In order to understand the potency of
Francesca Ancarola's album-length tribute to the late Chilean folksinger
Victor Jara, one must first understand who
Jara was. Born in 1932, by the late '60s
Jara had become one of the most popular artists in Chile, an anti-authoritarian protest singer and one of the founders of the country's politically charged "new song" movement. That militancy didn't sit well with the leaders of the coup who ousted General Augusto Pinochet from power in September 1973, and
Jara was taken, along with thousands of others who disagreed with the right-wing brutes, to a stadium, where his hands and ribs were broken. Within a few days, as he sang defiantly to the crowd,
Jara was murdered in a burst of machine gun fire at age 40. Many of his recording masters were subsequently destroyed, but that stadium now bears his name, testifying to his importance within Chilean culture.
Ancarola was only five years old when
Jara was killed, but like so many Chileans, she considers him an iconic figure in her life, hence this album. While
Ancarola's arrangements are often quite different from
Jara's own folksy style, she possesses a warm, rich voice that conveys the emotion that oozed from
Jara's own work, and she breathes new life into the music not by copying the original ideas but by recasting it.
Lonquén begins with the a cappella title track, the only original composition on the record, before diverging into an often jazzy, sometimes pop-ish direction, albeit one that never leaves the traditional Chilean elements too far behind.
Ancarola prefers simple backing, heavy on the standup bass and acoustic guitar, but she makes great use of that minimal accompaniment, using it to accent her florid outpourings. Some familiar with the work of
Jara -- what little that survived has been reissued by his widow -- might contend that
Ancarola's vocal delivery is actually too sweet to put across the urgency of
Jara's lyrics. Not true: although
Jara's words were fiery, there was always an undercurrent of love, hope, and peace there, and
Ancarola's creative interpretations make it clear that his work still has meaning today -- maybe even more than it did in his own time. ~ Jeff Tamarkin