Life, death, and chocolate inspire songwriter Lila Downs

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      Not many artists can claim to have a species of insect named after them.

      Last year, Mexican-American songwriter, bandleader, and activist Lila Downs inspired a group of biologists working in the state of Oaxaca to call a newly discovered and vibrantly hued grasshopper Liladownsia fraile in her honour. It’s an odd but fitting tribute to one of the most colourful singers in North American music, classically trained, but with roots deep in the soil of southern Mexico.

      Downs and her band—which includes her husband, Paul Cohen, on saxophones—mix Mexican songs with her own compositions, which blend folk, pop, jazz, reggae, and hip-hop with deceptive ease. Her themes are usually social and political, and she likes to link past and present in the lives of indigenous people and the poor. The title of Downs’s latest recording, Balas y Chocolate (Bullets and Chocolate) neatly encapsulates her perspective.

      “It’s in the way that we celebrate life and death,” says Downs, reached on her cellphone on a train heading to San Diego. “In Mexico we make an altar on the Day of the Dead—the first day is dedicated to the children and the young men and women who ‘come back’, and will partake in the chocolate which is a very important feature on the altar, with oranges, bread, and maybe some mescal.

      “I think the songs on the album take us through that experience. I try to express that relationship we have with the other world. And sometimes the lyrics are from the other world—the voices of those who cannot speak. I’m not quite sure how this is going to play out, but I’m starting to discover it as I perform the songs on-stage.”

      The title track is a kaleidoscopic piece with a party mood but a dark streak—the colour of the chocolate that’s so popular in Oaxaca, where Downs lives and where her Mixtec-Indian mother grew up.

      “Before Europeans came to this continent there was an important exchange between Honduras, El Salvador, Venezuela, Colombia, and Guatemala and Mexico. Cacao beans developed in the Mayan culture but before that they were fermented and used to make a kind of beer. I thought it was an interesting contrast that kids have such a beautiful relationship with chocolate—like my four-year-old son—and with these children who are running away from these countries, it was an unusual coincidence, and something in our news recently, associated with bullets and violence.”

      The jaunty music for “Balas y Chocolate” or the norteño polka “Las Casas de Madera” (“The Wooden Houses”)—which tells of windswept, abandoned houses and broken hearts—contrasts tellingly with the harshness of the world that Downs evokes.

      “These images are part of Mexican folklore and its metaphorical connections,” the singer says. “Those are the reasons we survive, and it makes our case for our connection with the Native world, and the wisdom of that tradition which holds nature in such high esteem. Maybe in times of crisis we connect to that when we express these things.”

      Lila Downs plays the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on Sunday (April 26).

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