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, a cultural voyager, a dancer-vocalist who borrows from both Iberian and Arabic traditions.
On stage she is an open and charismatic presence, with a meticulous intelligence. Thursday night at DROM was the U.S. release of her newest CD, Primero amarillo después malva (“First Yellow Then Mauve”). The songs are all original and represent world music, or fusion, of the best, most unforced sort, which, rather than poaching on other cultures, recuperates and acknowledges roots and sources already present and influential in one’s own.
And so in the voice of this raven-haired native of Granada one hears the sandstorms of the Sahara and sees in her hands the intricate fingers of Indian temple dance. There is flamenco in her footwork, belly dance in her torso, and in her throat a call to prayer. What she does is admirable, and of great beauty, integrity, and generosity.
Visit DROM for upcoming events at that venue. For more on Lara Bello, click here.
One response to “Lara Bello”
[…] Her variety isn’t just a matter of forms and genres. It comes from the fact that she is, in one person, many, a singer practiced in dance, literature, and the theater. To experience how varied she is, you have to see her: arms outstretched and undulating like charmed snakes; motions redolent of flamenco, Arabic, or Indian dance; the one-two-three thumb snaps of jazz; a scarf and trail handled theatrically, but with respect, as flamenco, belly, or sufi dancers do. There’s an intuitive symbolism in the way she uses fabrics, a reverberation of the value of cloth before mass production, which I’ve seen from her before, in concerts of the songs of Lorca or from her CD Primero amarrillo después malva. […]