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Susana Baca: the sensuous voice of Afro-Peruvians (Haitian Creole)

By Misha Berson

Seattle Times theater critic

Listening to Susana Baca's recordings can be deeply pleasurable. But seeing her perform live is dreamy.

Onstage the Afro-Peruvian singer, a lithe woman in her 50s, flashes a radiant smile and often has a tropical blossom tucked behind one ear.

Dressed in a silky shift, she is like some graceful long-stemmed flower, swaying and undulating to the songs she performs in a light, airy yet expressive voice.

"What a funny question!" Baca exclaimed in Spanish, via a translator, when asked about her sensuous stage presence.

"The music does this to me, it brings me these movements and sentiments," she said, during a phone interview from Chicago, where a dance company is choreographing a piece to her music. "For Afro-Peruvians, dance and music are inseparable, natural."

Baca, who begins a four-night stand at Jazz Alley on Thursday, is not only an interpreter of the music she sings. She is also a caretaker of, and ambassador for, a coastal culture that is little-known beyond Peruvian borders.

With her Bolivian sociologist husband, Ricardo Pereira, she runs the Instituto Negro Continuo in Lima, a center that helps "the younger generation of artists to explore their own projects and research, and is a place of classroom learning about Afro-Peruvian culture."

Baca also explained that she is a crusader for those Peruvians "of dark skin who are the poorest in my country, and who work in the forests and the sugar-cane fields."

"There's a grand fight these days," she said, "to preserve the traditions and languages of the Amazonian people, and other dark-skinned people. It's part of an ongoing battle to open free markets for these workers, instead of exploiting them."

But don't think that Baca is a strictly folkloric (or political) artist. She sees herself as a musical citizen of the world.

"While it has its roots in folkloric tradition, our music is definitely contemporary," she said, including her respected band in the statement. "We give ourselves much liberty."

That's borne out in Baca's most recent album, the well-received "Travesías" (English translation: "Crossroads.") Out on David Byrne's world-music label Luaka Bop, it features songs in Spanish, Portuguese, English, Haitian Creole and French, and a duet by Baca and Afro-Brazilian pop star Gilberto Gil.

Baca has recorded material ranging from Björk tunes to the classic chanson "Autumn Leaves," to poems by such major Latin American poets as César Vallejo, that she sets to music.

But her sound always taps into her heritage. Inspired by the music of Peruvian descendents of African slaves, her band creates polyrhythmic textures with such traditional instruments as the cajón (wooden box), the guapeo (clay pot) and the quijada (jaw bone rattle), as well as acoustic guitar and bass.

Byrne launched Baca's international career in 1995, by including her on the Luaka Bop disc "Afro-Peruvian Classics: The Soul of Black Peru."

It was just the break the singer, raised in a working-class family in the coastal town of Chorrillos, needed to broaden her audience ? both in Peru and in the U.S. and Europe.

"Before I used to sing in much more intimate spaces, and it was a hard and very difficult life," she noted. "Now I've achieved a wonderful opportunity to have a great career in my maturity. Maybe it would have been good to have this 20 years ago, but I'm not sure I would want to go back and be 20 years younger!"

Baca recently was honored with a Rockefeller fellowship to study the music of jazz great Louis Armstrong. She was doing research on Satchmo in his native New Orleans, but relocated to Chicago after Hurricane Katrina.

She also plans to create "a mass that is sung for the poorest people, that will be a prayer for justice and fulfilling the needs of the poor."

But at Jazz Alley, as in the several one-nighters she's performed over the past few years in Seattle, Baca will focus on tunes from her several CDs. A favorite is her catchy, lilting signature song, "No Valentin."

"This is emblematic for me," she confirmed. "It is actually a game that you would sing at parties. It's the story of two men who are fighting, and one goes to grab a stick, and the crowd yells, 'Don't hit him with a stick Valentin!' But it's not violent, it's funny."

Laughing, she recalled another use of the song. "There was a Peruvian president in years past whose name was Valentin," Baca reported. "During an election, women would sing the chorus to show they were against him."

Concert preview

Susana Baca plays Thursday-Sunday

at Dimitriou's Jazz Alley

2033 Sixth Ave.

Seattle; $28.50 (206-441-9729 or www.jazzalley.com).