NPR Music - Alt.Latino's Spain Soundtrack

Episode Date: November 6, 2024

Alt.Latino hosts Felix Contreras and Anamaria Sayre are in Spain for a music conference. On this episode, they share their favorite discoveries from Bilbao, San Sebastián and beyond.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Are you going to climb up with me to that statue later? Nope. Not going to do it. Not going to happen. Are you sure? Yeah. 100%? Thousand percent. It's not that far. Not going to do it.

Look it. See, it looks like such a nice climb. Look at all the people over there. They're climbing on that little, that little nice little pretty stone path. No, not going to do it. Are you sure? Yep. Let's talk about music. We are in this jewel of a city called San Sebastian. Because it is right at the tip of northern Spain, facing the Bay of Biscuit.

guy and right here on the Baja de la Concha is the seafood is to die for the food let's talk about the food we have to do this first from NPR music this is Alt Latino I'm Felix Contreras and I'm Anna Maria Sayer let the chisemes begin and today the chisemes coming in from Spain we have a lot to discuss because we've been here for what over a week and a half at least no a week we came for the Vime music conference that is held every year. Every October here in Bill Bowell. You were on a panel, I was on a panel,

presentations, showcases. Lots of running around eating tapas pinches. After four days of that, we're here in San Sebastian, cooling our hills before we head down to Barcelona. But along the way, we've each had our little earbuds in. We each had different themes of Spanish music going through. You go first. No, no, no, no. You go first.

Okay, I will. So earlier this year I was cruising one of the streaming services looking for stuff. Sure. And I came across this artist, her name is Maite Martin. And she is a Spanish vocalist from Barcelona. She uses flamenco as a bass, but there are so many other styles and genres that influence her style, including a heavy presence of jazz. Let's hear a little bit of this song first, and then I'm going to tell you a little bit more about her.

This track is called El Breve Espacio, Can No Ista. The vocalist is Maite Martin. The album is Tatuages. You know how when I play you like back to back kind of some of my more like maybe indie poppy kind of stuff with a little bit electronic production and you'll ask me like what's the difference? Yeah.

That's kind of how I feel with this. I hear like obviously beautiful vocals, like some really, really nice piano and it's like that really sweet. Like it's like the vocals to me that move so slow that you almost think they're not going to catch up to the sound, and then they do. Like, you're like somehow this is matching. And I feel like a lot of the kind of vocalists you bring me from, like, a certain era, they have that similar quality to them.

So I'm curious, like, what to you, what makes her unique? She is in that tradition of vocalists who interpret songs. This album is a collection of amazing songwriters from throughout Latin America and Spain. This particular track was written by Pablo Milanese from Cuba. there are songs by Victor Hara from Chile, Antonio Carlos Robim from Brazil, Jean-Manuel Serat from here in Spain. It's the way that she interprets the lyric.

The idea of interpreting the story behind the lyric. And I saw Ella Fitzgerald once, and she sang, A House is Not Home, which was made popular by Luther Vandross, but she did it completely differently, and it's just, it felt like she was living that song for the very first time, even though it was a very popular song.

That's the magic of this record and that's the magic of some of these artists that I bring in. It's how they interpret the stories. What was interesting to you about her interpretation that you just played? Mike and Martin brings in, you know, the little element of flamenco, the way the voice sort of trills, the way the voice moves between notes because of the different musical structure. I was surprised. I almost expected a little bit more of a flamenco trill from her,

having not known who she was and just knowing what you were bringing. It's there, but it's so, so, so, so subtle. It really feels pretty clean to me. Flamenco's like the blues. Yeah, 100%. Well, that's what I was going to say is think about a lot of the artists we love, out of Spain, jazz artists, etc. of big vocalists, like a Silvia Perez-Cruz

where you don't really oftentimes hear much of a flamenco. You can in certain songs, but it's really a basis for just being open and ready to, I think, really open up and breathe through things vocally, not necessarily, like, to incorporate that specific, you know? And now here I am doing flamenco

on the streets of San Sebastian. But you know what I mean? Like, it's more just, I think, an openness. Tatuages is the name of the album. the artist is Maite and Martin. It was released in 2024, so it qualifies as a new record for you to consider to add to your own personal best of 20204 list.

Because I'm sure everyone is making their own independent best of 2024 playlist, broken up by genre like you are, Felix. Okay, your turn. Okay, so this is, I think, tangentially related to what you're talking about, just obviously very different,

but a young artist, who I have been looking for an excuse to talk about. I have not spoken about her yet on the show, but I am obsessed. Dare I say obsessed with her voice. You know who she is, Felix. You've met her, and you actually took a shot of whiskey with her. I don't remember this.

We quit revealing stuff that I don't remember, man. She came to the tiny desk with Eladio Carrion, but her name is Liyya Cali. She's an artist from Barcelona. She got her start literally biking around Barcelona, just going to different, like, music clubs and stuff, just trying to get some exposure. I don't, her voice comes from the frickin' in heavens, Felix. It is like one of the most ridiculous things. This is a song from...

Earlier this year, she did with RELS B, who's a big, like, Spanish. R&B, Jason, hip-hop kind of Urbano, there I say, artist. And the song is called La Vida Sinti. Leah Calli. Okay, getting back to Leah Calli. I think that we could spend the rest of our careers here in Spain just talking about how the different regions and the influences of all the different regions

come out in different vocalists. You know, Felix, I have a new friend that I met on my flight here. I made come lunch with us. She lives in London, but her mom's from here from the Basque region, from close to San Sebastian. And she was telling me, she's like, there's so much intense regional pride, and I've noticed that on previous trips here as well. And a lot of the artists we bring do come from Barcelona or Madrid is another popular one. Madrid is more like the epicenter of industry, right?

Barcelona, I've said this before, has kind of more of like an acoustic, leaning and acoustic preference, perhaps. But there's always this really, regardless of the region, I think, this really rich, intense, beautiful, open vocal styling. Again, I'll make a reference to the U.S. because it's been constantly on my mind about how, as I mentioned before, vocalist from, you know, Louisiana, the Cajun, Acadian Cajun music styles, blues from the south, the Appalachian music. Like it's such a big country, so many different influences. This is a much smaller country, but still, maybe that's what makes the musical differences so intense because it is so small and they coexist, like right next to each other, from one village to the next. Maybe that just adds to the richness of all this.

I think there's an intensity not only of, obviously, in the music, but in the cultural pride as well, of the regions. Because if they're so small that if you don't have that level of intense, intensity, they'll die. The music will die. The distinctness of the regions will die. And so there's, I think, yeah, you have to apply that level of intensity to all of this work. It makes me think about the whole idea of tradition and how tradition changes the moment it's expressed. So there really is no tradition. It's like there's no right now because it now is now the past because it already happened. very esoteric conversation happening. God, it's because we're traveling, Felix. That's why. We're getting all heading.

Okay, we better take a break so that we can get ourselves together. We can talk about more music. We're producerless and on the road. We're going rogue. You know, Anna, for years I had this quote, and I don't remember where I got it, but I had this quote in my refrigerator way back when, when I was still in California. And it was something like, the goal of traveling,

is not to discover other places, but to discover yourself. I'm always amazed at how much more I have to learn, always being open to looking for that sound that I've never heard, and almost always finding it. And then you start to process all over again. I'm going to use this as a segue to my next song, Felix. Okay, you do that. Because I think the next song that I have is pretty rhythmically interesting.

It's a Spanish artist. This is a new record. She's from a town outside of Cadiz. She now lives in Madrid, but she's actually from a Venezuelan family. Her name is Judaline. This is her new album, and it's really interesting because it's quite heavily influenced by the continent of Africa, specifically by Morocco,

because she grew up with a lot of Moroccan sounds, African beats in her life, just as a product of being on the very southern tip of Spain. It's called INRI, her new album, Bodilia. This is a little This is going to be one of those artists that I'm going to claim I discovered. Oh my God. At least, you know what?

This is really validating for me though because at least we have literal recording. recorded evidence of how these things go down. I love this man. This is so cool. Yeah. There's currently like a bit of a melding that's happening as in like Latin music, reggaeton is really big. Afrobeats is really independently big and there are for the first time starting to be some big artists who are mixing in those two spaces.

But this came a lot more organically, right? Because it's derivative of where she's from where all of those things are things she grew up listening to as opposed to like, oh, these are two big global genres. Let's bring them together. Right. All that to say, it's fascinating to me because she plays with Flamenco a lot on this record too. Obviously, she's from Cadiz. And yet, rhythmically, they don't really sound that disparate to me.

You know, 800 years of Moorish, you know, rain in the southern Spain, man. You know, that doesn't go away. You know, my son Joaquin was studying in Sevilla a couple years ago, and back two years ago, December, we drove down, to Tarifa, which is the tip of southern Spain, and then we took the ferry across to Morocco. It was like, what, 40 minutes, 45 minutes. I was seasick the whole time, but, you know, besides that,

that's how close it is. You can stand on this European continent and look across and see Africa. It's a never-ending flow of influences, cross-influences. That's one of the magic things when you think about Spain and all the different regions. And she's singing in Arabic, Felix. Like, what the heck. Yeah. Okay, let's wrap up this conversation about music we're listening to while we're here in Spain, then San Sebastian and then eventually Barcelona. I'm going to play a vocalist that I found out about 2008, 2009, something like that, when one of her CDs came across my desk. Her name is Buica, Concha Buica, but she goes by Buica. She was born in Palma de Majorca, and it's a heavy, heavy flamenco tradition background.

influence, but one of the things I discovered about her, when I talked to her and didn't interview with her and then brought her in for a tiny desk, that years and years ago she was developing as a vocalist, she was actually a Tina Turner impersonator in Las Vegas. She has a wide variety of influences. When you look at her list of collaborators, everybody from Chick Korea, Chucho Valdez, Carlos Santana. a whole lot of different artists from different genres because they're all drawing on whatever it is that she has.

Again, a husky voice, not to name drop, but we were hanging out having a nice little conversation about music and life with the vocalist Anna Tijou. She's a huge, weak affair. She's obsessed. The way Anna spoke so effusively about her, not only her musical ability, her vocal quality, but the things that she's done as a black woman,

I was like, I need to hear this woman immediately. She truly is incredible. This is the title track from her 2008 album called Nina de Fuego. Oh, Felix, that voice. Why are you gatekeep these people from me? You've been holding on to that? You never told me I have to talk to Anna Tijou to hear about her? Anna.

I don't mean to embarrass you in front of all these people, okay? Yeah. But she did a tiny desk in 2013. Okay. I haven't seen every single tiny desk, Felix. One of my favorite records of hers is a duet record she did with the Cuban pianist Chuchovaldes. And it's a tribute to Chabella Vargas. Oh, my gosh.

She and Chabela are like soul sister twin people. Great, great record. It's one of my favorites of hers. She also did a whole album with Carlos Santana recently, too, a couple years ago. More people should know about Buica. That's why I bullied you into bringing her on the show today, literally. You have to bring Blika. You have to bring Blika. You have to bring Bluica. You have been listening to Al-Latino from NPR Music.

The audio editor for this show is Simon Rentner. With editorial support from Hazel Sills. The woman who keeps us together in every way possible is Grace Chung. The executive producer of NPR Music is Soraya Muhammad. And Keith Jenkins is the heffin-chief of NPR Music and Visuals. I'm Felix Contreras. And I'm Anna Maria Sayer. Thank you for listening.