Product description
VARIOS INTERPRETES WOMEN OF LATIN AMERICA
Amazon.com
Latin America has produced dozens of brilliant female singers and composers, including trail-blazers like Violetta Parra, Elis Regina, Soledad Bravo and Mecedes Sosa, to mention only a few. The present generation is also shaping up nicely. There are more women bandleaders than ever before, firmly in charge of their own talent, free to choose their material and back-up players without interference. As they so often do, Putumayo has supplied a short-list of emerging stars; the voices heard on this album are uniformly splendid and worthy of deeper exploration. But there are a few stand-outs: Brazilian Mônica Salmaso’s creamy dark voice makes a strong impression, as does Chilean chanteuse Jacqueline Fuentes’s plaintive, fado-like mezzo and Lhasa’s limpidly nostalgic Mexican ranchera. Some may cavil at yet another gender-based compilation. But they should consider that male-dominated equivalents have existed since the dawn of the recorded era; they were just not labeled as such. –Christina Roden