Susana Baca might have been as famous as Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick or Diana Ross if she had been born in the US. She has a voice to melt butter, has filled theatres in Lima, New York and Havana, and delights jazz, folk, Latin and world music fans equally with songs that splice Indigenous instruments and socially engaged lyrics – which she often writes herself. But being Peruvian – and Afro-Peruvian at that – she belongs to a culture largely invisible to the Anglophone world and marginalised in Latin America.

Peru was slow to discover her; she and her husband created their own label, Pregón, to release her early albums in the 1980s – on cassette, as vinyl was hard to come by. International recognition only came in 1995, with the inclusion of her cover of ‘María Lando’ on the Luaka Bop compilation Afro-Peruvian Classics: The Soul of Black Peru. Her debut solo album for David Byrne’s label followed in 1997. Since then she has scooped up three Latin Grammy awards and is widely recognised for her contribution to the preservation of Afro-Peruvian music. In 2011, she became the Peruvian minister of culture, the first person of African descent to occupy a cabinet post. This month sees the long-awaited release of Palabras Urgentes, her first LP for Real World Records. “I have always wanted to release an album with Real World,” she says, “having previously only recorded one song for them on an album entitled Gifted: Women of the World. I feel a strong bond with the UK.”

“The demand for music is there because the people need it after all this death and sickness”

But her deep and lasting bond is with South America’s marginalised Indigenous groups and minorities. At 77, she remains a tireless campaigner for social justice; the word ‘urgent’ in the title of the new album – in production since before the pandemic – alludes to the political graft and grievous economic inequalities that characterise Peru’s dysfunctional version of democracy. “I was aware of a feeling of anger and a sense that people felt betrayed and damaged by corruption. We chose these people and we believed them. There is a feeling that this cannot go on. Peru has been terribly polarised by fraud and impunity.”

“Now the pandemic has stripped us naked and has exposed the corruption of those who have taken advantage of the situation. People have lost jobs, livelihoods, work, families. Artists have been unable to tour. The situation is critical.” The one positive: “The demand for music is there because the people need it after all this death and sickness.”

Baca spoke to me via a particularly shaky Zoom connection from her home in Cañete, on the Pacific Coast about 160km south of Lima. From other interviews I’d read with her, I knew it was typical for conversations to veer away from music and towards bigger social and political themes – but, in fact, there is no line separating these for Susana Baca.

She was raised in an illustrious musical family in the poor Chorrillos district of Lima. A close friend during the 1970s was Chabuca Granda, the composer of ‘Fina Estampa’ and ‘La Flor de la Canela’ and a pioneering defender of Afro-Peruvian culture. Parents and mentor alike taught Baca that education was the only reliable means of escape, or enlightenment; in 1989-1991 she undertook a series of research trips with her husband (now manager) Ricardo Pereira to study Afro-Peruvian music and collate songs.

“I discovered many things on those trips. I discovered what hadn’t been unearthed by textbooks about national identity written by experts in black Peruvian culture. All the things I’d read were removed from what I saw when taking my own journey and getting to know people in their everyday lives, realising that being black was not only about colour, but about a way of adapting. This was fundamental in my career.”

“The other fundamental lesson those journeys gave me was to discover Peruvian identity had an African connection not only linked to colour – which placed it alongside Chinese and Japanese Peruvians – and showed it to be intimately interwoven with Andean culture. That had not been apparent before. Nor had the Spanish roots of Afro-Peruvian culture been properly detailed in academic works. For me it was heartening to be black and feel I belonged among Peru’s poor classes, where black, Chinese and Indigenous people form their own community – one that I had never seen in that way in anthropological and sociological works. Black urban culture has had its moments, and has had more visibility even than Andean culture, but rural Afro-Peruvian culture, which is linked to the Andean, has been marginalised and made largely invisible.”

The trip turned Baca into a serious and passionate researcher (she and Pereira went on to establish an institute of experimental dance and music) and deepened her understanding of Afro-Peruvian reality. Her music is a direct expression of this, blending Andean melancholy, Spanish notions about melody and beat-driven rhythms (festejo, landó and golpe tierra) that skip between Africa and Latin America, usually played on traditional Afro-Peruvian percussion instruments including cajón, quijada (made from a donkey’s jawbone), guapeo (clay pot), cowbells, congas and bongos.

Baca is often compared with Cesaria Evora – and not only because they both like to perform barefoot – but a key difference is the way the former’s music freights a joyous energy, even when the songs tell of suffering and heartache. “Art has healed my deep wounds,” she says. Thus her song ‘Lamento Negro’ – the title-track from her prizewinning 2001 album – opens with a heartrending story, gently told, of a life sacrificed to slavery, and culminates with a frenzied dance rhythm and a grito (cry) that claims to have killed off slavery.

Over the ten songs of Palabras Urgentes, we find Baca still fighting the good fight, exploring emotions that underlie and connect suffering and resistance. In her introduction to the album she writes: ‘Age casts a different light upon the world and this album seeks to express freely and honestly those things that I love most intensely. It is time to stop thinking of always having to please others and deliver an album truly from the heart.’

It was recorded at home in Cañete, with Baca cooking for the musicians and producers present. Diverse rhythms, drawn from Argentina and Puerto Rico, underpin ballads, nueva canción-style folksongs and uptempo percussion-led blasts, as the singer pays homage to individuals and peoples that inspire her.

‘La Herida Oscura’ is for Micaela Bastidas, an 18th-century Indigenous rebel leader and martyr for Peru’s liberation from Spain (this year marks the bicentennial of Peruvian independence). It was written by Chabuca Granda. Another song, ‘Juana Azurduy’, honours a famous woman warrior of the Bolivian war for independence. For Baca, history provides the vital link to a feminism Peruvian women have yet to fully discover. “I sing to [Azurduy] full-heartedly. We need more leaders like her. These trying times in which we now live demand combative women willing to risk it all to give us our freedom. We need new freedom.”

Another track, ‘Negra del Alma’, she says, “is not a song, it’s an encounter between my heart and the winds and popular rhythms of the Andes.” The song considers the Indigenous gaze and how it falls on black Peruvians.

“Tango is a protest, it wasn’t invented to please, but to say something, to provoke”

Baca has included covers of an Argentinian milonga (‘Milonga de Mis Amores’) and of the famous tango, ‘Cambalache’ – a sardonic portrayal of a corrupt society as a ‘junkshop’ that never changes its shoddy stock. “I do with tango what was done with it when it started,” she says. “Tango is a protest, it wasn’t invented to please, but to say something, to provoke. ‘Camabalche’ is a protest song, bearing truths that time hasn’t changed but has in fact made more firm and solid.”

“The milonga is a rhythm that I love to hear and share with Argentinian musicians. In Buenos Aires, and in most books, the African presence in the city is denied, even though, like Lima, Buenos Aires was a black city in the 1800s. Music is proof of this, and in Argentina the African element is mixed in with all the other rhythms that evolved there.”

A seasoned educator revealing stories we overlooked or thought lost, Baca is still capable of surprises. ‘Dämmerung’, which begins a cappella and segues into a melancholic reverberating piano, stands apart on the album, as do its lyrics – by poet Luis Hernández, who killed himself in 1977 – about a sorrowful, mist-shrouded dusk.

On the plangent, almost funereal ‘Vestida de Vida’, Baca addresses global warming. Of course she does; she has never shied away from the big issues, and the industrial destruction of the Amazon forest and the emptying of Peru’s seas are the 2021 equivalents of the military dictatorships and five centuries of abuses perpetrated by the landowning classes.

She insists that “nothing has changed” in Peru since she started exploring and performing the Afro-Peruvian songbook. “Peru is still a country where corruption is almost a legacy that comes from feudal Spain, where lords and gentlemen didn’t pay taxes and commoners did. It’d always been the case of the corrupt and well-connected versus those who lacked any kind of ‘in’ road. I called this out, in strong language, when I was young, and the audiences were small. To carry on doing it now at the age of 77, to live it all over again, to say the same things, is a way of showing my life hasn’t been lived in vain. That’s why the words are urgent. They haven’t changed their meaning; some melodies change, but the essence is the same.”

Baca credits the album’s freshness and energy to the Real World production team, in particular Michael League – the leader of New York-based ensemble Snarky Puppy. She first came across League years ago, when he was playing guitar in a university band that did covers of her songs. They eventually met in 2015 and Baca contributed to Snarky Puppy’s 2016 album, Family Dinner: Volume Two. League, along with Jeff Coffin (saxophonist) and Fab Dupont (audio engineer) stayed with Baca for ten days while producing the album.

League is gushing in his admiration for her work and legacy. “I’ve learned more about the purpose of music from Susana than from anyone else. She’s the most soulful singer I’ve ever heard. She sings with her entire spirit. She shows you what a singer is supposed to be, the essence of being an artist. Susana is not faking it, she’s just trying to express the truth inside her.”

He says Baca and Ricardo gave him a precise brief. “They wanted to touch the African roots of Peru. They wanted a kind of raw, simple aesthetic. After all the record is called Urgent Words and the intention was to put the message first. We wanted to leave a lot of space for her, not to produce ear-candy with lots of bells and whistles. The lyrics are very important. With Susana it’s all about the words.”

When I mention the range of genres and tempos on the new album, League demurs: “I don’t think that what’s impressive about Susana is her range or versatility, but the truth she expresses in a single note. I’d be happy to hear her sing the same song every day for the rest of my life.”

If this sounds like hero-worship, we might bear in mind that the recording sessions were also a non-stop family-style fiesta, with Baca cooking chicken dinners for everyone involved, delaying sessions while she took perfect Peruvian causas out of the oven to feed the crew. Somehow, it seems, she can be a diva and earth mother at the same time as playing the roles of hostess and mama.

As for Baca deserving even more attention than she currently gets, League thinks the honours and big label releases will always fall short. “When you’re making art at the level Susana is making it, you could never give someone enough recognition. She is a pure artist. She sings with intention, she has a message – and that’s probably how music first began. Everyone who has met her and knows her work is in awe of her.”

This interview originally appeared in the November 2021 issue of Songlines magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today

Read the review of Palabras Urgentes: Songlines Reviews Database