The rediscovery of Yma Sumac is a wonderful thing; but the English language is an inadequate tool to describe either her music or the eternally exciting experience of listening to her. Her identity is shrouded in mystery: either she was born in the village of Ichocan, Peru, a direct descendent of the last of the Incan Kings, or she was and is not. The songs she sings are either traditional Incan hymns and ceremonial songs or they are not. I personally think it's best not to know. The only incontravertible fact is that she amazes! Her voices swoops through 4 or 5 octaves; she sings operatically one moment and then makes guttural or piercing otherworldly noises the next. This album combines two different classic records of the 50's:
Voice of the Xtabay, conducted with dramatic orchestral overkill by Les Baxter and supposedly one of the few albums to never go out of print, and
Inca Taqul, conducted with not much less drama by her then-husband Moses Vivanco. It has not, does not, and conceivably will not get any better than Yma -- she breathes life and color and excitement into the
Voice of the Xtabay is the first studio album by Peruvian soprano Yma Sumac. It was released on 1950 by Capitol Records. It was produced and composed by Les Baxter, along Moisés Vivanco and John Rose as composers. The album features the Sumac's voice with a wide vocal range, accompanied of ethnic percussion and musical varations influenced by the Peruvian music. Cd Universe. Retrieved 21-12-2010 A Voice of the Xtabay reissue was released only in UK, with an alternative artwork, on 1956. Discogs. Retrieved el 21-12-2010 RateYourMusic. Retrieved 21-12-2010
Three songs from the album were used for the film Secret of the Incas.
References
This text has been derived from Voice of the Xtabay on Wikipedia and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0Artist/Band Information
Yma Sumac (; September 13, 1922 – November 1, 2008) was a noted Peruvian soprano. In the 1950s, she was one of the most famous proponents of exotica music and became an international success, based on the merits of her extreme vocal range, which was said to be "well over four octaves"Ellen Highstein: 'Yma Sumac (Chavarri, Emperatriz)' and was sometimes claimed to span even five octaves at her peak.Clarke Fountain, "Yma Sumac: Hollywood's Inca Princess (review). Allmovie, reproduced in the New York Times. 1992. David Richards, "The Trill of a Lifetime; Exotic Singer Yma Sumac Meets a New Wave of Fans." The Washington Post, March 2, 1987, STYLE; PAGE B1. Accessed August 6, 2006, via Lexis Nexis,
Yma Sumac recorded an extraordinarily wide vocal range of slightly over five octaves from B2 to C#7 (approximately 123 to 2270 Hz). She was able to sing notes in the low baritone register as well as notes above the range of an ordinary soprano. Both low and high extremes can be heard in the song Chuncho (The Forest Creatures) (1953). She was also apparently able to sing in an eerie "double voice".
Biography
Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chávarri del Castillo was born on September 10, 1922, in Ichocán, Cajamarca, Peru. While one of her "official" websites says that the "official date" of her birth is September 10,
the date on a different "official" website is given as September 13, 1922 (according to her personal assistant, who claimed to have seen her birth certificate).
Other dates mentioned in her various biographies range from 1921 to 1929. Some sources claim that she was not born in Ichocán, but in a nearby village, or possibly in Lima, and that her family owned a ranch in Ichocán where she spent most of her early life.
Stories published in the 1950s claimed that she was an Incan princess, directly descended from Atahualpa. Her New York Times obituary reported that, "The largest and most persistent fabrication about Ms. Sumac was that she was actually a housewife from Brooklyn named Amy Camus, her name spelled backward. The fact is that the government of Peru in 1946 formally supported her claim to be descended from Atahualpa, the last Incan emperor."
Chávarri adopted the stage name of Imma Sumack (also spelled Ymma Sumack and Ima Sumack) before she left South America to go to the U.S. The stage name was based on her mother's name, which was derived from Ima Shumaq, Quechua for "how beautiful!" although in interviews she claimed it meant "beautiful flower" or "beautiful girl".Cusihuaman 2001: p. 47,103
Imma Sumack first appeared on radio in 1942 and married composer and bandleader, , on June 6 of the same year. She recorded at least eighteen tracks of Peruvian folk songs in Argentina in 1943. These early recordings for the Odeon label featured Moisés Vivanco's group, Compañía Peruana de Arte, a group of forty-six Indian dancers, singers, and musicians.
In 1946, Sumack and Vivanco moved to New York City, where they performed as the Inka Taky Trio, Sumack singing soprano, Vivanco on guitar, and her cousin Cholita Rivero singing contralto and dancing. Sumack bore a son, Charles, in 1949, and was signed by Capitol Records in 1950, at which time her stage name became Yma Sumac.
During the 1950s, Yma Sumac produced a series of legendary lounge music recordings featuring Hollywood-style versions of Incan and South American folk songs, working with the likes of Les Baxter and Billy May. The combination of her extraordinary voice, exotic looks, and stage personality made her a hit with American audiences. Sumac appeared in a Broadway musical, Flahooley, in 1951, as a foreign princess who brings Aladdin's lamp to an American toy factory to have it repaired. The show's score was by Sammy Fain and E. Y. "Yip" Harburg, but Sumac's three numbers were the work of Vivanco with one co-written by Vivanco and Fain.
Capitol Records, Sumac's label, recorded the show. Flahooley closed quickly, but the recording continues as a cult classic, in part because it also marked the Broadway debut of Barbara Cook. During the height of Sumac's popularity, she appeared in the films Secret of the Incas (1954) and Omar Khayyam (1957). She became a U.S. citizen on July 22, 1955. In 1959, she popularized Jorge Bravo de Rueda's classic song "Vírgenes del Sol" on her Fuego del Ande long playing album (LP).
In 1957, Sumac and Vivanco divorced, their dispute making news in Los Angeles. They remarried that same year, but divorced again in 1965.
Apparently due to financial difficulties, Yma Sumac and the original Inka Taky Trio went on a world tour in 1961, which lasted for five years. They performed in forty cities in the Soviet Union, and afterward throughout Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Their performance in Bucharest, Romania, was recorded as the album Recital, her only 'live in concert' record. Yma Sumac spent the rest of the 1960s performing sporadically.
In 1971, she released a rock album called Miracles, and then returned to live in Peru. She performed in concert from time to time during the 1970s in Peru and later in New York at the Chateau Madrid and Town Hall. In the 1980s, she resumed her career under the management of Alan Eichler and had a number of concerts both in the U.S. and abroad, including the Hollywood Roosevelt's Cinegrill, New York's Ballroom in 1987 (where she was held-over for seven weeks to SRO crowds) and several San Francisco shows at the Theatre on the Square among others. In 1987, she also recorded the song "I Wonder" from the Disney film Sleeping Beauty for Stay Awake, an album of songs from Disney movies, produced by Hal Willner. She sang "Ataypura" during a March 19, 1987, appearance on Late Night with David Letterman, appearing alongside Jan Hooks and Sam Donaldson. She also recorded a new German "techno" dance record, "Mambo ConFusion."
In 1989, she sang once again at the Ballroom in New York and returned to Europe for the first time in 30 years to headline the BRT's "Gala Bertjes" TV special in Brussels as well as the "Etoile Palace" program in Paris hosted by Frederic Mitterand. In March 1990, she played the role of Heidi in Stephen Sondheim's Follies, in Long Beach, California, her first attempt at serious theater since Flahooley in 1951. She also gave several concerts in the summer of 1996 in San Francisco and Hollywood as well as two more in Montreal, Canada, in July 1997 as part of the Montreal International Jazz Festival.
In 1992, Günther Czernetsky directed a documentary titled Yma Sumac — Hollywood's Inkaprinzessin (Yma Sumac — Hollywood's Inca Princess). With the resurgence of lounge music in the late 1990s, Sumac's profile rose again when the song "Ataypura" was featured in the Coen Brothers film, The Big Lebowski. Her song "Bo Mambo" appeared in a commercial for Kahlúa liquor and was sampled for the song "Hands Up" by the Black Eyed Peas. The song "Gopher Mambo" was used in the films Ordinary Decent Criminal, Dead Husbands, and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. "Gopher Mambo" was also used in an act of the Cirque Du Soleil show Quidam. The songs "Goomba Boomba" and "Malambo No. 1" appeared in Death to Smoochy.
On May 6, 2006, Sumac flew to Lima, where she was presented the Orden del Sol award by Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo and the Jorge Basadre medal by the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos.
Yma Sumac died on November 1, 2008, aged 86 at an assisted-living home in Los Angeles, nine months after being diagnosed as having colon cancer. She was interred at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood, California in the "Sanctuary of Memories" section.
Discography
ymasumac.jpgthumbright220pxThe cover of Yma Sumac's debut album, Voice of the Xtabay (1950).
*At least eighteen tracks of Peruvian folk songs in Argentina in 1943 for the Odeon Records label, with Moisés Vivanco's group, Compañía Peruana de Arte—a group of forty-six Indian dancers, singers, and musicians. (At least five additional tracks from these sessions are instrumentals or feature other vocalists.)(10" 78 rpm)
* Voice of the Xtabay (1950), Capitol Records CD-244 (78 rpm set)
* Flahooley (1951), Capitol DF-284 (78 rpm set)
* Legend of the Sun Virgin (1952), Capitol DDN-299 (78 rpm set)
* Inca Taqui (1953), Capitol L-243 (10" LP)
* Mambo! (1954), Capitol T-564 (10" LP)
* Voice of the Xtabay & Inca Taqui, (1955) Capitol W-684 (both on one 12" LP)
* Legend of the Jivaro (1957), Capitol T-770 (12" LP)
* Fuego Del Ande (1959), Capitol T-1169 (Monophonic); ST 1169 (Stereo) (mono and stereo versions were separate recordings) (12" LP)
* Recital (1961), Electrecord EDE-073 (12" LP) — reissued on CD, ESP-DISK' 4029 (2006)
* Miracles (1971), London XPS 608 (12" LP) — reissued with two additional tracks as Yma Rocks! (1998), ShamLys JOM-1027-2 (CD)
* I Wonder on Stay Awake: Various Interpretations of Music from Vintage Disney Films, 1988 (one of Various Artists)
* Mambo ConFusion (1991), Deutsche Schallplatten Berlin (Germany CD Maxi-Single), DSB 3025-5 (CD Maxi-Single contains 'Radio Version,' longer 'Maxi Version,' and 'Mambo Hip' version)
References
This text has been derived from Yma Sumac on Wikipedia and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0
