Could There Be A More Fitting Ministra de Cultura?
Susana Baca, her grace, appears in New York
By Carolina Amoruso*
How do you breathe a pristine freshness and a love for living into every note you
sing, every smile you garland those around you with, every twirl of your skirt and
every ground-embracing fall of your bare feet?
Ask Susana Baca. She’ll tell you. Or maybe she won’t; her elegance, her
mastery of song and stage and living are inbred; Susana Baca is one of the
very few artistes who exude a genuine, innate, and ultimately inexplicable
graciousness.
We, her admirers at the casually fashionable City Winery in Soho last Sunday
evening, basked in her graces for a too short, hour-plus set, spanning her
repertoire of Afro-Peruvian standards, her own poetic ballads, and gentle, but
not smooth, jazz, as she and her set—percussion, baby bass, guitar and violin—
came into our living room. Or did we come into theirs?
I’d missed the arrival of her latest relea...