Susana Baca’s voice isn’t so much an instrument to name things but to paint them through sound so that we can see them perfectly if we close our eyes. With her music, she recreates Peru, the brilliant light and the melancholy of the cordilleras, as well as the history of black slavery, imbued nonetheless with sensuality. Bomb Magazine
«Don’t forget me, sing me.» Those were the words Chabuca Granda wrote on her deathbed more than twenty years ago in a letter to Susana Baca. For the Afro-Peruvian Baca, Granda’s plea is as powerful today as when she first read it. Seis Poemas, her latest six-song EP is partly a tribute to Chabuca Granda, one of the great figures of Latin American song. Baca, who got her start spinning the poems of others into wistful melodies, also borrows from the verses of Federico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish avant-garde poet who was assassinated during his country’s Civil War and in a nod to her ancestry she delves into Peru’s overlooked yet rich African legacy. It’s not the first time Baca has interpreted Granda’s songs and poems. In 1984, a year after Granda’s death, she reworked some of her music and in 1995 «Maria Landó,» (a Granda composition with words by César Calvo) appeared on Luaka Bop’s The Soul of Black Peru, catapulting Baca from relative anonymity onto the world stage. «I’ve recorded this series of songs about things I think are important to my life,» Baca says. «Time passes and I feel as though I have to leave a testimony of things that I’ve worked.»
Baca first met Granda as a university student in Lima around the time the singer/songwriter had begun exploring Afro-Peruvian rhythms and incorporating them in her music. Granda, who was born in the Peruvian Sierra to an upper-middle class family of European and Andean extraction, saw Baca as a link to a younger generation of artists and the black Peruvian sub-culture she was beginning to delve into. Considered a pioneer, Granda is credited with bridging the cultural divide, at least in music, between the indigenous and mestizo majorities, the white ruling minority, and the nearly invisible blacks who account for less than five percent of the population. It’s only been in the last half century that Peruvians have reluctantly acknowledged their African heritage, and Granda — along with black poet, historian, journalist and musician Nicomedes Santa Cruz –helped pave the way for legitimizing a black identity within the country’s social fabric.
Susana Baca was born in Lima but grew up in the small black coastal barrio of Chorrillos,»populated with fishermen and cats,» she says. Since colonial times the town has also been the home to an enclave of African slave descendants. Baca was immersed in music and flooded by the smells from her mother’s kitchen from an early age. Both gifts were passed on to her. Her father made a living as a driver and was the go to guitarist for neighborhood street parties and impromptu musical gatherings. As a child Baca listened to Cuban musicians like Pérez Prado and Beny Moré. But seeing her sister stand behind a radio station microphone to sing was a defining moment in her life. Then and there she caught a glimpse of her destiny.
Baca’s talent as a singer got her noticed in school and at the same time she began to develop an interest in the poets of Peru. She formed an experimental music group combining poetry and song and through grants from Peru’s Institute of Modern Art and the National Institute of Peruvian Culture, she began performing. At the prestigious international Agua Dulce festival in Lima, she took top honors. In 1992, alongside her husband Ricardo Pereira, she founded the Instituto Negrocontinuo dedicated to researching
