root salad Pascuala Ilabaca
This sparky Chilean singer and accordeon player has wide influences, she tells Bas Springer.
hilean singer and accordeon player Pascuala Ilabaca is considered one of the most prominent talents in Latin America. She stands out because of her particular way of mixing Chilean folk and the spirit of the Nueva Canción Chilena with jazz, pop, rock and music from India and Mexico. With her pas- sionate and infectious live shows Ilabaca has already made a big impression at such large-scale festivals in Europe as WOMAD, TFF Rudolstadt, London Jazz Festival and last year’s edition of WOMEX, with a suc- cessful UK tour already undertaken in 2014.
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Born into an artistic family in the Chilean harbour town of Valparaíso in 1985, Pascuala Ilabaca grew up listening to Viole- ta Parra and Victor Jara as well Björk, and Salif Keita. She learned to play the piano and accordeon and lived in India in 2008 and 2009, where she studied music with master vocalist Pashupati Nath Mishra. Her debut CD appeared in 2010 entitled Pascuala Canta A Violeta, a tribute to the legendary Chilean folk singer Violeta Parra. “In the past people couldn’t listen to Violeta Parra or Victor Jara because they were banned by the dictatorship. The only music allowed was the one approved by the government.”
In recent years she has become a lead- ing light in a cohort of exciting Chilean singer-songwriters who redefined creativity following the dark days of dictator Pinochet. Nearly always armed with her accordeon, Ilabaca has an incredible voice, simultaneously combining melancholy and happiness and backed by her gifted five- piece band Fauna on guitars, saxophone, clarinet and percussion. Since 2011 they have done twelve tours throughout Europe, with more than 150 concerts. They released their third album as a band in 2016, Rey Loj, which received the Pulsar, Chile’s most pres- tigious music award.
Ilabaca calls herself ‘a nomadic person’. “All my inspiration comes from travel. I want to connect cultures, people and music. I use a lot of rhythms that derive from the Andean carnaval like saya and huayno and of course cumbia rhythms. We also play cueca, a kind of love dance. In India I learned traditional singing. I try to bring Himalayan and Andean dances together. However, I’m mostly influenced by the music and poetry from female singers from Latin America, such as Violeta Parra and the Chilean poet-diplomat Gabriela Mistral, who in 1945 became the first Latin Ameri- can author to receive a Nobel Prize in Litera- ture. I’m also influenced by Egberto Gis- monti and Bola de Nieve.”
Ilabaca is an open- minded and very socially engaged globetrotter. Her compositions touch on political as well as romantic and celebratory themes. Nowadays she composes her owns songs but in the past her reper- toire also included inter- pretations of songs by Jara and Parra, express- ing her affinity with the spirit of the Nueva Can- ción movement.
“In my lyrics I speak a
lot about saving indige- nous cultures, old tradi- tions and iconic charac- ters from my culture. I sing for instance in the language of the Mapuche, indigenous inhabitants of South-Cen- tral Chile and southwest- ern Argentina. Their lan- guage is dying out. When I’m travelling I speak a lot about pre- serving my culture. The reaction is always the same: people are touched by my stories because all over the world everyone tries to preserve their own culture.”
“On my latest album I sing about the rapid pas- sage of time. That’s why the album is called Rey Loj, which means ‘King Clock’. Every- body suffers from rapidly advancing time. Even people who don’t care much about money and live a non-bourgeois life are pris- oners of time. For the album I wrote three songs about the accelerated passage of time. In other songs I try to provide a key to escape time. For instance when you live a very emotional time, you can forget about time with music. When you make music you can create your own time. You can also syn- chronise yourself with your heartbeat, not only with the beat of the clock. If you are your own magician and you can manage that, you’re going to be much more happy. Some of my songs emerged from dreams. In your dreams you can live your whole life in one hour or you can fly, or ride a horse. Many people believe that you can’t escape time, they are prisoners of time. But you can experience time in different ways, that’s what I like to relate with the album.”
magic in normal life. If you know that par- adise doesn’t exist, you have to create your own paradise. We have to recycle our earth and create our own happiness. I stimulate my audience to leave the present behind and connect with their lives, so they can be able to create their own world and create their own happiness. In Chile a lot of people are victims of fear. People who lived under the dictatorship always have a fear of politics and the things they really want to do. So fear breaks your creativity. I was lucky to be born into an artistic family. We were very poor but we never felt hungry. As a child I already realised that you can be an artist and happy, without starving to death. So I was never afraid of being a creative person.”
“A
pascualailabaca.com F
lot of people on this earth suf- fer and they have important stories to tell but nobody lis- tens to them. I discovered
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Photo: Marcia Fonseca
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