[UPDATED: 2007/10/26]

Unconventional, and unashamed: Spain's Concha Buika uses music to focus her capricious mind.

Buika’s Afro-flamenco sound bridges worlds -MIAMI NEW TIMES-

ソウル/R&B音楽ファンにも注目されている！

  Chavela Vargas apadrina en Meéxico a la cantante española Concha Buika -EFE-

  World. La cantante nacida en Mallorca, la revelación de este verano, actúa en París.
Buika, gitana de África - LIBERATION, París -

 

Unconventional, and unashamed: Spain's Concha Buika uses music to focus her capricious mind BY JORDAN LEVIN Posted on Sun, Oct. 21, 2007 http://www.miamiherald.com/tropical_life/story/277626.html Concha Buika used to make things up all the time. She didn't think of it as lying so much as, well, creating a more interesting reality. Of course her life didn't really need to be more interesting. She grew up as one of six children in the only black family on the Spanish island of Mallorca, worked in Las Vegas as a Tina Turner impersonator and has been married simultaneously to a man and a woman (Buika's idea). ''The mind is very capricious,'' Buika says by phone from the office of her record company in Madrid, her voice and frequent laugh as deep and rich as her smoky, chocolate singing. ``Sometimes we want to remember things that in reality we don't remember, but they become part of our life and we believe in them. We can get confused.'' When she started singing, she found the line between reality and fantasy became much clearer. ``When I really got into music was when I discovered that music made me a better person. It helped me not to lie. I always fantasized a lot, made up a lot of stories. So turning them into songs made me much more sincere myself. ``I got used to singing the truth. There are a lot of artists who put in their songs or sing what they'd like to happen. But I sing what has really happened to me, however horrible or embarrassing it is. I'm not ashamed to be a person, I don't go looking for virtues or defects or where paradise is, and I don't want to look for it. I think paradise is all around us. So I compose and sing sincerely to get the things I have inside me out, so they don't hurt me.'' The things that come out of Concha Buika's music have made her a star in Spain, where her second album, Mi Nina Lola, has been a hit. She is rapidly becoming a world music sensation. She makes her U.S. concert debut Wednesday at Miami's Manuel Artime Theater, part of the Rhythm Foundation's New Voices From Spain series, before going on to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. ''She's a true artist,'' says Miguel Marin, producer of the New Voices program. ``She is able to communicate the truth. She doesn't have a fake life. She performs from the inside. She has no fear, she really believes in what she does and breaks all kinds of barriers. I think she has been really brave to follow her instincts in the kind of music she does.'' Buika's music is a blend of flamenco, jazz, blues, copla -- an old-fashioned romantic Spanish song form -- and more, which Buika sings with a combination of jazz cool and flamenco's ripped-from-the-gut intensity. Her music and her lyrics are as individual as she is. ''I believe in myself, and in my way of saying things,'' she sings in A Mi Manera (My Way). ''I don't know what is flamenco or what is blues or jazz or rock. I only know what is singing and playing,'' says the 35-year-old-singer. ``For me the flamenco of [Mexican singer] Chavela Vargas is the same as Dinah Washington. It's music that comes from the depths, from the place where everything pure comes from. For me [musical] styles seem like little dictators.'' LIFE ON MALLORCA Buika grew up on the Spanish island of Mallorca in the Mediterranean, where the only other black person besides her family was a man hired to stand outside a store as a novelty to attract customers. Her parents were political exiles from Equatorial Guinea, and her father walked out on the family when she was 9. She has happy memories of growing up in a poor neighborhood full of gypsies, playing in the street in her underwear. ''The neighborhood was really fun and really strange,'' Buika remembers. ``Because it was a neighborhood where there were no rules, and children don't like rules.'' But she was also an outsider. Women used to touch her kinky hair for luck, and some children were not allowed to play with her. ''I always felt very strange, but it didn't affect me, because I didn't know anything else,'' Buika says. ``For me it was normal to be the only black girl in the neighborhood, in the school, in the disco.'' SINGING R&B Although she was surrounded by music, at home, where her mother played American and Latin pop music, flamenco at the homes of gypsy friends, she never studied formally. She got her first job singing, with an R&B band, at 17. 'My aunt called my mother, and said, `Don't you have a daughter who can sing?' And my mother said 'My daughter Concha sings really well' because she'd listen to me around the house. I said 'Mama, I can't sing.' But the salary was 10,000 pesetas, which was a lot of money then, and so I said for 10,000 pesetas I'll sing, dance and do tricks like a circus monkey.'' She was afraid of performing, but she turned out to be a natural. ``The truth is I'm a person who confronts my fears. I got up onstage terrified, but driven to keep going. And from the day I got up onstage they kept offering me work.'' One job was in Las Vegas, where Buika worked in 2001 as a Tina Turner impersonator. ``I had some friends from work who'd been there, and so I thought I could just go there, too. I always go around in a very savage, innocent way, because I'm from a small town.'' THREE'S COMPANY Her attitude about life is willfully innocent, as well. While she was married to the father of her 8-year-old son, Buika fell in love with a woman and arranged for the three of them to marry. She shrugs off the idea that there is anything strange in this, or in talking about it openly. ``I do what I do, and I'm not doing anything that other human beings haven't done. All human beings are more or less the same. A lot of people don't dare do things, but they think about them. People hide something bad. I haven't done anything bad, so I don't have any reason to hide it. What rule is there that two people can't love a third person?'' Splitting from her two partners inspired one of the most powerful songs on her album, Jodida pero contenta (Screwed but happy). ``I was singing a reality that was exactly what I felt in that moment. Because from that moment on my world was mine. For the first time since I was 17 I felt like I was really in charge of my own life.'' Her music just comes to her when she composes and when she performs, from however she's feeling and from something else she can't identify. ''It's like something comes from very far away and journeys for many years and puts itself in my ear and tells me things,'' Buika says. ``The same thing happens when I'm onstage. I don't know where they come from. All of a sudden they're in my head and I get them out.'' And she makes sure to keep herself open. She never watches herself on TV or reads articles about herself, for fear she'll become self-critical. ''No, no, no, no, no,'' Buika says, laughing. ``It scares me a lot. I think that if I see myself I'll see defects and want to change things. I know how I am. And I don't want to change anything.''         Paradise Found Buika’s Afro-flamenco sound bridges worlds By Julienne Gage Published: October 18, 2007 Quiz for October, Hispanic Heritage Month: What's the one Spanish-speaking country that always gets forgotten, or at least saved until the last minute, during Hispanic history celebrations? Although she wasn't actually born there, Afro-Spanish singing sensation Concha Buika has the answer, and you'll find traces of it in her emotive vocals. It's Equatorial Guinea, an African nation so filled with political strife and corruption that Buika's parents fled it for the all-white Spanish island of Palma de Mallorca in the early Seventies. "I don't know if I represent anything, but I am the consequence of a historic fact," the 35-year-old says in her throaty voice, during a phone interview from Mexico. Buika is on tour behind her latest album, Mi Nina Lola, a work of flamenco fusion, both originals and standards, mixed with jazz, blues, and tango. It was produced by popular Spanish producer Javier Limon, the mastermind behind the flamenco fusion found on Cuban pianist Bebo Valdes and Spanish singer Diego El Cigala's Lagrimas Negras. Fleshing out her exotic sound are master flamenco guitarist Nino Josele, Latin jazz trumpeter Jerry Gonzalez, Cuban drummer Horacio "El Negro" Hernandez, Uruguayan jazz pianist Jose Reinoso, and Cuban bassist Alain Perez. For more than a decade, Buika's "steel wool" voice, as one critic called it, has scrubbed up the shine on numerous house, funk, hip-hop, and electro-jazz albums. Finally, in 2000, she released her jazzy first independent album, Mestizou. In 2005 came the all-encompassing fusion album, Buika, but it's the flamenco spirit found on La Nina Lola that really grounds her in the roots of her upbringing. Growing up as the only black kid on the Mediterranean island, Buika sought solace in a well-known community of outsiders ? the gypsies. "They sang a lot in the streets, and that felt very familiar to me," she recalls. "My mother came from a very small town where she sang to greet the neighbors in the morning, she sang when she was sad, she sang when she was happy, and she helped me to sing to express myself." When Buika was 17 years old, her mother encouraged her to take her show public. It was the Eighties, and post-Franco Spain was exploding with foreign pop music. "Everything was amazing. I was influenced by Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Madonna ? there was a lot of jazz fusion," says the singer, who also plays the piano, cello, bass, and guitar. But later, like many adventuresome Mallorcans influenced by the masses of British tourists, Buika moved to London to find herself as an artist, singing in local pubs and learning a bit about dramatization. But soon some friends who worked in a casino in Las Vegas invited her to sing there. So she donned a wig and jumped onstage as a Tina Turner impersonator. Over the past six years, she has partially returned to her geographic roots, dividing her time between Madrid and Mallorca, where she composes and performs. Buika was an instant sensation, and shortly thereafter, she went from scraping by on 60 euros a night to filling concert halls. "I still can't believe it. I feel funny, but I think I'm in my place," says the artist, who swears she never reads her interviews in the press and never watches her music videos. "It could be a very African way of thinking, but if humans were made to look at themselves, they'd have one set of eyes to see outward and another set to look inside. I'm made to feel myself, not see." That feeling has captured audiences worldwide. Take, for example, her interpretation of the title track and flamenco classic "Mi Nina Lola." Assuming the character of a single father trying helplessly to console his daughter, she worries with awkward concern that the young girl won't say what's on her mind. "As long as your father is alive, you're not alone in this world," Buika wails like a gypsy as the flamenco transitions into light jazz. After Buika's father returned to Africa, her single mother helped her articulate thoughts and feelings amid the clamor of five other siblings. The habit stuck, and a serendipitous example is Buika's original number "Jodida pero Contenta" ("Screwed but Happy"). Over a background meshed with jazz and Cuban soul, her voice sings proudly of her having escaped a destructive relationship in which she didn't feel appreciated. "I'm leaving here screwed but happy/You've doubled me over, but I maintain the hope within myself/Hurt but awake for my future," she slurs with a typical Spanish lisp. Buika says her sound as well as her lyrics are rooted in a philosophy that any good music is made by people who felt like they were in the margins. It's why she classifies the blues of Billie Holiday and the country of Bonnie Raitt in the same genre. "Music is a universe that has no limits, and in reality we're all the same," she insists. Strange as she has always felt on this awkward planet, that universal understanding of music has helped Buika become the embodiment of multiculturalism she is today. "I don't fear life, because I don't look for paradise; my body is my paradise," she philosophizes excitedly, her words peppered with Spanish slang. "Art is the only really legitimate religion that has us all in community, because it goes directly to your soul. The music is deep within us. We just have to remember it."       架空の旅をとおして、世界中の素敵なソウルミュージックをEbonyEbony独自の視点でお届け。レディソウルをこよなく愛するサイト「EbonyEbony」でブイカの紹介があったので、転載させてもらいます。 EbonyEbony http://ebonyebony.blog14.fc2.com/blog-entry-76.html By MissMahogany Miss Mahoganyです。サンパウロで音楽を満喫している私は本来であればこの地の素敵なミュージシャンを紹介する予定なのですが、本日は少し脱線させて頂きます。今年頭にご紹介したマジョルカ島出身のアフロスパニッシュBuika嬢の新作「Mi Nina Lola」が早くもドロップされたので、そちらのご紹介です（前作の記事はこちら）。というのも、とにかくこの新作が素晴らしいことこのうえない傑作中の傑作なのです!! 　前作で試みられたカンテ・フラメンコやヒターノ・ルンバとクラブジャズ/ハウスの融合（安直ではないミュージシャンシップにのっとった素晴らしいアプローチ）は、非常に新鮮かつ斬新で心躍らされましたが本作ではそれらが更に深化しています。そして何より私が深化したこの本作で惹かれるもの。それはジャズを基盤としつつも有機的にさまざまな音楽要素(主体はフラメンコです）が織り成したアンサンブルの見事さです（前作で見られたプログラミングの音は本作では影を潜めています）。とにかく一つ一つの楽器が生々しくこれでもかとばかりに躍動しています。特に生命を与えられたかのようなスパニッシュギターの響きの見事さといったら！！そしてフラメンコのこぶしを効かせつつ、よりブルージーかつ生々しいまでにソウルフルに情熱を込めて唄いきるBuika嬢のヴォーカル表現！その佇まいは故Nina SimoneやEsther Phillips等ジャズの枠では収まりきらなかったクラシックな偉大なるシスタ達を想起させます。Nina Simoneがフラメンコのミュージシャンと競演したとしたら？そんな贅沢な想像が許されてしまう盤なのです。前作がラテンの粋を力強く豪快に表現するうえで不可欠なアップテンプ主体の音楽だったのに対し（だからこそクラブジャズ/ハウス的なアプローチも有効なのでしょう）、本作はほどよく枯れた豊潤な味わいをとことんまで堪能できるスロウ〜ミディアムのオンパレード。Buika嬢の魅力を余すことなく伝えるうえでこの二枚の盤は対となって語られるべき必然性を感じます。 　他国人からすればある意味その土着的な味わいを楽しむものであるルーツミュージックを、タイムレスでクラシックでワールドワイドな魂の音楽として見事に昇華させた感のある本作。自分のルーツを素直に掘り下げ、そしてそこから見事に発展させた美しすぎる結晶！そんな盤を目の前にして私は今何事にも変えがたい素直な感動を味わっているのです。By MissMahogany         CHAVELA VARGAS apadrina en México a cantante española BUIKA Cuernavaca (México) 11 de Octubre (EFE) La artista Chavela Vargas se ha convertido en la madrina musical en México de la cantante española de orígen guineano Concha Buika, que estos días está en el país para actuar, entre otros lugares, en el Festival Cervantino de Guanajuato, explicaron hoy ambas artistas en entrevista con Efe. Buika, con su fusión de copla, jazz, flamenco y soul, en realidad tiene, según dice la mexicana, un gran parecido con ella misma en las notas que utiliza, en el “quebrado” de la voz. Además, en “las cosas profundas” y “en esa cosa rara que tenemos ambas en la voz”, dijo Chavela en un encuentro que protagonizaron las dos artistas en un restaurante de la ciudad de Cuernavaca, en el central estado de Morelos. La diva, de 88 años, aseguro que Buika, de tan sólo 35, le cae muy bien porque apenas “estaá empezando a luchar". “Ya tendrá su rato de llorar, porque todo no es dulzura y belleza en la vida, tendrá sus malos ratos, pero se debe luchar”, señaló la veterana artista. “Todo lo hermoso, todo lo interesante, lo aporta Concha con su juventud”, indicó Chavela, quien añadió que Buika, por ser de “la generación de aprender”, es en realidad la maestra. “Me está enseñando todo lo que la juventud puede dar y todo lo que la juventud es”, explicó. Buika aseguró, por su parte, que Chavela Vargas no tiene que enseñarle nada, porque todo lo enseña en sus canciones, “en su manera de cantar y de llorar hacia dentro". “Chavela es una de las mujeres que nos ha enseñado a las demás mujeres a vivir, que no sabemos vivir, estamos tontas”, aseguró. “Voy a poner una escuelita, 'Aprende a vivir a lo Vargas', a puro 'riatazo' (golpe) limpio”, bromeó, entretanto, la cantante mexicana nacida en Costa Rica. Ambas artistas se niegan a planear el futuro “para dejar las cosas fluir”, por lo que no saben si colaboraran en directo o en un álbum, aunque Chavela aseguró que si lo hacen tendrá que ser antes de que se muera. Vargas, que se niega a morir en sábado para no “arruinar la pachanga” a sus amigos, tiene ganas de volver a España a actuar, país al que aseguró está casada. “Es un extraño maridaje: España y yo nos casamos hace más de 15 años y no nos vamos a separar nunca por ella es la hembra de Europa, la señora España. Es muy orgullosa, muy pretenciosa, muy bella, hermosa, carinosa, tierna. Yo la amo y amo a los españoles”, dijo. Buika, que ha recorrido Europa con la gira de su álbum “Mi niña Lola”, y que, después de México, viajará a Colombia, Estados Unidos, Japón y Grecia, señaló que nunca se ha planteado diferencias entre los publicos. “El aplauso suena tan bonito que nunca me he parado a pensar si suena diferente”, concluyó. EFE       Buika, gitana de África World. La cantante nacida en Mallorca, la revelación de este verano, actúa en París. Liberation NB: concierto el 2 de octubre en el New Morning de París Ante todo está el poder de su voz, que tiene a la vez las inflexiones roncas de una diva del jazz, las modulaciones de una gran cantaora flamenca y el compás de una reina africana. Su disco, Mi Niña Lola, que salió en la primavera sin demasiado bombo, debe su éxito de ahora, primero, a lo que se dijo de ella de boca en boca y al entusiasmo de algunos vendedores de discos. En segundo lugar fue gracias al impacto de los festivales de verano, "Río Loco" en Toulouse, "Les Méditerranéennes" en Leucate o "Le Kiosque: Musique de La Villette" en París. El resultado fue que los conciertos de esa "casi desconocida" consiguieron el lleno en las noches de estos conciertos. Detrás de esta voz excepcional se esconden una personalidad muy fuerte y una trayectoria fuera de lo normal. María Concepción Buika nació en 1972 en Palma de Mallorca, en las Islas Baleares. Sus padres huyeron de su país, Guinea Ecuatorial, ex-colonia española de África, que, en aquel tiempo, estaba bajo el control del siniestro Francisco Macías Nguema, quien hizo cerrar los hospitales y las escuelas y prohibió la pesca y llevar zapatos. Matemático. En casa se habla la lengua bubi y, los numerosos hermanos y hermanas crecen en el barrio más pobre de Palma: el barrio chino, en medio de putas y yonkies. El padre, matemático y poeta, desaparece sin dar explicaciones cuando Concha (su diminutivo) tiene 9 años. La niña prefiere la compañía de los gitanos y el mundo de la calle más que la escuela. Un poco más tarde empezó a ganarse la vida en una ciudad ahora colonizada por los turistas alemanes, cantando en los cafés temas clásicos del jazz o del soul. También pasa un año en Las Vegas en donde imita a Tina Turner en un casino sin importancia. Su primer CD sale en 2004, New Afro Spanish Generation, aunque tuvo problemas importantes, ya que durante su producción (la meta era llevar a Buika a lo más alto), Erykah Badu y los músicos de los estudios españoles no alcanzan el nivel que la cantante necesita. Sin embargo las cosas mejoran gracias al encuentro con Javier Limón, que será quien se encargue del segundo CD. Copla. Limón, conocido por el éxito de sus primeros trabajos, Lágrimas Negras, con Bebo Valdés y Diego, el Cigala y, el último Paco de Lucía, Cositas Buenas, crea su propio sello, Casa Limón, y propone a Buika una estética flamenca y un ramillete de musicos, ahora sí, excepcionales: la guitarra de Niño Josele, la percusión de Pirana, el bajista cubano, Alain Pérez, el trompeta, Jerry Gonzales. El éxito de Mi Niña Lola también se debe a un repertorio ocupado en gran medida por la copla: una clase de canción popular de los años 30 a los 60 que cantaba, por ejemplo, la gran Concha Piquer (1906-1990). Buika puede también componer cosas tan radicales como Jodida, pero contenta, la última canción del CD, en la que filosofa sobre los beneficios que uno puede sacar de las experiencias dolorosas. Ella es el reflejo de una personalidad vehemente que no duda, en las entrevistas, en exponer su bisexualidad y en reivindicar el consumo de marihuana o el bajar música gratuitamente de internet.