It is 5 p.m. on an October afternoon and already the sun is setting. Susana
Baca is trying to communicate to a waiter that she would like a coffee. She is seated
on the side of a long, stately corridor leading into one of the many cafeterias on the
University of Chicago campus. It is approaching mealtime and the waiter whose
attention she has captured smiles at her request and says that the café is around the
corner. She does not understand him. He will show her the way. "Que lindo," she
says (how nice).
Baca does not consider herself a pan-American artist. Folkloric Afro-Peruvian
songs, passed down through generations of people who struggled, fought and loved
are her main source of inspiration. And it is the people of Peru that keep her
grounded.
While she fully intends to stick to her roots in Peru, she has been on quite a
journey in the past year: recording her latest album 'Travesias'in upstate New York
in the spring, and traveling to the Congo before coming to the States to begin a
fellowship to study the music of the African Diaspora. As fate would have it, she
began her fellowship in New Orleans-three weeks before Hurricane Katrina came
along. The year-long fellowship began in August of 2005 at Tulane University, where
Baca planned to study Creole music and the work of Louis Armstrong. When the
hurricane hit the city, everything came to a halt.
"I couldn't believe the situation," she now recalls from her small office at the
University of Chicago, where she was offered a place to continue her fellowship.
"When you live in Latin America you expect the government to do nothing. You know
that you are on your own."
Luckily, an artist friend arranged for a car to get her out of the city shortly
before it was decimated. As she fled New Orleans with nothing but a suitcase, she
looked out at the drowning city and felt an intense, deep-sinking feeling as she saw
the faces of people staggering on the side of the road. "I felt that they had been
abandoned," she said softly, tears welling up in her eyes. "I felt paralyzed."
She was scheduled to perform a series of concerts in Helsinki immediately
after the evacuation and described the experience as cathartic following the
destruction in New Orleans. "I had to alleviate that tragedy through music."
It is this kind of quiet intensity that pervades her latest album. It is a record
she describes as a personal dialogue, a collection of intimate moments for the person
who is alone and who is in love. The songs are stripped down, quiet, like a late-night
conversation.