“You have to want to sing about the many parts of who you are, not just the pretty things, or the things you think are cute,” says Spanish singer Buika. “Because the art of a person is sometimes in their pain. It’s everywhere and I think one must live openly, bravely, and tell it like it is at every moment, as if you were breathing.”

Buika is back, bearing body and soul in the most poignant album of her career. From the risqué cover art to the intimacy and rawness of her themes and vocal delivery, Buika has proven yet again that she’s completely surrendered herself to her art – no matter where it may take her. On Niña de Fuego (Girl of Fire) she plunges even deeper into her emotions and emerges in voice to reveal her inner anguish. Traditional coplas (female-centric Spanish torch songs) and fusions of flamenco, jazz, gypsy rumba, and Afro-Cuban rhythms become heart-wrenching songs of despair and love lost. For the first time Buika includes beautifully rendered rancheras in her repertoire, one of which is testament to her own lyrical prowess as a songwriter.

Last year Buika’s U.S. debut Mi Niña Lola (released by Warner Music Latina) was met with critical acclaim. Spanish newspaper El País called the album “a revolution” and it went on to win a Premio de la Música, Spain’s answer to the Grammys, for Best Produced Album. The New York Times’ music critic Jon Pareles classified Buika’s live New York City debut at BAM as nothing short of “magnificent.” In Miami and Washington D.C. audiences were enthralled by the way in which Buika effortlessly straddled the musical sources of multiple continents without becoming entangled in any one particular idiom. In Mexico her concerts made a fan and musical godmother out of the legendary octogenarian songstress Chavela Vargas. In a relatively short time span Buika has gone from struggling artist to a trailblazing force in contemporary Spanish music. She is at the crossroads of many genres -- a place where jazz, funk, flamenco, copla and neo-soul come together in a sublime, musical pact.

On Niña de Fuego the singer reunites with producer Javier Limón, renowned for the sophisticated flamenco jazz cross-pollinations that he previously brought to highly praised albums by Bebo Valdés and Diego “El Cigala” (Lagrimas Negras) and Paco de Lucía (Cositas Buenas). On Niña de Fuego, Javier Limón is also a musician, unleashing masterful flamenco guitar flourishes accompanied by an A-list lineup that includes Cuban musicians Iván “Melon” Lewis on piano, Horacio “El Negro” Hernández on drums, and Carlitos Sarduy on trumpet. The sound is anchored by Dany Noel on bass with Ramón Porrina and Piraña on percussion.

Concha Buika (pronounced BWEE-kah) was born María Concepción Balboa Buika on the island of Mallorca, to parents who came to Spain as political exiles from Equatorial Guinea. They lived in a poor neighborhood in the island’s capital city, Palma de Mallorca, where Buika remembers that the only black resident other than her family members was a man hired to stand in the doorway of a gift shop, like just another novelty on display. She was a skinny girl with an Afro that curious neighbors would reach out to touch – hair which she later learned to style from photos of her early musical idols Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston. Her father, a writer and activist, left the family and returned to Guinea, and her mother raised Buika and her five siblings in a household “filled with people, food and music.” She grew up singing and playing instruments – guitar, piano, bass. She has recently taken up cello.

“I am African and an African does not have musical training,” she explains. “An African can’t live without music. Like meals, music was part of our daily life. There has always been music in my head and in my heart.”

Buika also found a second home among the community of Gypsy families who had settled in Palma. She played after school in that marginal neighborhood, and as always, music was a part of those long childhood afternoons, which are echoed today in Buika’s instinctive embrace of flamenco’s emotional cante jondo, or deep song, and the copla. But as much as she is currently identified with the copla, and credited with reinventing that classic romantic Spanish style, Buika herself refuses to define music by genre or style. She says she considers all artists and all kinds of music to be “a gift from God,” but allows that she’s most drawn to music, borne on society’s fringes that expresses her own desire to tell it like it is. “I’m from the barrio,” she says. “I’m inspired by chattering with my comadres [girlfriends].”

In the copla and cante (flamenco song) Buika sees a mirror that she’s able to hold up in front of her in an attempt to dispel her demons. “It’s not just about music, it’s a way of life,” she says. “It’s about not running away from yourself. Some people sing about what they would like to happen, but in the copla and el cante, we confront who we are, with all of our fears and all of our defects. In the United States there’s also a great tradition like this: it’s called the blues.”

Buika speaks from experience. Her first tentative steps in music were as a blues singer in a hotel in Mallorca. As fate would have it Buika embarked on her music career almost by accident when at 17 her aunt turned down the hotel gig and persuaded Buika to taker her place instead. Not ever having considered singing professionally, the teenager said no at first, but then relented when she learned she would earn more money than she could make doing other work available to her. “Since I got on that stage I’ve never stopped working,” she says now.

Eventually Buika branched out, singing jazz and soul in venues across the Balearics and doing backing vocals on numerous Spanish productions. A chance meeting with producers at a Balearic-beats club sparked a slew of dance singles; appearances at raves in Mallorca, Germany and Ibiza followed. Buika spent time in London and in 2001 the singer ended up in Las Vegas, where she worked in casinos as a Tina Turner impersonator, with the requisite wig and platform shoes. After a year and a half, Buika returned to Mallorca and recorded a jazzy independent album. For the last six years she has divided her time between Mallorca and Madrid, where she’s found soulmates in a community of artists “more interested in the show than the business.”

For Buika the stage is a space for communion with her audience. It’s a nearly sacred place from where she’s able to channel and transmit an otherworldly energy she says has always accompanied her in life. “I’ve always felt that there’s something that comes from very far away to whisper things in my ear,” Buika says. “I’ve noticed that if I go onstage allowing it to function, it will guide me along. It’s a very strange thing because it makes me sing things that I have never rehearsed…..up until that moment they didn’t exist, and then suddenly they reveal themselves as if they had been in the air all along.”

Buika brilliantly captures this sense of the unexpected on Niña de Fuego -- a disarming revelation even if you’ve already fallen in love with Buika once before.

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Interviews and other Media (Acrobat Reader maybe required):

BBC World
Turkey
Miami Herald
Miami News
New York Post
Daily News