Recording of March 2015: Amar en Paz

Estrella Morente: Amar en Paz
Estrella Morente, voice; Niño Josele, guitar
Calle 54/Sony Music 88875011922 (CD). 2014. Fernando Trueba, prod., exec. prod.; Nat Chediak, exec. prod.; Jose Luis Crespo, eng.; Jim Anderson, mix; Alan Silverman, mastering. DDD? TT: 66:29
Performance ****
Sonics ****½

What makes a great singer great is a magical combination of virtuosic physical skills with mental and emotional powers of interpretation that allow you to hear and feel a lyric's subtext: the emotions the songwriter hoped to evoke by a turn in the melody.

"Because love is the saddest thing / When it stays behind . . ." Singing those lines from the title track of Amar en Paz (To Love in Peace), the latest from the inventive team at the Spanish label Calle 54, flamenco singer Estrella Morente—most famous in the US for having been the singing voice of Penélope Cruz in the film Volver—spins a very personal emotional web, and in the process creates a cross-lingual masterpiece. The song's original Portuguese title is "O Amor em Paz"; it was written by famed Brazilian songwriter Antonio Carlos Jobim, and translated into Spanish by the Spanish producer Fernando Trueba. It fulfills the vision for this record that Trueba and his partner and coproducer Nat Chediak, from Cuba, hoped they could create.

While dancing is the most flamboyant part of flamenco, and the guitar adds the instrumental fire, it's the singing, or cante, that embodies and projects the music's actual soul. Estrella Morente is the daughter of one of the most influential of all flamenco singers, the late Enrique Estrella. Here, accompanied only by the great flamenco guitarist Niño Josele (who in 2006 recorded Paz, a record of Bill Evans tunes, for Calle 54), Morente creates her own rhythms, singing long, haunting lines in a stark rendering of another Jobim tune, "Dindi": "Oh, Dindi, / if you knew how much I love you / the world would be, Dindi, / everything, Dindi, / beautiful, Dindi, / Oh, Dindi."

Reached at his home in Biscayne Bay, Florida, Chediak explained the concept behind Amar en Paz: "This is boundaryless music. Estrella's just interpreting the music as she feels it, and I think that's what makes it special. It's not just that you have an artist from a different country, from a different continent, interpreting the repertoire in a different language—it's just the way she is understanding it. It isn't a flamenco date and it isn't a Brazilian date, but it is a meeting of a flamenco artist with Brazilian music, so it's a little bit of both and it's neither. The concoction winds up being a one-off, if you will, without betraying the music whatsoever. It's a sensibility that's closer to jazz than pop. Jazz is all about interpretation, and this is closer to that."

Recorded in Madrid in five sessions in May and June of 2014, Amar en Paz was mixed at Avatar Studios, in Manhattan, by Jim Anderson, and mastered at Arf! Digital by Alan Silverman. Anderson has become the label's mix engineer of choice. "Fernando and I view Jim as the elephant in the room, so to speak: the one without whom we dare not venture," Chediak said. "We see him more as a musician than an engineer, even though he has very gifted ears and just a wonderful sense of place, aurally—where everything belongs in the general soundscape of the record. He's an artistic collaborator in every date that we do."

Of the sound on Amar en Paz, Anderson said, "The trick is to make everything sound natural, and as if I had done nothing—yet doing 'nothing' took about 20 hours! To get the guitar to support the voice, and then let it naturally take over when the solo appears . . . there's nothing natural about it. Moving up the guitar to overtake the vocal and not make it 'heard' is, I feel, quite an accomplishment. There's some light EQ, some slight compression, and about four subtle reverbs in play in the final mix, all sounding as if they should have been there in the first place. To me, a 'simple' project such as this, since it's more exposed, can be more challenging than the most complicated one, when much can be hidden. There's no place to hide here at all."

Lyrically, Amar en Paz covers two sides of the same coin: love and the lack of love. The tempos tend toward the slow and sad, which gives Morente plenty of room to improvise vocal lines, as in Paulinho da Viola's "Baile del Desamor" ("Dança da Solidão," or Heartbreak Dance). She toys with expectations, deftly skipping across stark lines in an intriguing contrast of subject and tempo: "Solitude is lava / that covers everything / It's the bitterness in my mouth / a gold-toothed grin / Solitude's a word / nailed in a heart / that is mute and resigned / to the beat of disillusion."

An unusual project with intriguing results that will appeal to fans of both vocal music and Latin fusion, Amar en Paz is the kind of adventurous project that fills Calle 54's 12-album catalog. "We record music that is outside the box, that touches upon different genres and traditions, that perhaps unconsciously breaks new ground in the process," Chediak said. "It's not experimental music in any sense of the word. We're moved by the pleasure of making someone's life a little more enjoyable for 60 minutes—nothing more ambitious than that."—Robert Baird

COMMENTS
Allen Fant's picture

Thanks! for sharing- RB. I will add this one to my must-buy list.

jimtavegia's picture

Sadly, not available at Amazon right now.

Anon2's picture

Mr. Jim:

Try this if you want Amar en Paz:

http://www.amazon.es/s/ref=nb_sb_noss/277-9801328-4208859?__mk_es_ES=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Estrella%20Morente

All of her recent recordings seem to be there, even some with Paco de Lucia.

Amazon's European sites are fantastic. The check out cart does instant currency conversion (Euros/Pounds Sterling to USD). If you live in a metro area whose airport has direct flights to Europe, you'll find that it's even faster than some US Amazon shipments.

Good luck.
low2midhifi

Klinn's picture

Her father was Enrique Moriente, a great Flamenco singer. A wonderful record from her father:

http://www.amazon.com/Omega-Enrique-Morente/dp/B001UGISHU/ref=ntt_mus_ep_dpi_2

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