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Listen: A brave new artist
Is making her presence felt
On the inside of her right wrist, Alejandra Ribera has an elegant tattoo. A single word, it reads:
Escuchame
Translated from Spanish, it says:
“listen to me”
And so you should.
Listen to her voice, and her songs, her passionate approach to a wide variety of music, and her attitude on stage almost demands you pay attention.
This is an artist with international roots — born in Toronto to an Argentinian waiter and a Scottish actress, raised in the heart of the city’s gay village — and a style that reminds her listeners of Edith Piaf and Tom Waits and a louder, more powerful Joan Armatrading.
Now in her mid-twenties, Ribera’s disarming humour — on and off stage — contrasts with her frequently dark material, and an unconventional life that’s been full of adventures and misadventures, — travel, and jobs in science labs, burger-joints, and energy healing. The resumé includes four days at York University’s vocal jazz programme (she dropped out to go to the mountains of Slovakia and study with a witch doctor, honest) and childhood music studies (violin, viola, choral music. She had spent her teenage years listening to the music and the passion of such varied artists as Odetta, Mercedes Sosa and Jimmy Scott, and her evenings sneaking into seedy gay piano bars and cabarets.
These artists — and dozens more — shaped the multi-dimensional repertoire that is Alejandra’s hallmark today, and is at the same time her greatest weakness and her greatest strength. For every listener who can’t come to grips with an artist whose music would be at home at a jazz club, a world music gathering or a folk festival, there are dozens fascinated by her no-holds-barred approach to songs that cross genres and borders with almost frightening ease.
Sophisticated? Sure. Blunt and tough and in your face? Certainly. Funny and smart and wry and self-deprecating? Indeed, all of that. For Alejandra, on stage, it’s a carefully constructed balancing act, and she very rarely falls. For the audience, it’s a roller coaster ride that may take them from Latin folk tunes to cabaret songs in French or Spanish to the unexpected jazzy moodiness to her own alternative pop songs.
The hard and sometimes discouraging work of building a multi-dimensional musical career is, at last, paying off. An elegantly simple CD sampler included eight of her own songs (including one in French) and a unique version of Cielito Lindo, a Mexican folk standard sung in Spanish. Alejandra called the album NavigatorNavigateher, and the cover shot shows her smoking a Cuban cigar, her eyebrows and her attitude indicating the surprises contained in the music.
The CD led her to play on CBC Radio and on a dozen college stations, Toronto area festivals, performances in a dozen local bars, clubs and cabarets, and a regular runs of dates at the Cameron House, perhaps the best place in Toronto to launch alternative, intriguing and unusual musical careers.
Her four-piece band — all graduates of the Humber College jazz programme — skillfully match the quality of her voice, the aching ballads of love found and lost again, as well as the international flight-of-fancy excursions and the unexpected pop approach of some of her own songs.
Alejandra Ribera is a musical force of nature. And she is on the verge of far wider acceptance. A new CD is gestating, and new songs fill the notebook she carries everywhere she goes. Her performances are full of life and confidence.
And her wrist says it all: Listen to me.
Listen to her.
Listen.
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Online!
