Long before K.D Lang became the ranch-hopping poster-girl for lesbian chic, the Costa Rican born singer, Chavela Vargas was dressing as a man, smoking cigars, drinking heavily, carrying a gun and seducing female audiences with throaty-voiced Mexican Rancheras – lusty, ribald tales about heartbreak and experience traditionally sung by men – allegedly gaining her trademark limp from jumping out of a window because a woman disappointed her in love. Sounds like the kind of thing you’ve seen every week in Desperate Housewives or Sex In The City? Well yes, perhaps thesedays it is unremarkable, but put into the context of 1950s Mexico where Chavela fled at 14, such delicious transgressions were nothing short of scandalous. Not that the L-Word was ever mentioned directly. Born in 1919 it was a full 80 years before Vargas publicly came out as a lesbian in 2000 at the age of 81, the same year she was awarded Spain’s Great Cross of Isabel la Católica, the country’s highest honour for a career that began in 1961 and continues to this day some eighty or so albums later.
Recorded and released after a brief spell of retirement in 2003 this special collector’s edition boasts a beautifully realised custom Digipak CD design with foil embossed double cover with a 20 page book containing original illustrations by Rafael Esquer and lyrics in Spanish with English translations. The liner notes are written by Carlos Monsivais, one of Mexico’s leading scholars and cultural critics and this year’s winner of Mexico’s highest award: ‘The National Arts and Sciences Award’. The latest release also includes 10 unique postcard portraits each featuring an image of Chaevla backed with deep, portentous excerpts from Monsivais’s liner-notes. As a product it works magnificently, boasting all the characteristic richness and depth of the remarkable Chavela herself. But how does it score musically? Well consider if you will, this; Chavela is also famous for being the lover of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo notorious equally for her unconventional appearance, her facial hair, her unibrow, her communism as well as for her flamboyant surrealism, and Chavela’s minimal guitar arrangements, her hoarse and textured vocal and her fantastical lyrical imagery are rather like the oils that you see worked into the surface of the canvass itself, squeezed from the jaws of experience, thrown into relief by splashes of romance, flashes of fantasy and expressed by the ordinary events of the calendar: going to church, the bloom of a flower, migrating birds, the cycles of the moon, the aches and pains of the body, the passing of seasons – all set out against a background of tequila bottles, mangos, palm trees, streams, balmy afternoons and a tapestry of shadows and prayers.
Imagine Billie Holiday singing in Spanish, smashed on Tequila, choking on a cigar, reading excerpts from the magic realism of Jorge Luis Borge, accompanied by Rodriguez and singing songs of such swelling, furious tenderness they could whip up a mesocyclone in a desert. Check out ‘La Llorona’ (The Weeping Woman). It’s a tear-jerking classic.
An enchanting tragedy, a vial of experience and a record of immensurable joy. Chavela Vargas: At Carneige Hall. As deep and as broad as the soul of a devil-angel spread against the sky at night.