Lhasa de Sela
Lhasa de Sela ( born September 27, 1972 in Big Indian in the Catskills, New York, USA, † 1 January 2010, Montreal ) was an American- Mexican singer.
Life and career
Her father is from Mexico, her mother is a U.S. citizen. As a child she traveled for seven years with her parents and her three sisters to a bus by the United States and Mexico. These nomadic time without television and schooling, but with lots of books and music, she coined musical and thinking. Learning and creativity were the determining factors. Besides music, she was also involved in other art forms, such as painting.
Her first performances as a singer she had thirteen years old in a Greek cafe in San Francisco. Later, she was often in Montreal, where her sisters at Cirque du Soleil participate. There she met Yves Desrosiers know in 1991, the producer and arranger of their first album La Llorona. The 11 pieces were marked by melancholy beauty, intense and tense vocals and economical instrumentation. The lyrics of their first release are all in Spanish, since this language allows her opinion a greater emotionality. In addition to their own songs they sang songs by other artists, such as Víctor Jara and Violeta Parra. Although she used no music genres directly, they had fans from different areas, jazz, world music, chanson, alternative rock and Tango Argentino. From time to time they collaborated with other artists in this genre or related species, such as with Bratsch, Tindersticks and Arthur H. Both because of their biographies and because of her vocal style is often compared with Lila Downs.
Between the times in which she produced her rare plates or went on tour, she devoted herself to other projects. Some years she lived in France where she developed a new kind of circus with her sisters: Pocheros. In Marseilles, they wrote a lot of their second album, The Living Road, on which she sings, unlike the first multi-lingual, in English, French and Spanish.
Until her death she was living in Montreal. This was also their last record, complete, recorded in English. She appeared in April 2009 in Canada and Europe.
Lhasa de Sela died on 1 January 2010 of breast cancer.