Lila Downs

Lila Downs

Lila Downs admits she is surprised her music has become internationally successful. After all, much of what she sings is in Spanish, it speaks of the pride and plight of the Mexican and Indian communities, it can be politically flinty, and she has even managed to alienate folk purists by mixing in rock guitars, hip-hop, jazz and reggae influences.

As a cocktail of musical styles it just doesn't seem to fit anywhere in the musical spectrum. Her early albums from the mid-90s often went unreviewed in mainstream media in Mexico where she was born, and in the United States where she spends much of her time.

But in the past few years all that has changed: her striking appearance in brightly coloured traditional clothes and with her long dark hair in severe plaits has drawn comparisons with Frida Kahlo. That association was enhanced by her appearing on the soundtrack to the 2002 Salma Hayek movie Frida. Her song Burn It Blue was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Song which she performed at the awards ceremony the following year.

Subsequently Billboard magazine said she had "one of the most spell-binding voices to grace the world music scene" and the LA Times, "Lila Downs is a reflection of a 21st-century world culture where ethnicity and national boundaries blur".

In part that musical blurring comes from Downs' own background. Born in the politically volatile city of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, Lila (pronounced "Leela") Downs is the daughter of a Mixtec mother and an American professor of art and cinema from Minnesota.

She grew up in both Mexico and California before heading to the University of Minnesota where she graduated in anthropology.

But if this sounds like a privileged upbringing it needs to be noted she also sang in bars in Mexico City, and worked in her mother's car parts shop where she would hear the men tell of the troubles faced by migrant Mexican workers in the US, and of those who tried to cross the heavily patrolled border. It was those stories that prompted her to put them to music and take their struggles to a wider world.

The combination of music, stories, culture and politics was natural to her.

"I studied music from when I was quite young, but it was formal classical training and the repertoire for what a singer must learn was quite different from what we have chosen to blend together.

"The 'school' of bars and restaurants was my eye opener and it was then I met Paul [Cohen], my husband and collaborator. He was a circus clown then and lived on the streets as a performer. When we met we coincided on many different ways of life, and of looking at music."