BLONDE AMBITION
With the band's name, you half expect to see a bunch of Latinas with bleached hair, funny hats and maracas performing Mexican songs-0Mamacitas getting their homeland groove on. Instead, Las Rubias are two classically trained gringas backed by a group that includes musicians from France, the U.S. and Colombia paying tribute to the music of Latin America while tackling Mozart as well.
The band's name is "sort of a pun," vocalist Emily Hurst says via e-mail. "There's sort of a tradition in Norteño music of bands with "del Norte" in the title-Los Tigres del Norte, Los Huracanes del Norte, etc. So, we thought it would be funny to call ourselves the Blondes of the North as a play on that."
The group got its start when Hurst and Alyssa Lamb got together to start a classical vocal duo. Unable to find suitable duets, they began playing around with the music of Lydia Mendoza, a Mexican singer from the 1930s.
"We had so much fun that we wanted to do more and just took it from there," Hurst explains. "Olivier (Conan) volunteered to play cuatro with us, and we gradually found the other band members, as well as more and more songs we wanted to sing. We remain somewhat true to our classical roots-we do the "Confutatis" and occasionally a Mendelssohn or Schumann duet-but we've strayed pretty far from the original choir idea."
And far it was. On their first effort, Rumba Internationale, they included pretty faithful renditions of classic songs such as "Perfidia" (a song recorded by far too many people, from Desi Arnaz to Linda Ronstadt via Nat King Cole) and "Quizas." Their new release, Panamericana, is a journey across the continent with a compilation of songs from Argentina, Peru and other countries. The most surprising track is a very personal rendition of Caetano Veloso's "Baby," a song he wrote for Os Mutantes in 1968 at the height of the psychedelic-inspired Tropicalia movement in Brazil.
"Instead of trying to replicate those sounds and going for a traditional, repertory type of approach, we really tried to make it our own, developing an original sound and finding a common denominator between all those songs," said Olivier Conan. "The pan-American thread developed in a fairly organic fashion."
As for "Baby," the tune has been a staple of their stage act for a while. After I saw them perform it during a Coney Island gig last summer, around the time Bebel Gilberto's album came out, the band members later told me they picked it up from the English-language Mutantes version.
"We were asked to do 'Baby' for a friend's wedding," says Alissa Lamb, "and we all liked playing it so much that it ended up being one of the songs in the repertoire."
While on stage, no attempt is made to mask their American accents when singing Latin songs, and they also seem to have fun when doing their classical stuff with a Cuban nightclub backing. There's no quizas about it-despite their roots (both hair and ethnic)-these rubias are the real thing.