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Latin 101Celia Cruz's "I Will Survive," Mexico's Liz Phair, and other highlights from the Latin Grammys.

By Jody Rosen
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 1, 2004, at 12:40 PM ET

Julieta Venegas
Sí (RCA International)
Click here to listen to "Andar Conmigo," and here to listen to "Lo Que Pidas."
The unusually strong and eclectic field of nominees for this evening's Latin Grammy Awards offers a glimpse of a parallel pop universe. Case in point: Julieta Venegas, the gifted Mexican singer-songwriter-accordionist who is nominated for three major awards. On her latest album, Sí, Venegas has pulled a Liz Phair. Having established herself over the past several years as the hippest, artiest chick in rock en Español, she has taken aim at hit radio with an album that blends lilting Mexican folk, disco beats, and pure pop melodies. The genre-blurring results are irresistible: The hit ballad "Andar Conmigo" moves from a vaguely ranchera-like lope into reggae; "Lo Que Pidas" has a dancey hook that would make Madonna jealous and a delicious call-and-response between Venegas' accordion and a DJ's turntable scratches.

Carlinhos Brown
Carlinhos Brown Es Carlito Marrón (BMG)
Click here to listen to "Carlito Marrón," and here to listen to "Talavera."
On paper the Grammy-nominated album by Brazilian percussionist, guitarist, and self-styled shaman Carlinhos Brown sounds like one of those abominable "world fusion" records that get piped into free-trade coffee shops from Seattle to Brooklyn: a mishmash of Bahian carnival rhythms, mambo, flamenco, and several other styles, with lyrics in Portuguese, Spanish, English, and Yoruba. But Brown is one of Brazil's great musical eccentrics, an irrepressible weirdo who makes Andre 3000 seem as staid as André Previn; he turns a potentially dodgy experiment into an exercise in recording-studio bravura and plain loopy fun. It's a hoot hearing Brown impersonate a Cuban sonero on "Carlito Marrón." But the best tracks transcend pastiche and offer strange new sounds: "Talavera" boosts Brown's acoustic guitar to a dull roar and digitally alters his vocal, creating a spooky 21st-century yodel.

Bebo Valdés y Diego El Cigala
Lágrimas Negras (RCA)
Click here to listen to "Lágrimas Negras."
There's never been an intercontinental, intergenerational musical summit quite like Lágrimas Negras, the collection of Latin standards by Bebo Valdés, 86-year-old titan of Afro-Cuban piano, and 44-year-old Diego El Cigala, Spain's supreme flamenco cantador. Listen to the title track. Valdés' left-hand accents suspend the song between moments of tension and release, between restful pauses and dense clusters of rhythm; his right hand picks out elegant melodic elaborations and makes quick runs up the keyboard. To Valdés' cool urbanity, El Cigala brings a blast of Andalusian fire—the moaning, ululating soul cries that have defined flamenco music for centuries. There have been countless versions of the nine love songs on this Album of the Year nominee; it's hard to imagine they've ever sounded quite so beautiful.

Kinky
Atlas (Nettwerk)
Click here to listen to "Do U Like It?" and here to listen "Semillas de Menta."
They've saddled themselves with one of the worst band names in living memory, but the Monterrey, Mexico, quintet Kinky atones for that lapse in taste by making smart, rugged dance music. On Atlas, a Best Alternative Music Album hopeful, the band's surreal, silly Spanish- and English-language songs are crammed with timbales and loud electric guitars, with analog synthesizers, drum loops, and strange buzzing noises; it sounds a bit like a cage match showdown between Carlos Santana and a Roland SP-808 sampler. (Check out the wild racket in the middle of "Do U Like It?") After 11 straight party tunes, Atlas winds down with the gentle "Semillas de Menta," a bossa nova punctuated by a calliopelike whistle: the lovely, dreamy sound of the Electroflux, a defunct toy keyboard that's played with a pencil.

Celia Cruz
Regalo del Alma (Sony International)
Click here to listen to "Yo Viviré (I Will Survive)."
To call the late Celia Cruz's electrifying rumba version of the disco classic "I Will Survive" a "cover" seems unfair to both Cruz and Gloria Gaynor, wherever she is. In a brazen diva move, Cruz completely overhauled the original lyric, transforming the stiff-upper-lip breakup anthem into an Ode on the Immortality of Celia Cruz. "Yo Viviré"—the final number on Cruz's Grammy-nominated final album, released just two weeks after her death in July 2003—was destined to be the Queen of Salsa's last word; it's a worthy valediction. Over a relentless percussive attack she croons, belts, and unleashes the growling vocal improvisations that were her trademark. "My voice can fly/ Can overcome any hurt/ Any time/ Any loneliness," Cruz sings—an outrageous boast, and an understatement.

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Jody Rosen is Slate's music critic. He lives in New York City. He can be reached at .
Audio excerpts from: Sí © 2003 RCA International; Carlinhos Brown Es Carlito Marrón © 2003 BMG; Lágrimas Negras © 2003 RCA; Atlas © 2003 Nettwerk; Regalo del Alma © 2003 Sony International. All rights reserved.
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