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Flamencos y mestizos: Lara Bello
I would no more call what Lara Bello does “fusion” than I would the diverse flowers of a meadow seeded by the winds. The flora of her landscape seem to have landed there quite naturally and grown at their own pace. Flamenco, jazz, and folk, the genres of North Africa, the Near East, Asia, Iberia,…
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Este nuestro espacio
The lovely little play that I saw on Saturday night began with the Spanish singer Lara Bello, dimly visible, evoking a lost bohemia from behind a diaphonous scrim, accompanied by the pianist Shai Bachar. It is almost a cameo to look at now, like something contained in a locket of long ago, from someplace in…
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Por el agua de Granada
Before time overcomes the memory, I should say something about the presentation last Thursday by Lara Bello and Erik Kurimski of their new CD of folk songs collected by the Spanish poet García Lorca. What I knew going in was that Bello is the ideal interpreter of the material. I have heard her before in…
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La ruta de Lorca
On June 5, the birthday of the great Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, I joined LA RUTA DE LORCA EN NUEVA YORK, a walking tour of some of the poet’s haunts in the vicinity of Columbia University. We gathered at the university gate, bearing as our standard a rendering of Lorca’s face, composed,…
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Por el agua de Granada
Last week at Terraza 7 Train Cafe I saw POR EL AGUA DE GRANADA … CANCIONERO LORQUIANO, a collaboration of the Spanish singer Lara Bello and the guitarist Eric Kurimski to present renderings of Federico García Lorca’s poems and lyrics. As it happens, Bello is the very first person I would turn to for such…
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Lara Bello
The Spanish singer Lara Bello is one of the more inventive artists I have encountered in New York. Her album Niña Pez was an amalgam of jazz, singer-songwriter folk, flamenco, alternative rock and Middle Eastern vocals. In the title figure she created a sort of alter ego for her own persona. Bello is a storyteller,…