Arts & Lectures
2005-2006 Performing Arts Season News Release
For Immediate Release

March 7, 2006

Brilliant singer Lila Downs to perform her
eclectic Mexican music at UCSB Campbell Hall

Summary Facts:

UCSB Arts & Lectures presents Lila Downs, an acclaimed singer who re-imagines American and Mexican music as an on-going conversation between two great traditions, on Tuesday, April 18 at 8 pm in UCSB Campbell Hall. Creating a strongly layered and emotional music in which blues and jazz cohabitate with ranchera, and honky-tonk swings alongside romantic boleros, Downs has invigorated a new wave of cross-border Latino music. Her 2004 album One Blood/Una Sangre won a Latin Grammy and “Burn It Blue,” her contribution to the acclaimed movie Frida, earned her an Oscar nomination. Billboard Magazine writes, “Downs is smart, subversive, sexy and soulful.” The New York Times asserts, “There are many tones in the Mexican jukebox, and many of the best resound from Ms. Downs, a mezzo-soprano with a three-octave range, a hungry mind and an arresting stage presence.”

Downs’ latest recording La Cantina (Entre Copa y Copa) will be released March 7 by Narada Records. Made up mainly of rancheras, the album will focus on the songs of the revered Mexican composer Jose Alfredo Jimenez. “It’s a challenge to try to do something new with these forms,” she was quoted as saying in a recent article in The Los Angeles Times. “So we did some of the songs with a very low groove and a beat, and one of them’s like a hip-hop piece. I love to use contemporary instruments and forms of music....Then on the other hand I love to hear the acoustic sound of the traditional instruments.”

Lila Downs grew up in the Sierra Madre Mountains of southern Mexico, in the state of Oaxaca, and also in Minnesota. She is the daughter of a Scottish-American cinematographer/painter, who came to Mexico originally to make a documentary about the blue-winged teal’s annual migration from Canada to the Yucatan Peninsula. There he met Lila’s mother, a Mixtec-Indian woman, who sang in Mexico City.

Downs started singing mariachi songs when she was 8. When she turned 14, she started voice lessons in Los Angeles, and then continued voice lessons in Oaxaca city at Bellas Artes. She moved back to the United States to study voice and anthropology at the University of Minnesota. She was working at her mother’s car parts store, in Tlaxiaco, Oaxaca, when she returned to music, and toured with the Cadetes de Yodoyuxi and La Trova Serrana, a band based in Guelatao, Oaxaca, who sing about their Zapotec community and values.

Downs was to become an opera singer, but she became disenchanted with the music department in Minnesota, dropped out, followed the Grateful Dead for a while, sold jewelry on the streets and moved back to the mountains of Oaxaca where she learned to weave cloth. She later wrote her college thesis on the symbolism created by the Triqui women in their weaving, a language which narrates the history of this autonomous Indian group.

She returned to singing in the club scenes of Oaxaca and Philadelphia along with Paul Cohen, an expatriate saxophonist who had also been a clown and juggler in the circus. They began collaborating together on songs that would slowly mature into their most recent recordings. This musical process began taking form during the soothing and warm Oaxacan nights, at a bar called El Sol y La Luna.

Downs and the band’s most recent performances have included heavy touring in Mexico, South America, the U.S. and Europe. She collaborates with musicians from Mexico, Canada, Cuba, Peru, Argentina and Paraguay, performing her own compositions and tapping into the vast reservoir of native Mesoamerican music, by singing songs in the Indian languages of Mexico such as Mixtec, Zapotec, Maya and Nahuatl.

Concert-goers are invited to stay after the performance for a Meet-the-Artist discussion.

Lila Downs is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures and sponsored by El Mexicano, KCSB 91.9 FM, Hotel Oceana and Longoria Wines. The concert is generously supported by Fredric E. Steck & Kelly LeBrock. Ms. Downs’ residency is supported by the Western States Arts Federation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Tickets are $35 for the general public and $19 for UCSB students who must show valid ID at ticket purchase and the evening of the show. Ticket prices are subject to convenience fees. Tickets are on sale now and can also be purchased at the door, if still available.

For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.

Editor: For photos, please call
George Yatchisin at (805) 893-3494.

©2006 UCSB Arts & Lectures, University of California, Santa Barbara