (“Cucurrucucu Paloma”); a social awareness original song (in this case, dedicated to the hardship suffered daily by women who grind the corn to make tortillas) infused with electric guitar to sneak even closer to progressive rock (“Paloma del Comalito”); a little mountain climbing adventure onto Downs’ high, high, high upper octaves (“Xochipitzahua”) versus the lower ones where she usually hangs out; and the incorporation of rap (“Pecadora”).
Excellent overall, with an overarching theme of religious faith juxtaposed with nitty gritty reality. The result is a concept work feel, also to be found on her earlier CDs. Border/La Linea from 2001, for example, is dedicated to the Mexican migrants, “to the spirits of those who have died crossing the line.” (She might wish to revisit such a theme, to add a song about Donald Trump’s proposed wall along the Mexican border.)
Skip to four years later, 2015, and Balas y Chocolate: It’s not that all Lila Downs’ trademark moves aren’t again present, it’s that there is a much higher level of intensity brought to bear. Balas opens with six straight uptempo tracks. The listener doesn’t get time to catch her/his breath until the beautiful Cohen/Downs love ballad, “Cuando me tocas tu” (When you touch me). The several delights amidst those first six include “La burra” (The burro), which in concert Lila Downs performs down on all fours. Also, the title track, inspired by Downs’ son’s chocolate obsession (as though he were unique!), contains one of Cohen/Downs’ most infectious refrains, ever, almost as infectious as chocolate itself. It’s also by far the happiest track in the whole collection.
Nearly everything else is haunted, again in concept album fashion, by both the recent violence afflicting Mexico, and Paul Cohen’s struggle against an undisclosed ailment. Shortly after the love song, “La promesa” makes perhaps the strongest musical as well as political statement of this release. Heartfelt laments over the inability to find Mexico as it could more ideally become lead into especially powerful syncopated refrains, instrumental as well as lyrical.
Certain politicians talk of walling off Mexico from the United States. As Genesis’s Tony Banks would have put it, they fear what they don’t understand. But meanwhile, Lila Downs works zestfully in her music to break down barriers every which way, mixing it all up into a chocolate covered, Mexican/klezmer/rap/progrock stew. It seems especially appropriate that one of her Italian fans, an entomologist, named an unusually colorful grasshopper after her. It was discovered near her home base in Oaxaca. As noted in 2014 articles in both the Los Angeles Times and Entomology Today, the name is liladownsia fraile, but let’s hope and pray that for a long time to come, frail will not be the word to best describe her husband’s health!
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Author: David Taylor
David Taylor is a retired elementary school teacher of English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL). For several years, he has also been a staff writer for Progression, the Journal of Progressive Music. Other publishing credits include Contact with Gaia, a speculative fiction novel, and science fiction novel Sessions With the Seer, published by Virtual Bookworm. Family and friends insist his principal achievement is an award-winning chocolate chip cookie.
