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A Place Too Small
The shocking loss of Lhasa De Sela on 1st January
robbed us of one of the most expressive, individual
voices of the past decade. Jan Fairley had been working
on a Lhasa feature for fRoots when the news hit.
O
n January 1st 2010 just before that she had just had treatment for
midnight Mexican-US singer breast cancer but she asked me not to back in
Lhasa De Sela died at home in mention it in anything published as she 2003 she took care of
Montreal. She had been fight- felt the big ’c’ word only drew unwanted much of its production
ing breast cancer for 21 attention. Although she had prepared W
hen Lhasa De Sela created
The Living Road
even drawing the booklet
months. She loved living in the middle of and recorded the disc before her cancer, pictures. For its much-awaited follow-up,
Montreal in a mixed neighbourhood, rid- I felt that some of the songs were called simply Lhasa, she’s done the same
ing her bike, caring for her cat Isaan, prophetic in ways that only the uncon- while changing tack slightly: “I was hun-
sharing time in recent years with her scious knows, but although she thought gry for something simple. On Living Road
partner Ryan. there might be that resonance in her there were at least 20 musicians and on
We had hit it off when I first met her
choice and arrangements she preferred this one there are just five. It was really
for fRoots in January 2004, sealed by the
me not to mention it. Before we could fun because we were all in the studio
fact that I had mentioned almost at the
publish, the cancer had recurred and her together playing. We worked live onto
end of our interview that I thought I had
Paris and London concerts were can- 24-track analogue tape with hardly any
heard something ’Chilean‘ in her music.
celled. Eventually we decided to prepare overdubbing. It is definitely less sophisti-
She was jubilant and it sparked her telling
the feature for this edition of fRoots, cated. I found when I was listening to
me a family story of some significance.
hoping she might be recovered by then. music I could tell what was digital and
She told me her father had a dear child-
This was not to be. The text of that piece what was analogue and I realised I was
hood friend who had gone to Chile during
is as follows from here, as Lhasa would tired of listening to music that feels doc-
the Allende years and had never been
have wanted it… tored. I wanted to make an album with
seen or heard of again after the coup d’é-
tat of September 1973. Her father was
sure he had been ’disappeared’ and she
and her sisters had grown up with this
story. As a result her parents had played
lots of Chilean music to them as they trav-
elled around in the 1970s. Her parents,
who were then hippies, had chosen a
nomadic lifestyle living with their children
in a converted school bus which they
drove around the US and Mexico. Lhasa
loved Chilean music so much, particularly
the songs of Víctor Jara, and confessed
that at that time with childish innocence
she had secretly decided to marry Jara
when she was grown up, not understand-
ing that as he had been murdered this
would not be possible.
For some reason I asked her sponta-
neously what the name of her father’s
friend had been and she told me. It’s such
an unusual name, like Lhasa’s herself, I felt
myself prickle with gooseflesh as quite
weirdly I had met an American in Chile
with that name and knew that he was still
very much alive and in a crazy serendipity
was actually living in my home town of
Edinburgh. It was too fanciful to mention
but I chased contacts to find him when I
got home and indeed he was Lhasa’s
father’s long lost friend and I was able to
put them in contact to everyone’s amuse-
ment. Lhasa met him when she gave a con-
cert at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall not long
afterwards. Later she told me the incident
had awakened all sorts of thoughts and
that one day she would work on a disc of
Víctor Jara songs and maybe those of semi-
nal Chilean folklorist Violeta Parra.
In 2009 when I spoke to Lhasa about
her new third disc Lhasa (Warner
2564690483; see fR312) we both knew
Photo: Philip Ryalls
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