Carmelina
Colombian music is incredibly diverse. Cubanson, Latin salsa, and merengue collude with African chants and percussion, primal Indian sources, flamenco and Moorish echoes from Spain, nativecumbia, and out-of-control German brass bands. All of these influences and sounds are heard, separately and together, onCarmelina. Toto La Momposina hails from the north of the country, where the Madalena river flows toward the Caribbean, and she is as much a musical hunter-gatherer as a singer of formidable beauty and strength. In every song she becomes a different woman--a flirt, an Earth Mother, or a humble food-seller--and her voice is at once as fresh as a girl's and as ancient as the 500-year-old tradition she personifies. The instruments used on this album are uniformly intriguing, but thegaita, a long-neglected Indian wooden or bamboo flute named for a Spanish bagpipe, is particularly fascinating.--Christina Roden