Lila Downs will be performing a free concert at 9 pm, on Friday, December 11, 2009, in Valle de Banderas, Nayarit, México as part of the Fiestas del 20 Aniversario de la Fundación de la Bahía.
POSTSCRIPT: I just returned from this concert and it was great. Bahia de Banderas is a little town inland from Bucerias and it is so small that it doesn’t even seem to have any restaurants on its zocola, where an enormous stage was set up. This free show was run like it was for an audience of 20,000 in a town of 5,000 (and maybe 2,000 showed up). I don’t understand why half of Vallarta wasn’t there, but there are a lot of things I don’t understand about this land.
Transportation from Puerto Vallarta to this concert is now available at 100 pesos per person RT. If there are few people interested, vans will be used and in the case of many there will be a bus.
Pickups are at 6:30 pm at Farmacia Guadalajara on Insurgentes, Old town and 7 pm at Walmart. Reservations are necessary to organize this transportation.
The concert will be in Valle de Banderas, about 45-60 minutes away from Vallarta. The vans or bus will leave from Farmacia GDL, with another pick up at WalMart.
Contact Astrid van Dam, Superior Tours Vallarta
- www.superiortoursvallarta.com
- info (at) superiortoursvallarta.com
- tel/fax +52 322 29 37226
Lila Downs was born 1968 in Tlaxiaco, Oaxaca. She performs her own compositions as well as tapping into native Mesoamerican music of the Mixtec, Zapotec, Maya and Nahuatl cultures.
Downs is the daughter of Mixtec cabaret singer Anita Sánchez and Allen Downs, a Scottish/English-American professor of art and cinematographer from Minnesota. She grew up partly in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, partly in the U.S. state of California as a teen, and Minnesota as an adult where she graduated from the University of Minnesota in voice and anthropology.
She later returned to Mexico where she learned to weave. Later, she began singing in the club scenes of Oaxaca and Philadelphia along with Paul Cohen, an American-born saxophonist. They began collaborating together on songs that would slowly evolve into Downs’s subsequent recordings. Cohen went on to become both Downs’ husband and her artistic director.
In recent years, Downs and her band have toured widely in Mexico, South America, the US and Europe. She was also heard in the soundtrack to the movie Frida in a song, Burn it Blue, that was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Song and that she performed at the 75th Academy Awards. Other songs that she performed on the soundtrack are “Benediction and Dream,” “Estrella Oscura,” and “La Llorona.” Other movies with a Lila Downs song are Tortilla Soup, Real Women Have Curves and Fados by Carlos Saura. She was also invited to the Twelve Girls Band’s concert in Shanghai, where she sings in French and English. Downs is currently based in Coyoacán, a borough of Mexico City.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iq3dJgUyM_c[/youtube]