Las Rubias del Norte

Artist Description

What if America lost the war for cultural imperialism, rock’n’roll never existed, and Latin music became the common language for popular sounds the world around? You don’t really have to imagine it.  Just slap on Ziguala, the new record from Las Rubias del Norte. The group hails from Brooklyn, but its members tread a global map whose often blurry sonic borders are hued with what Jelly Roll Morton once called “the Spanish tinge.”

Las Rubias del Norte was started seven years ago, when Allyssa Lamb and Emily Hurst decided to quit their classical choir and start a group of their own. The group’s sound quickly veered off its classical course, incorporating Boleros, Peruvian waltzes, Andean huaynos and Cuban Guajiras. The result played like a dreamy soundtrack with classical harmonies set to a Latin beat.

The material on their third album covers a wider range than usual. Bollywood, Rebetika, Opera, Venezuelan, Ecuadorian and Neapolitan folklore, classic Mexican songs, the Tex-Mex repertoire, Cumbia, Chicha, a Spanish pop gem and a rarely performed Kurt Weill French song. The amazing Parker String Quartet plays on two of the tracks and the instrumentation has been expanded to include Hammond, Farfisa and vibraphone. Las Rubias do keep the Pan-Latin spirit alive by treating it all like it was recorded in Veracruz in the 1961.

Ziguala takes its name from a song originally written in 1955 by rembetika great Manolis Hiotis. His version was strongly influenced by American blues. The song was covered in the early 1960s by New York –based Greek singer Rena Dalia, who gave it a bit more of a Latin twist. Las Rubias have taken this approach to heart and taken an international repertoire rich in national ambiguities and re-appropriated it with their signature sound.

Indeed, there’s a Bollywood song with a Latin source (fabled Indian composer S.D. Burman’s “Mana Janab”), a French song with a Spanish source (“Seguedille,” from Bizet’s Carmen), a piece from a German composer’s French opera (“J’attends un Navire,” from Kurt Weill’s Marie Galante), a Spanish song made famous by an Anglo-Belgian singer raised in America &and Spain (Jeanette, of “Porque te Vas” fame) and, of course, Las Rubias using a mostly Latin filter on songs with diverse origin.