The incredible voice of Lhasa de Sela, a Montreal resident who was born in the US to a Mexican father and American mother, will be familiar to many 1997 and '98 Lilith Fair attendees, and she's featured on the Lilith Fair double CD. Sung in Spanish, this evocative and passionate Juno Award-winning 1997 release (recorded in various acoustically-endowed Montreal kitchens!), celebrates the vocal styles of 30's era jazz greats as well as the distinctive style of traditional Mexican ballads. An array of textures are described through accordion, flamenco-influenced guitar, slide bass, and even samples of falling rain. The songs are informed with the weight and wonder of Aztec mythology: La Llorona is the wind that glides between earth and sky, sighing and crying, seducing men with her melancholy melodies and then turning them to stone with her petrifying kiss. Recommended!

La Llorona is the first album by Mexican American singer Lhasa de Sela, released in 1997 in Canada and 1998 elsewhere.

This text has been derived from La Llorona (album) on Wikipedia and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0

Artist/Band Information

Lhasa de Sela (September 27, 1972 – January 1, 2010), also known by the mononym Lhasa, was an American-born singer-songwriter who was raised in Mexico and the United States and divided her adult life between Canada and France.

Biography

Lhasa was born in Big Indian, New York, of a Mexican father, Spanish instructor Alex Sela, and a Lebanese-Jewish-American mother, photographer and actress Alexandra Karam. Her first decade was spent criss-crossing the United States and Mexico in a converted school bus with her parents and siblings, home-schooled by her mother.

She started singing in a Greek cafe in San Francisco when she was thirteen. Aged 19, she moved to Montreal, and sang for five years in bars, where she developed the material that eventually became her first album, La Llorona, released in 1997. La Llorona, which mixes traditional Latin American songs with original songs, was strongly influenced by Mexican music, but also Klezmer music, Eastern European gypsy music, Middle-Eastern music and alternative rock. The album was released by the Canadian independent record label, Audiogram, in Montreal, and brought her much success, including the Quebec Félix Award in Canada for "Artiste québécois — musique du monde" in 1997 and a Canadian Juno Award for Best Global Artist in 1998.

After touring in Europe and North America for several years, Lhasa left her singing career in 1999 and moved to France to join her sisters in Pocheros, a circus/theatre company. She eventually reached Marseille, where she started writing songs again. She then returned to Montreal to produce her second album, The Living Road, which was released in 2003. While La Llorona had been entirely in Spanish, The Living Road included songs in English, French and Spanish.

A two year tour followed the release of The Living Road, taking her and her group to seventeen countries. She was a guest singer on the Tindersticks' track "Sometimes It Hurts" off their Waiting for the Moon album, and later joined Tindersticks' singer Stuart Staples for a duet on the track "That Leaving Feeling", found on his Leaving Songs album. She also appeared as a guest on the albums of French singers Arthur H and Jérôme Minière, and the French gypsy music group Bratsch. She received the BBC World Music Award for Best Artist of the Americas in 2005. The accumulated worldwide sales of her two albums are nearing one million.

De Sela's third album Lhasa was released in April 2009 in Canada and Europe, and the next month in the U.S. She could also be heard on the title track of Patrick Watson's album Wooden Arms.

Death

Following a 21-month-long battle with breast cancer, Lhasa died, age 37, on the evening of January 1, 2010, at her home in Montreal. She was cremated. On January 16, Jim Corcoran devoted an episode of his CBC Radio One program À Propos, a weekly show about Quebec music, to a Lhasa tribute show.. À Propos, January 16, 2010.

Discography

* 1997 – La Llorona (Audiogram/Atlantic)

* 2003 – The Living Road (Audiogram/Nettwerk)

* 2009 – Lhasa (Nettwerk)

Filmography

* 1997 – El Desierto

* 2005 – Con toda palabra

* 2009 – Rising

References

This text has been derived from Lhasa de Sela on Wikipedia and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0